Home Office

At the UK Government's Home Office, Sutton was a senior research officer, initially in the Department for Research Statistics and Development, and then later in the Policing and Reducing Crime Unit. He was on the team that evaluated the unit fines experiment in the UK,^[3] the findings of which led the British Government to implement means-related fines.^[4] At a national level the results proved disastrous and the legislation was rapidly repealed following a media outcry.^[5] In 1996, he was part of the team that evaluated the £50m Safer Cities Project, finding it cost effective in reducing domestic burglary.^[6][7] With respect to the change in the program by its coordinators, from a programme directed largely towards primary prevention, largely towards implementing more offender-oriented schemes, Pease (1997)^[8] quotes from Sutton's 1996 evaluation, "This is a strikingly thought-provoking result, given that the situational measures adopted were subsequently found to have been cost-effective in reducing burglary".^[9]

Criminology

According to the Oxford Handbook of Criminology (2012),^[10] Sutton made an early contribution to identifying the, "A priori, economic factors [… f]or a crime to occur", namely the means for converting stolen goods into financial gain,

The capacity to commit crimes of various types will be affected by economic developments. The availability of illegal markets for stolen goods, and the shifting attractiveness of different goods on them, will structure changes in crime patterns (Sutton 1998;^[11] Sutton et al. 2001;^[12] Fitzgerald et al. 2003;^[13] Hallsworth 2005^[14]).

personal and social factors in a contemporary adolescent sample, and, for the first time ever in criminology, presents concrete evidence that crime occurs when (and only when) people with specific personal characteristics take part in settings with specific environmental features under specific circumstances.

Mythbusting

Spinach is sometimes wrongly claimed to be a good source of iron. However, this myth is often also wrongly explained by researchers misplacing a decimal mark.^[22] Mike Sutton showed that there almost certainly was no decimal error involved in deriving the wrong iron content of spinach.^[23] Later analysis also supports the idea that the true reason for the misestimation of the iron content of spinach are "unreliable methods or poor experimentation".^[24]

References to this decimal error story often lead back to T. J. Hamblins article "Fake!" in the British Medical Journal from 1981.^[25] However, this article is neither the original source nor does it provide any proof or reference for the decimal error story. Mike Suttons inquiry lead T. J. Hamblin to conclude that "even by the turn of the twentieth century errors in earlier measurements were readily apparent without the need to invoke decimal places."^[26]