Limitations
Policy Implications
- Redlining and the Federal Housing Administration
- Chicago Area Projects
- Neighborhood programs that focus on cohesiveness and organization to control deviant behavior of its residents
- Difficult to know if research has verified social disorganization as an explanation of crime
- Doesn't indicate how much crime is actually going on in the inner city - just that crime is occurring at a high rate
- Doesn't explain crime going on in Zones 4 and 5
- Tautological: crime and deviance are high inside an area, so the area is socially disorganized --> the area is socially disorganized, so there is crime and deviance
- Are crime rates due to higher rates of criminal behavior or due to police disparities?
- What does social disorganization actually indicate?
- Not really a theory of delinquency
- Social disorganization describes other theories of crime: anomie/strain, differential association, self-control
Social
Disorganization Theory
Framework
Fundamental Assumption
- Clifford Shaw and Henry McKay's study of male juveniles
- Zone 1: central business district
- Zone 2: transition zone; immigrants, poor,
deteriorating neighborhoods being invaded by
manufacturing industries
- Zone 3: workingmen's homes
- Zone 4: residential zone
- Zone 5: commuter zone
- Absence or breakdown of social control
- Concentrated Disadvantage
- Bursik, Sampson, & Groves
- New model that measured external factors and
key components of social disorganization
- Collective Efficacy
- Social Capital
Crime and deviance occur when individuals reside in communities where there is greater disorganization of social characteristics and a lack of informal social controls
Foundation
Structural Theory
Adolphe Quetelet
Andre-Michel Guerry
- French astronomer, mathematician, statistician, and sociologist
- Developed the body mass index scale
- Published Of the Development of the Propensity to Crime
- Studied data on the number of individuals charged with crime, types of crimes committed, the time of year and location of crimes, age and sex of individuals accused
- Discovered correlations between rates of crime and many social characteristics: use of alcohol, season and climate, age, sex, education, poverty, and occupation
- Criminal behavior followed a pattern and regularity that can be explained by the characteristics of the group that produced it
- French lawyer and statistician
- Studied under Quetelet
- Known as the founder of moral statistics, which led to the development of criminology, sociology, and modern social science
- Published statistical maps that depicted geographical areas in France where individuals charged with crime resided along with other data (education levels, illegitimate births, charitable donations, etc.) --> hotspots??
- Data showed that criminals resided in wealthier districts with higher education levels
- Macro-level theory
- Individuals and the activity of the community
Robert E. Park and the Theory of Urban Ecology
Ernest W. Burgess and Concentric Zone Theory
- American urban sociologist
- Helped develop the Chicago School of Sociology
- Studied human ecology, race relations, migration, assimilation, social movements, and social disorganization
- Introduction to the Science of Sociology (1922)
- Cities were environments like those found in nature
- Cities were governed by the same forces of Darwinian evolution that happens in ecosystems
- Competition: created by groups fighting for urban resources which led to a division of urban spaces
- Succession: residents of a city become more affluent and move outward from the city center
- Urban Growth: various areas inside the city expand radially, creating pressure on surrounding areas to expand further outward
- As the city grows, each inner ring invades the ring that immediately surrounds it, setting off the process of invasion, domination, and succession