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Across the world, the most marginalised groups of society are overrepresented in prisons and institutions of the criminal justice system. Besides racial and ethnic minorities, prisons worldwide disproportionately house individuals who count among the least educated, most unemployed and poorest groups of society. However, it is one of the paradoxes of penality that whilst it is obvious that criminal justice systems across the world target disadvantaged populations, the link between imprisonment and socio-economic inequality has been mostly elusive on a global and cross-national scale. This contribution addresses this paradox and aims at unravelling it. It will focus on those processes and mechanisms through which social inequality is transmitted into unequal criminal punishment, and how criminal punishment reproduces inequality. I will first present the evidence from a macro- and comparative perspective, and then explore the relationship between punishment and inequality within societies. Imprisonment growth and concentration of imprisonment are identified as routes towards exacerbating and entrenching inequality, thus being a cause rather than a consequence of inequality.

This study examines the relationship between mode of Internet access, variety of online activities, and the potential for the Internet to contribute to local social capital in distressed, urban communities. Based on a sample of 525 telephone surveys in Detroit, findings show that breadth of access predicts participation in a larger variety of online activities, which is associated with higher levels of local social capital. Neither public Internet access, home broadband, nor Internet access through a mobile phone data plan alone affords participation in a full range of social capital-enhancing activities. The findings highlight the potential problems of initiatives that assume equivalent social outcomes through nonequivalent modes of access, such as providing Internet access through mobile phones in place of home broadband. Efforts to enhance a city’s social infrastructure by providing Internet access are best served when individuals have multiple points of access available.

Objectives: Examine the relationships among structural disadvantage, friendship network age composition, and violent offending by investigating the contextual and individual etiology of affiliating with older friends and exploring the mechanisms that link friendship network age composition to violent offending. Method: Hierarchical linear models analyze 8,481 respondents distributed across 1,485 census tracts from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health. Social network data are used to construct a measure of the proportion of a respondent’s friendship network that is at least one grade older than the respondent. Results: Consistent with hypotheses, structural disadvantage increases affiliations with older friends, older friendship networks report higher levels of violence, and affiliating with older friends increases violence among respondents. Contrary to expectations, the influence of affiliating with older friends on respondent violence decreases, rather than increases, as levels of violence in the friendship network increase. Conclusions: The results shed light on the inextricable linkages among social context, friendship network composition, and sociobehavioral outcomes among youth. The findings inform peer mentoring program evaluations observing iatrogenic effects via peer deviancy.

The primary theoretical perspectives through which homicide clearance is analyzed do not give explicit attention to the neighborhood context in which people are victimized. Indeed, few clearance studies incorporate neighborhood effects. This study investigates whether neighborhood context influences the odds of homicide clearance in Rochester, NY, net of theoretically relevant victim and incident characteristics. The study also incorporates a direct measure of investigator caseload to assess the influence of organizational characteristics on clearance rates. Findings indicate that homicides, particularly of Black victims, were significantly more likely to be cleared in disadvantaged neighborhoods even as witnesses were less likely to cooperate with police in those neighborhoods. However, the odds of clearance decrease as the number of open cases each investigator is carrying increases. Case incident characteristics and the quality of evidence collected remain salient solvability factors regardless of location. Equally important is maintaining adequate staffing and keeping investigator caseloads at manageable levels. Heavy caseloads impose a significant constraint on the time that can be devoted to otherwise solvable cases and as such are analogous to the constraints imposed on prosecutors and courts by their typically heavy caseloads.

Regional differences in the use of prison are, in part, due to cultures of punishment within Sunbelt states. To date, this has been largely studied at the state level, ignoring the smaller geographic areas in which the effects of imprisonment are deeply felt. We employ a novel data set to examine the relationship between prison and region and regional variation in the relationship between concentrated disadvantage and neighborhood imprisonment. We find that region affects neighborhood prison admission rates in unexpected ways, and that the relationship between concentrated disadvantage and prison admissions varies in magnitude by region. We discuss the implications of these findings for better understanding the impact of region and the processes that lead to imprisonment.

Social research has long argued that collective resources and major events like disasters have an important impact on violent crime, but it has been difficult to show their effects because data are scarce. We conducted a large survey in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina that included questions about collective resources. We aggregated our sample to the census tract level and merged it with data on concentrated disadvantage and violent crime. Our analyses show that bridging social networks are associated with lower levels of violent crime, while bonding social networks are associated with higher levels. Social trust is associated with lower levels of violent crime, but civic engagement has no impact. Concentrated disadvantage is associated with higher levels of violent crime. Finally, our results suggest that disaster recovery increased the importance of collective resources but not concentrated disadvantage on violent crime.

This study examines the distribution of crime across various types of low-income housing developments and estimates the main and interactive effects of housing development and neighborhood characteristics on crime. Negative binomial regression models were estimated to observe the influence of security and design features, neighborhood concentrated disadvantage, residential stability, and nearby nonresidential land use on crime at the housing developments. The findings suggest that low-income housing developments are not uniformly criminogenic, and both development characteristics and neighborhood conditions are relevant for understanding crime in low-income housing developments. Implications for prevention are discussed.

Hip-hop has deep historical ties to disadvantaged communities. Resounding success in mainstream and global music markets potentially disrupts those connections. The authors use in-depth interviews with 25 self-defined rap/hip-hop artists to explore the significance of place in modern hip-hop. Bringing together historical studies of hip-hop and sociological neighborhood studies, the authors examine hip-hop artists’ community connections. Findings reveal that exposure to concentrated racial and economic disadvantage shapes how artists interpret community, artistic impact, and social responsibility. This supports the “black placemaking” framework, which highlights how black urban neighborhood residents creatively build community amid structural disadvantage. The analysis also elucidates the role specific types of physical places play in black placemaking processes.

Objectives:We draw upon theories of social disorganization, strain, and subculture of violence to examine how sex and race/ethnicity intersect to inform nonlethal violent offending at the macrolevel.Methods:Using neighborhood-level incidents, we examine (1) the structural correlates of male and female nonlethal violence and (2) whether ecological conditions have variable impacts on the prevalence of White, Black, and Latino male and female offenses above and beyond differential exposure to disadvantage. We use multivariate negative binomial regression within a structural equation modeling framework which allows for the examination of the same set of indicator variables on more than one dependent variable simultaneously while accounting for covariance between the dependent variables.Results:We find few significant differences in the salience of disadvantage on female and male violence across race and ethnicity although some differences emerge for White men and women. Structural factors are largely sex invariant within race and ethnicity.Conclusions:Despite expectations that disadvantage would have differential effects across sex and race/ethnicity, we uncover only minor differences. This suggests that structural effects are more invariant than variant across subgroups and highlights the importance of investigating both similarities and differences when examining neighborhood structure, intersectionality, and criminal behavior.

Neighborhood structural conditions influence police behavior, but few studies have addressed whether neighborhood conditions are associated with officers’ perceptions of residents in those communities. This is an important gap because officers’ perceptions of what they can expect from residents in disadvantaged communities may help explain differential treatment. Using data from the Project on Policing Neighborhoods, we examined neighborhood effects on officers’ perceptions of citizen cooperation. Officers working in beats with more concentrated disadvantage and higher homicide rates were less likely to believe that citizens would be willing to cooperate with law enforcement. We discuss this finding in relation to explaining differential police treatment across communities and what it means for the legitimacy dialogue that unfolds between the police and community.

Academic work on crime and punishment has focused mostly on urban centers, leaving rural communities understudied, except for acknowledgement that rural communities warehouse a large number of prisoners and that rural prisons provide jobs and economic development for some struggling communities. This study uses a novel dataset that includes information on the home addresses of all prisoners in Arkansas from 1993 to 2003 to document imprisonment rates and racial disparities in imprisonment rates across metropolitan and nonmetropolitan counties. We show how rural communities both receive and produce prisoners and that imprisonment and racial disparities in imprisonment vary more within different types of communities than across different types of communities. Further, we find that nonmetropolitan rates of imprisonment are higher than would be expected, based on observed local risk factors such as poverty rate. We close with a discussion of what these findings illustrate about concentrated disadvantage across the rural-urban interface.

The relationship between victimization and subsequent maladaptive behaviors such as offending is well established. To a lesser degree, a contextual lens has been used to examine how neighborhood characteristics influence the overlap between victimization and offending. The existing literature has yet to explore how the neighborhood context moderates the victim–offender overlap among young women, specifically, or whether the type of force used during sexual victimization or offending matters. This study uses data from The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health) to examine whether concentrated disadvantage moderates the impact of sexual victimization on subsequent offending for women. Results indicate that young women who experience sexual victimization are more likely to engage in general offending regardless of neighborhood type. However, closer examination reveals that, when taking into account the type of force used in sexual victimization (physical or coerced) and the type of offending (violent, property, drug use), the overlap does indeed vary across neighborhoods. Specifically, results indicate that only coerced sexual victimization significantly affects property offending in neighborhoods with high levels of concentrated disadvantage. Related to violent offending, physical sexual victimization has a strong positive impact in less disadvantaged neighborhoods. Finally, coerced sexual victimization is significantly associated with an increased likelihood for drug use, and this relationship is consistent across neighborhoods. The findings suggest that nuances in the nature of victimization and offending need to be taken into account to fully understand the victim–offender overlap across neighborhood context.

Objectives: Examine how neighborhoods vary in the degree to which they experience repeat/near repeat crime patterns and whether theoretical constructs representing neighborhood-level context, including social ecology and structural attributes, can explain variation in single incidents and those linked in space and time. Methods: Examine social, structural, and environmental design covariates from the American Community Survey to assess the context of near repeat burglary at the block group level. Spatially lagged negative binomial regression models were estimated to assess the relative contribution of these covariates on single and repeat/near repeat burglary counts. Results: Positive and consistent association between concentrated disadvantage and racial heterogeneity and all types of burglaries was evident, although the effects for other indicators, including residential instability, family disruption, and population density, varied across classifications of single and repeat/near repeat burglaries. Conclusions: Repeat/near repeat burglary patterns are conditional on the overall level and specific dimensions of disorganization, holding implications for offender-focused as well as community-focused explanations. This study contributes greater integration between the study of empirically observed patterns of repeats and community-based theories of crime, including collective efficacy.

Objectives:Neighborhood characteristics predict burglary targets, but target attractiveness may be colored by the conditions in which a potential offender resides. We test whether relative differences in concentrated disadvantage, racial/ethnic composition, and ethnic heterogeneity influence where burglars offend, controlling for distance. From a relative deprivation perspective, economically advantaged areas make more attractive targets to burglars residing in disadvantage neighborhoods, but a social disorganization perspective predicts areas lower in social cohesion are most attractive, which may be neighborhoods with greater disadvantage.Methods:Drawing upon a unique sample of cleared burglaries in the City of Tampa, Florida from 2000 to 2012, we utilize discrete choice modeling to predict burglar offense destination.Results:Offenders target neighborhoods that are geographically proximate or ecologically similar to their own. When accounting for relative differences, burglars from all neighborhood type...

Quantitative segregation research focuses almost exclusively on the spatial sorting of demographic groups. This research largely ignores the structural characteristics of neighborhoods – such as crime, job accessibility, and school quality – that likely help determine important household outcomes. This paper summarizes the research on segregation, neighborhood effects, and concentrated disadvantage, and argues that we should pay more attention to neighborhood structural characteristics, and that the data increasingly exist to include measures of spatial segregation and neighborhood opportunity. The paper concludes with a brief empirical justification for the inclusion of data on neighborhood violence and a discussion on policy applications.

Few studies have examined multilevel effects of neighborhood context on childhood maltreatment. Less work has analyzed these effects with juvenile offenders, and no prior work has examined context effects of childhood maltreatment through the Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) framework. ACEs include 10 indictors: emotional abuse, physical abuse, sexual abuse, emotional neglect, physical neglect, domestic violence toward the youth’s mother, household substance abuse, household mental illness, parental separation/divorce, and household member with a history of jail/imprisonment. Effects of concentrated disadvantage and affluence on ACE scores are examined in a statewide sample of more than 59,000 juvenile offenders, controlling for salient individual (including family and parenting) measures and demographics. Both disadvantage and affluence affect ACE exposure. Implications for research and policy are discussed.

A public health approach to violence prevention involves the empirical identification of groups and communities at the highest risk for violence to inform targeted interventions. We demonstrate the utility of complete incident-level crime data toward this end. Data for 32,056 unique incidents involving homicide, aggravated assault, and robbery were extracted from the 2013 Michigan Incident Crime Reporting system, a statewide National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) data system. Differential victimization rates were calculated across demographic subgroups and jurisdictions to identify patterns in risk. Two-stage least squares regression models were estimated to examine correlates of variation in excess risk. Analyses identified young Black males and females at relatively high risk for violent victimization, and that this risk was amplified within cities with disproportionately high crime rates. Multivariate models suggested concentrated disadvantage as the most stable correlate of variation in excess risk across Michigan cities and towns. The results highlight the importance of expanding NIBRS adoption and the deployment of focused interventions involving both short-term enforcement and long-term social reinvestment.

Several recent spatial analyses conclude the strong positive association typically found between neighborhood concentrated disadvantage and crime in cross–sectional studies significantly differs across neighborhoods. It is possible this spatial variation is due to within–neighborhood dynamics of continuity and change, as suggested by ecological theories of neighborhood crime. Using ordinary least–squares and geographically weighted regression models, I explore the role of within–neighborhood change on the disadvantage–homicide relationship across Chicago neighborhoods and find that controlling for historical changes in disadvantage within neighborhoods reduces—but does not eliminate—spatial variation in the cross–sectional relationship. Within–neighborhood changes in concentrated disadvantage from 1970 to 2000 are positively related to homicide rates, net of the level of disadvantage in 2000. This suggests the relationship is influenced to some degree by temporal continuity or change in the neighborhood ecological structure, consistent with the dynamic conceptualization of neighborhoods inherent to ecological theories of crime like social disorganization.

The issue of poverty is exacerbated by the concentration of low-income families in neighborhoods of concentrated disadvantage. Public administrators in housing and social services are uniquely situated to address poverty and concentrated disadvantage through an explicit housing with services agenda. This article provides a theoretical and empirical review of issues associated with poverty and concentrated disadvantage from the perspective of subsidized housing provision. The review leads to the recommendation that administrators provide housing with services. The article finishes with an agenda for placing standardized assessments that are connected to evidence-based services within the delivery of public housing.

Communities across the United States have become increasingly concerned over the presence of sex offenders in their neighborhoods. The purpose of this research is to examine the factors that are associated with the concentration of sex offenders in a large geographic area with few residency restrictions. This research also examines multiple categories of sex offenders subject to varying levels of community notification, allowing for an assessment of what, if any, effect community notification has on the residential patterns of sex offenders. Concentrated disadvantage, concentrated affluence, and housing affordability are all significant factors in explaining the concentration of multiple categories of sex offenders. Concentrated affluence relative to poverty is the most consistent predictor of sex offender concentration, revealing that more affluent communities ward off sex offender residents, regardless of community notification requirements.

Violent crime is known to be concentrated in the same urban neighborhoods as poverty and other forms of disadvantage. While U.S. violent crime has declined at an unprecedented rate over the past two decades, little is known about the spatial distribution of this decline within cities. Using longitudinal neighborhood crime data from six U.S. cities during the national crime decline, this article examines changes in (1) crime rates of neighborhoods grouped by their initial crime levels, poverty rates, and racial/ethnic makeups; (2) the neighborhood exposure to violence of urban residents classified by race/ethnicity and poverty status; and (3) the relative distribution of violent crime across urban neighborhoods. We find that crime levels declined the most in the initially most violent and disadvantaged neighborhoods and that exposure to violence fell the most among disadvantaged urban residents. Nonetheless, crime remained concentrated in cities’ initially most violent and disadvantaged locales.

Downtown Los Angeles is undergoing a transformation from concentrated disadvantage to vibrant city center. Using ethnographic research conducted in the gentrifying Historic Core of Los Angeles, I find that the presence of some original residents is encouraged as they help create the gritty and risky atmosphere valued by the new urbanites moving to the area who equate poverty with authenticity in a form of poverty fetishism. I focus here on a subsection of the low-income downtown population, who I call “urban mascots,” whose value lies in their ability to embody stereotypical attributes of poverty. I create a typology of urban mascots based on the type of interactions they are willing to have with those seeking experiences with urban poverty. In the end, I argue that urban mascots provide the new gentrifying residents with a cast of nonthreatening and charismatic characters who represent for them a consumable authentic urban experience.

Objectives: Social disorganization theory implies that neighborhood disadvantage influences delinquency in part through the weakening of neighborhood-level social ties and residents’ commitment to social norms. We test these associations by focusing on social ties among neighborhood parents and adolescent commitment to social norms. Methods: We use a population survey of adolescents and combine it with administrative (population) data on school neighborhood characteristics in Iceland. We use multilevel data on 83 school communities and 5,865 adolescents in Iceland to analyze our hypotheses. Results: We find partial support for our hypotheses. Thus, adolescents living in neighborhoods characterized by concentrated disadvantage are more delinquent, net of individual-level (household) characteristics. Moreover, neighborhood-level parental networks and adolescent commitment to social norms mediate a part of this contextual effect. Conclusion: By supporting community theories in a different societal context (i.e., in a small homogeneous society) than most prior work, our study strengthens the external validity of the existing research. As we use cross-sectional data, the study faces the limitation of not being able to separate the constructs temporally.

This study examined the census tract characteristics associated with the spatial concentration of registered sex offender (RSO) residences in 1,823 census tracts across 53 counties in upstate New York. The concentration of RSOs for each tract was measured using excess risk scores that essentially measure disproportionate concentrations of RSOs based on the resident population of the county and tract. The tract characteristics examined included structural characteristics from the 2010 Census, such as indicators of social disorganization, housing availability and affordability, and population density, legal characteristics describing the presence of residence restrictions, and controls for spatial autocorrelation and regional differences. Results indicate that registered sex offenders (RSOs) are disproportionately more likely to be found in tracts exhibiting high levels of concentrated disadvantage, available housing, and affordable housing, and disproportionately less likely to be found in tracts with high levels of ethnic heterogeneity. Controlling for spatial autocorrelation (lag) did not change overall results but was significantly and positively associated with excess risk. Implications for future policy and research practices are discussed.

Objectives: Test whether the exposure of street segments to five different potentially criminogenic facilities is positively related to violent, property, or disorder crime counts controlling for sociodemographic context. The geographic extent of the relationship is also explored. Method: Facility exposure is operationalized as total inverse distance from each street segment in Philadelphia, PA, to surrounding facilities within three threshold distances of 400, 800, and 1,200 feet. All distances are measured using shortest path street distance. Census block group data representing ethnic heterogeneity, concentrated disadvantage, and stability are proportionally allocated to each street block. Negative binomial regression is used to model the relationships. Results: Exposure to bars and subway stations was positively associated with violent, property, and disorder crime at all distance thresholds from street segments. Schools were associated with disorder offenses at all distance thresholds. The effects of exposure to halfway houses and drug treatment centers varied by distance and by crime type. Conclusions: Facilities have a significant effect on crime at nearby places even controlling for sociodemographic variables. The geographic extent of a facility’s criminogenic influence varies by type of facility and type of crime. Future research should examine additional types of facilities and include information about place management.

We examined whether the prevalence of commercial diversity, heavy traffic, sidewalks, and trees is associated with perceived social cohesion in Los Angeles County neighborhoods, and how concentrated disadvantage and perceived danger shape these relationships. Consistent with theoretical expectations, concentrated disadvantage and danger were associated with lower cohesion. The effects of built characteristics on cohesion were moderated by disadvantage and/or perceived danger. Danger moderated the effect of commercial diversity, sidewalks, and trees, and concentrated disadvantage moderated the coefficients on built variables (excepting trees) such that the magnitude of their effects were stronger in high-disadvantage neighborhoods. We conclude that built characteristics appear to matter more for cohesion in high-disadvantage neighborhoods and also that approaches to promoting cohesion through the built environment should focus on bolstering residents’ perceptions of safety.

This research seeks to add a new dimension to the growing body of literature investigating disparities in sentencing outcomes. Our study used multilevel modeling techniques to incorporate legal and extralegal individual-level variables with macro-level data in an examination of the factors influencing the formal application of the criminal label when identical noncriminal sanctions are available. Results suggest that measures of police racial profiling are predictive of unfavorable plea outcomes and subsequent application of a criminal label. Findings indicated that the likelihood of receiving an unfavorable criminal plea bargain was greater for men, non-Whites, defendants with a prior arrest, defendants arrested in areas of low concentrated disadvantage, and defendants arrested in areas with high levels of racial profiling. In addition, both concentrated disadvantage and stop disparity conditioned the effect of race on plea outcome.

Subsidized housing controversies frequently involve the fear of crime, a connection that is not well understood in policy and planning. This article thus critically reviews the literature on subsidized housing and crime. Three key findings emerge. First, subsidized households have too frequently lived in violent housing developments and neighborhoods. Second, the spillover effects on crime in surrounding neighborhoods are typically very small. Finally, although the precise mechanisms through which subsidized housing may affect crime are less clear, it is most likely that concentrated disadvantage plays the biggest role when effects are observed, rather than the physical attributes of subsidized housing. © The Author(s) 2013.

Much contemporary policy seeking to address the problems of urban poverty and the failures of public housing focuses on deconcentrating poverty through the relocation of public housing residents to less-poor neighborhoods or by replacing large public housing complexes with mixed-income developments. Lying behind these efforts is a set of generally integrationist goals, aiming to remove public housing residents from contexts of isolation and concentrated disadvantage and settle them in safer, healthier, and more supportive environments that better connect them to resources, relationships, and opportunities. Although some of the goals of these efforts are being met, the broader integrationist goals are proving elusive. Focusing on the mixed-income component of Chicago’s Plan for Transformation—the most ambitious effort to remake public housing in the country—this article argues that a range of institutional actors (including developers, property management, community-based organizations, and the housing authority) and organizational behaviors (around design, service provision, intervention, deliberation, and representation) shape dynamics that reproduce exclusion and work against the integrationist goals of these policies.

The purpose of this study is to examine the degree to which police arrest is influenced by an offenders’ level of verbal intelligence. Concomitantly, we examine whether the level of concentrated disadvantage of the neighborhood where the offender resides moderates the effect of verbal intelligence on arrest. To accomplish this, we employed the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) to examine the extent to which persistent delinquent youths’ self-reported arrests are significantly related to their verbal IQ scores. Furthermore, we also analyzed the interaction of verbal IQ scores and neighborhood disadvantage net of an array of theoretically relevant control variables.

This study provides a partial test of Klinger’s ecological theory of police behavior using hierarchical linear modeling on 1,677 suspects who had encounters with police within 24 beats. The current study used data from four sources originally collected by the Project on Policing Neighborhoods (POPN), including systematic social observation, in-person interviews with officers, census data, and police crime records. It investigates the effects of neighborhood violent crime rates and concentrated disadvantage on officer vigor, controlling for individual-level officer characteristics and situational factors. The analyses reveal that police vigor was significantly shaped by beat-level crime rates, with high–crime rate neighborhoods experiencing higher levels of police vigor in handling suspects. The findings are not consistent with the ecological propositions set forth by Klinger. Implications of these findings and suggestions for future research and theoretical development are discussed.

In Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect and The Collapse of American Criminal Justice Robert J Sampson and William Stuntz, respectively, highlight the intersection and reassertion--to draw upon and extend the work of Edward Soja (2011)--of race, space, and punishment's place in urban sociology, critical criminology, and postmodern geography (Massey, 2012; Sampson, 2012; Ludwig et al, 2012; Sharkey, 2013). The structural circumstances of deprivation and criminalization facing African-Americans that they both highlight, and the related racialized perceptions of criminality that are counterparts, appear to be some of the salient features that recently led to the murder of a young black teenager, Trayvon Martin, in the US state of Florida. Florida is one of many US states with new Stand Your Ground laws which have proliferated across the country, along with a noticeable uptick in so-called 'justified homicides'. In this instance the inequalities of race and space highlighted by these two authors tragically came together as a neighborhood watch patrolman shot and killed Trayvon and shaped the lack of an initial official response, until massive protests broke out across the US against the failure of authorities to charge the assailant with a crime (Sampson, 2012; Sampson and Raudenbush, 2004). This review essay presents these two landmark books, offering an appreciation and critique of their interrelated arguments and setting them in the context of a wider literature on the evolution of spatial, social class, and racial relations right up to our contemporary present. Sampson's book is arguably one of the greatest works of urban sociology, critical criminology, and what Soja (2011) calls "postmodern geography" in a generation, radically altering these entire fields. Highlighted here in particular is the "neighborhood effect", referring to the relationship between race, class, space, and punishment's place in the US, which with only 5% of the world's population, has 25% of its prisoners. This carceral boom is the latest, and perhaps one of the most troubling, forms of American exceptionalism, with a widening divide since the 1970s between the US and other advanced capitalist states (albeit one that has been narrowing as of late). Sampson, to a greater extent than ever before, and with a wealth of data, maps urban inequalities at the structural neighborhood and social ecological level. More specifically he relates the "explosion in crime rates" in the major urban cities of the US starting in 1965 to White flight and urban decline and decay. The concentrated increase in crime in major urban cities, Sampson (2012, page 143) argues, comes with White flight and related resource deprivation. This decreases the neighborhood's sense of collective efficacy or social agency, thus increasing crime, racially biased perceptions of criminality among low-income communities of color, and punishment via incarceration, in what some have called a 'spiral of decay'. Sampson shows that the actual term 'mass incarceration' is misleading. What exists instead is spatially concentrated hyperincarceration of poor Blacks with little formal education, as Loic Waquant (2010) and others have shown. While underscoring the clear link between neighborhood disadvantage and crime, Sampson goes further, showing in a study of Cook County in Chicago that low-income neighborhoods of color, with concentrated disadvantage, have incarceration rates three times higher than neighborhoods with comparable levels of crime but without concentrated disadvantage (see also National Public Radio, 2012; PBS, 2012; Sampson and Loeffler, 2010). These arguments and powerful data represent an enormous contribution to the literature of urban sociology, critical criminology, and political geography. Yet, despite the impressive achievement this represents in a host of fields, there are some significant empirical and theoretical gaps and problems. …

Objectives: Attribution theory is used to frame a study on concentrated disadvantage and youth correctional confinement. Method: Population of delinquent referrals and a random sample of 50 youth case file records from a large urban juvenile court in the southwest are analyzed. Results: Black and Latino/Latina youth were more likely than their White counterparts to be institutionalized. Youth from areas with high levels of concentrated disadvantage were more likely to be confined than youth from more affluent areas. Court officials' perceptions of disadvantage play an important role when deciding whether youth should remain in the community or be incarcerated. Conclusions: Race, ethnicity, and concentrated disadvantage play a significant role in juvenile justice. Court officials perceive areas of disadvantage as high risk and dangerous for youth. Unfortunately, correctional confinement appears to be one way to address youths' vulnerable state. This study sheds light on the importance of economic landscapes in the administration of justice and the delivery of services.

This study examined the effects of neighborhood structural and social characteristics on offending among girls and boys aged 8–17 residing in 80 Chicago neighborhoods. The results demonstrated gender differences in contextual effects, although not in ways predicted by social disorganization theory. Collective efficacy and concentrated disadvantage were not significantly associated with self-reported offending among males. Among females, collective efficacy was related to higher rates of general delinquency and violence, while disadvantage reduced the likelihood of self-reported violence. These outcomes suggest that neighborhoods may impact individual offending in complex ways and highlight the importance of considering gender when researching contextual effects on youth offending.

Theory suggests that neighborhood effects depend not only on where individuals live today, but also on where they lived in the past. Previous research, however, usually measures neighborhood context only once and does not account for length of residence, thereby understating the detrimental effects of long-term neighborhood disadvantage. This study investigates effects of duration of exposure to disadvantaged neighborhoods on high school graduation. It follows 4,154 children in the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, measuring neighborhood context once per year from age 1 to 17. The analysis overcomes the problem of dynamic neighborhood selection by adapting novel methods of causal inference for time-varying treatments. In contrast to previous analyses, these methods do not “control away” the effect of neighborhood context operating indirectly through time-varying characteristics of the family; thus, they capture the full impact of a lifetime of neighborhood disadvantage. We find that sustained exposure to disadvantaged neighborhoods has a severe impact on high school graduation that is considerably larger than effects reported in prior research. We estimate that growing up in the most (compared to the least) disadvantaged quintile of neighborhoods reduces the probability of graduation from 96 to 76 percent for black children, and from 95 to 87 percent for nonblack children.

Studies of beliefs about social stratification have generally focused on how individual-level factors shape people's explanations of poverty and inequality. In this article, the authors contribute to this literature by adding a community-level measure of “concentrated disadvantage” (poverty and associated conditions) to models predicting support for individualistic (person-centered) and structuralist (system-challenging) beliefs about the causes of poverty. Using data from two Los Angeles County surveys and the 1990 Census, multi-level linear and logistic regression models reveal that higher levels of concentrated disadvantage are associated with increased support for both individualist and structuralist explanations of poverty—a “dual consciousness” pattern the authors attribute to increased exposure to social conditions that simultaneously foster sympathetic and antagonistic attitudes toward the poor. These findings add useful information to our knowledge of stratification beliefs and contribute to a growing body of studies showing that “place-level” factors can be important determinants of beliefs and attitudes net of individual-level covariates.

Since community policing emerged in the 1970s and 1980s, it has been common for police departments to use police—community partnerships as a strategy for improving public satisfaction with the police. Yet very little is known about what predicts citizen willingness to participate in these types of community policing initiatives. In this study, the authors use the results of an anonymous mailed survey ( n = 16,193) conducted in a large Western city to examine individual and community-level relationships between race/ethnicity and willingness to work with the police in a community anticrime initiative. Contrary to previous research, but consistent with Blumer’s group position thesis, African Americans who responded to the survey report a greater willingness to work with the police than do White respondents. Neighborhood-level variables show mixed results, with concentrated disadvantage having a minor statistical effect on increasing citizen willingness to participate in partnership initiatives. The discussion considers the theoretical, methodological, and policy implications of these observed differences.

The current work assesses the relationship between respondent perceptions of collective efficacy and neighborhood violence. Data used in the analysis combined a community survey from Mesa, Arizona, with census data. Factor analysis provided mixed evidence regarding the factor structure of collective efficacy; therefore, separate regression models were used to test the influence of collective efficacy, social cohesion, and willingness to intervene on levels of neighborhood violence. Analyses found that community structural characteristics including concentrated disadvantage and residential instability significantly predicted perceptions of collective efficacy, social cohesion, and willingness to intervene. In turn each of these variables was related to violent crime after controlling for levels of concentrated disadvantage, residential instability, and individual demographic characteristics. When social cohesion and willingness to intervene were included in a single regression model, only social cohesion was predictive of neighborhood violence. Social cohesion and violent crime had reciprocal effects that were both negative and statistically significant.

Foundational research on the link between neighborhood accessibility and burglary has consistently shown a positive association. However, recent research has found that less accessible neighborhoods have higher burglary rates. Geographically referenced data from 401 neighborhoods in Jacksonville, Florida, are used to determine whether these inconsistencies can be explained by a conditioning effect of neighborhood social-structural context. Results from spatially lagged regression models indicate that neighborhood accessibility fails to have a direct effect on burglary rates after social-structural variables are controlled; rather, the effect of neighborhood accessibility on burglary rates is conditioned by the level of concentrated disadvantage of the neighborhood. Two potential explanations for the empirical findings are offered, and implications of the results for “designing out” crime are discussed.

The homicide rate in Chicago nearly tripled between 1965 and 1992 and subsequently declined by more than 50% through 2005. However, is this trend representative of all areas in the city? Drawing on the social disorganization and concentrated disadvantage perspectives, this article uses semiparametric group-based trajectory modeling to examine homicide trajectories in Chicago neighborhoods from 1965 to 1995. Significant variability is found in homicide trajectories across neighborhoods. Multivariate results show that disadvantage increases the likelihood of having an increasing or persistently high homicide trajectory. Social disorganization and family disruption are also predictive of variation in homicide trajectories but only in communities with already low levels of homicide. Other theoretically relevant predictors are evaluated, and suggestions for theoretical refinement and future research are discussed.

This article argues that the literature on digital inequality—in its focus on individual characteristics, behaviors, and outcomes—has overlooked change within the context of where social and civic inequalities are reproduced. This omission is the result of a failure to explore the role of ecological context within the study of the digital divide and the role of communication within the study of collective efficacy. Social cohesion, and an expectation for informal social control at the neighborhood level, is a function of both ecological context and media context. Those embedded within settings where prior media, including the telephone and face-to-face contact, could not overcome contextual barriers to collective action, namely within areas of concentrated disadvantage; may now, as a result of local Internet use, experience reduced social and civic inequality. This article is based on the results of a 3-year naturalistic experiment that examined the use of the Internet for communication at the neighborhood level. It proposes a new measure of collective efficacy — in place of network measures or perceived cohesion — based on the direct observation of communication practices. The analysis includes a model of the ecological characteristics associated with neighborhoods that adopted the Internet as a means of local information exchange, and it provides a comparison of the content of electronic messages exchanged within areas of advantage and those of extreme poverty, unemployment, and racial segregation. Findings suggest that as much as the Internet supports social and civic engagement in areas where it is already likely to be high, it also affords engagement within contexts of extreme disadvantage.

Individual and household-level characteristics that influence sexual behavior have been extensively studied in South Africa, but community characteristics have received limited attention. We use multilevel discrete time hazard models and multilevel logistic regression models to analyze data from a representative sample of young people in KwaZulu Natal, and from several sources of community data. Results suggest that, net of individual and household characteristics, higher levels of community concentrated disadvantage are associated with increased hazard of sexual initiation and higher risk of unprotected sex. Social disorder increases the hazard of sexual initiation, while greater community social cohesion is associated with delayed sexual debut, although the latter association appears stronger for young men than for young women. We discuss these results and the ways they vary from predictions based on U.S. theory in light of conditions prevailing in contemporary South Africa.

Neighborhoods with concentrated disadvantage have heightened levels of crime, and since the 1980s they have seen an infusion of immigrants. The article suggests that the influx of recent immigrants should contribute to the revitalization of disadvantaged neighborhoods and thereby help to reduce violent crime. The article tests whether the effect of concentrated disadvantage on local homicide levels is attenuated by levels of recent arrivals (1985-1990). The article find that recently arrived immigrants are associated with reductions of lethal violence in disadvantaged neighborhoods. It suggest that the influx of recent immigrants in disadvantaged neighborhoods reinvigorates local economic opportunity structures and social networks, and revitalizes neighborhood organizations and institutions. However, recently arrived immigrants are associated with increases in local homicide levels in advantaged contexts. Recent immigrants appear to elevate homicide via the potential disruption they cause in local social networks and efforts at community social control.

Elijah Anderson's Code of the Street provides an ethnographic account of a disadvantaged urban environment where residents face poverty and racial residential isolation. For Anderson, joblessness among African-American men deprive youth of positive male role models, creating a context for the “street code” to govern behavior, leading youth to violence. Similarly, a disadvantaged urban setting in which opportunities in legitimate labor markets are lacking fosters an environment where youth may seek illicit markets for a means of economic support. Drawing on Anderson's work, we assess the availability of male role models (older, employed black males) and the concentration of urban disadvantage on black juvenile drug sales and violent arrests across multiple cities in 2000. We find Anderson's concerns over the removal of traditional role models as a result of rising disadvantage in a Philadelphia community to be generalized to large urban areas. Specifically, we find that the presence of traditional role models reduces aggravated assaults by youth, but male role models are unable to reduce the economic lure of drug sales for black urban youth in disadvantaged environments.

This article treats social capital as a multidimensional phenomenon along which neighborhoods are differentially organized. The authors assess this notion by linking two original surveys carried out in Chicago based on community residents ( N = 8,782) and positional leaders ( N = 2,822) representing six organizational dimensions. These data are used to examine both the dimensionality and structural predictors of neighborhood social organization. Results show that the social capital of Chicago communities encapsulates four distinct dimensions at the residential level and two at the leadership level. Moreover, dimensions of leadership-based social capital are for the most part inversely related to resident-based social capital and differentially predicted by concentrated disadvantage, residential stability, and racial/ethnic diversity. Based on multidimensional scaling and clustering of the communities, the authors derive a conceptual typology highlighted by four distinct groups—Cosmopolitan Efficacy, Urban Villages, Institutional Alienation, and Conduct Norms. The authors discuss implications and suggest new directions for exploration of community differentiation.

This study aims to explore the relationship between perceived neighborhood social disorder and attitudes toward reporting domestic violence against women. Data from a national representative sample ( N = 14,994) of Spaniards 18 years old and older were used. Multivariate logistic regression analysis showed that perceived neighborhood social disorder is negatively associated with attitudes toward reporting domestic violence against women. These results take into account the potential confounding effects of gender, age, socioeconomic status, perceived frequency of domestic violence against women, and size of city on reporting attitudes. Findings support the idea that to reduce and prevent domestic violence against women, it is also important to address those conditions leading to mistrust between people and diminished social control such as concentrated disadvantage and disorder.

The concept of street efficacy, defined as the perceived ability to avoid violent confrontations and to be safe in one's neighborhood, is proposed as a mechanism connecting aspects of adolescents'“imposed” environments to the choices they make in creating their own “selected” environments that minimize the potential for violent confrontations. Empirical models using data from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods suggest that street efficacy is substantially influenced by various aspects of the social context surrounding adolescents. Adolescents who live in neighborhoods with concentrated disadvantage and low collective efficacy, respectively, are found to have less confidence in their ability to avoid violence after controlling for an extensive set of individual- and family-level factors. Exposure to violence also reduces street efficacy, although it does not explain the association between collective efficacy and individual street efficacy. Adolescents' confidence in their ability to avoid violence is shown to be an important predictor of the types of environments they select for themselves. In particular, adolescents with high levels of street efficacy are less likely to resort to violence themselves or to associate with delinquent peers.

Between the mid-1980s and early 1990s, there was an unprecedented growth in youth homicides. Numerous studies note the importance of measures of concentrated disadvantage in the social production of adult homicide. However, few studies have examined the relationship between these social ecological factors and homicides in which youth are both the perpetrators and victims. This research examines the impact of structural indicators of concentrated disadvantage on city-level rates of youth-on-youth homicide. Results indicate that concentrated disadvantage is associated with youth-on-youth homicide rates in large U.S. cities over time. The rise in these structural indicators of disadvantage is also associated with the increase in youth-on-youth homicide rates in U.S. cities in the early 1990s. The theoretical significance of these findings for substantive theories of youth violence and their social policy ramifications are discussed.

Community policing advocates argue that reforms designed to break down barriers between police and citizens can produce favorable outcomes. The authors test a series of related hypotheses in a multivariate context by using four independent data sources— community surveys, patrol officer interviews, Census Bureau, and police crime records— to estimate hierarchical linear models. The results show that citizens who perceive police partnerships favorably report fewer problems related to incivilities and also express higher levels of safety. Findings from models including cross-level interaction terms indicate that the positive outcomes associated with police partnerships are not restricted to citizens residing in affluent neighborhoods. In our ecological analysis, we find that police-community collaboration is associated with higher aggregate quality of life assessments and that community policing as a form of public social control mediates the adverse effects of concentrated disadvantage. The findings support social-psychological and ecological theories on which community policing practices are partially based.

Drawing on the emerging life-course paradigm in criminological theory, this study examines the relationship between cognitive ability and delinquent behavior within a sample of inner-city youth. The results indicate that net of statistical controls, cognitive ability maintains a robust inverse relationship with the likelihood of the onset of delinquency, the early onset of delinquency, and the persistence of delinquency during the 18-year period covered by the dataset. Furthermore, cognitive ability mediates the effect of concentrated disadvantage on both the onset and early onset of delinquency. Overall, the results of this study suggest that cognitive ability is an important criminogenic risk factor that has important implications for both correctional interventions and the continued development of structural and multilevel theories of crime.