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Shaw and McKay advanced social disorganization theory in the 1930s, kick-starting a large body of research on communities and crime. Studies emphasize individual impacts of poverty, residential instability, and racial/ethnic heterogeneity by examining their independent effects on crime, adopting a variable-centered approach. We use a “neighborhood-centered” approach that considers how structural forces combine into unique constellations that vary across communities, with consequences for crime. Examining neighborhoods in Southern California we: (1) identify neighborhood typologies based on levels of poverty, instability, and heterogeneity; (2) explore how these typologies fit within a disorganization framework and are spatially distributed across the region; and (3) examine how these typologies are differentially associated with crime. Results reveal nine neighborhood types with varying relationships to crime.

In this study, we use generalized estimating equation (GEE) models to analyze how rates of eviction correspond to homicide, robbery, and burglary rates across all residential neighborhoods in Philadelphia from 2006 through 2016. We assess the moderating role of neighborhood poverty accounting for residential mobility, economic disadvantage, and community composition. We find that eviction is associated with all three types of crime in fully controlled models. Additionally, neighborhood poverty significantly moderates this relationship for robbery and burglary, but not homicide. We discuss the implications of these results with attention to policy opportunities to reduce eviction and suggestions for future research.

Criminal justice (CJ) education often includes culminating research courses as part of its curriculum. Many of these courses follow a traditional process of considering ethics, theory, research des...

Objectives:Explanations of community violence traditionally reflect a social disorganization perspective, suggesting that neighborhood characteristics affect crime via the intervening mechanism of informal social control. Drawing on Agnew’s Macro Strain Theory [MST], we argue that neighborhood characteristics 1) also affect macro-level crime for reasons related to aggregated strain and 2) condition the relationship between micro-level strains and individual violent offending.Methods:Using data from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods, we conduct a series of multilevel models examining both the macro- and multi-level relationship between neighborhood characteristics, strain and youth violence.Findings:Results generally support our arguments, suggesting that neighborhood characteristics like concentrated disadvantage 1) remain associated with community violence even after adjusting for multiple measures of informal social control and 2) condition the association between micro-level strain and violent offending.Conclusions:Strain processes, at both the macro and micro-level, play a critical role in the well-established empirical relationship between structural disadvantage and violence. In light of results, community crime control policies should address the ways in which structural disadvantage increases motivation, rather than focusing exclusively on the ways in which it weakens informal social control.

The study of place in relation to crime has its roots in the ecological works of Parks, Burgess, Shaw, McKay, and the Chicago School. Within this ecological framework the relationship between locat...

In this study, we model the risk of robbery in the City of Tshwane in South Africa. We use the collective knowledge of two prominent spatial theories of crime (social disorganization theory, and cr...

Many recent sociological studies of urban poverty have drawn inspiration from the Chicago School model of social disorganization. Studies of urban poverty and formal organizations have been profoundly shaped by this theoretical perspective, casting organizations as components of neighborhoods and thus relevant for study as potential contributors to neighborhood social control. We argue that this approach obscures many ways in which formal organizations are involved in the production and management of urban poverty. In order to take advantage of the many insights offered by sociological studies of organizations, we propose that students of urban poverty expand their theoretical perspective on formal organizations. We develop such an approach, an amalgamation of key concepts from two existing theoretical frameworks rarely discussed in urban poverty studies: urban governance and strategic action fields . This perspective offers new directions for research on urban poverty and urges greater integration with related studies from political science and geography.

A wide-ranging body of research on the immigration-crime relationship has shown that immigration does not increase community crime levels. However, most prior studies have focused on traditional im...

Latinos in the US often settle in ethnic enclave neighborhoods, which research and theory suggests have residents who are less engaged in neighborhood activism. However, we know little about the re...

Despite the importance of relative inequality in studies on race, place and crime, existing literature has paid little attention to the possibility of racial differences in the effect of relative i...

This study examines to what extent new and emerging data sources or big data have been empirically used to measure key theoretical concepts within environmental criminology. By means of a scoping review, aimed at studies published between 2005 and 2018, insight is provided into the characteristics of studies that used big data sources within environmental criminology. The type and extent of big data sources used, as well as the strengths and weaknesses of these data sources, are synthesized. After the selection procedure, 84 studies were included for further analysis. Although the number of studies increased each year, there has been a remarkable increase in the number of studies since 2014. The findings suggest that most studies used administrative data or user-generated content as one type of research data. However, innovative data sources (automated and volunteered data) have gained in importance in recent years. Also, most studies are of a descriptive or predictive nature, predominantly conducted by computational (social) scientists. Since these approaches pay little to no attention to mechanisms that bring about social outcomes, an alternative philosophical framework is proposed. We put forward a scientific realist approach as a solution to integrate data-driven and theory-driven research. This approach responds to recent calls to move towards an ‘analytical criminology’. The results are discussed within this framework, and translated into avenues for future research.

Immigrant ethnicity remains a largely understudied aspect of the immigration–crime nexus. Instead, most research to date relies on a single measure of immigrant concentration—most commonly the percent foreign born, the percent recently arrived or the percent Latino/Hispanic. In doing so, studies fail to account for the potential heterogeneity within the immigrant population. This study provides a comprehensive examination of immigrant ethnicity by disaggregating the immigrant population by language and religious affiliation. Drawing on three waves of census data and 9 years of official recorded crime data, this study explores the impact of both immigrant concentration and diversity on violent crime across 882 neighborhoods located in two Australian cities. The results demonstrate that growth in the immigrant population—regardless of the language or religion group under consideration—does not lead to more violent crime within a neighborhood. Further, no language or religion group concentration is associated with more violent crime once the sociostructural and environmental features of neighborhoods are considered. Indeed, the growth and concentration of some ethnic groups are linked to less violent crime. However, both linguistically and religiously diverse neighborhoods encounter more violent crime.

The systemic model of social disorganization advocates that communities can help regulate disorder and crime by exerting informal social control. This paper examines the avenues through which polic...

Recent years have seen increased attention to the problem of hate crime, including such crime motivated by anti-gay bias. Although there is a growing body of research regarding the context of hate crime offending, there is a relative dearth of work investigating the community-level context of anti-gay hate crime. The current study investigates the community-level determinants of anti-gay hate crime in New York City from 2006 to 2010, using data obtained from the New York Police Department (NYPD)’s Hate Crimes Task Force (HCTF), one of the nation’s leading hate crime police units. Using a framework drawing on group conflict and criminological theories, the current study examines anti-gay hate crime as an outcome of gay visibility, social disorganization, and economic strain. It is hypothesized that greater gay visibility, as well as social disorganization and poor and worsening economic conditions over time will be associated with increases in anti-gay hate crime. Results show that gay demographics, measured by static visibility and increasing gay populations over time, are shown to consistently predict higher levels of anti-gay hate crime. Adding to the generally mixed findings on the role of economic conditions in explaining hate crime, this study also finds that anti-gay hate crime occurs in more disadvantaged communities and communities marked by poorer economic conditions. The findings show anti-gay hate crime to be an outcome of gay visibility, disadvantage, and poor economic conditions, indicating that anti-gay crime may be an angry response to the strains present in the community. The study concludes with a discussion of the findings and implications for policy makers and practitioners.

In this article I discuss the role that the social disorganization accompanying globalization plays in producing a demographic I refer to as “left behind” men. I suggest that much of the pu...

The article describes how social disorganization is conditioned by such phenomena as social cohesion, informal social control and the ability of the community to control criminal behaviour. The article reviews the research indicating the harmful practice of creating social housing zones in large cities, in which young people with low cultural and economic capital are concentrated. This tendency is not matched by the regularity of high cohesion and high informal social control in ethnically distinct neighbourhoods, but uniform in this respect, which has been revealed in the research. The response of educators, social workers, and youth activists to disadvantage areas is the organization of street work centers and group work centers in these places.

espanolLa comunidad ha desempenado un papel fundamental en la prevencion de conductas antisociales y delincuenciales. La literatura criminologica viene estudiando desde principios del siglo XX la relacion entre las caracteristicas de los barrios y la tasa de delitos y conductas antisociales que se producen en ellos. Desde la conocida teoria de la desorganizacion social, hasta otras mas contemporaneas como la de la eficacia colectiva, han estudiado los efectos que despliegan las caracteristicas del vecindario en conductas antisociales o delincuenciales. El objetivo principal de este trabajo ha consistido en llevar a cabo un proyecto piloto sobre la cohesion social y la percepcion de inseguridad en uno de los barrios mas populares de la ciudad extremena de Caceres, conocido como la barriada de Aldea Moret. La cohesion social es uno de los principales conceptos que utiliza una de las teorias ecologicas mas importante en estos ultimos anos en criminologia, como es la teoria de la eficacia colectiva, para explicar la relacion entre la comunidad y la criminalidad. Este estudio no solo nos permite llegar a conocer cuestiones relativas a la cohesion social y la percepcion de inseguridad en un barrio, sino tambien estudiar teorias criminologicas poco trabajadas en nuestro pais. EnglishThe community has played a critical role in preventing antisocial and criminal behavior. The criminological literature has been studying since the beginning of the 20th century the relationship between the characteristics of the neighborhoods and the crime and antisocial rate that occurs in them. From the well-known criminological theory of social disorganization, to other more contemporary ones such as that of collective efficacy, they have studied the effects that neighborhood characteristics display on antisocial or delinquent behaviors. The main objective of this work has been to carry out a pilot project on social cohesion and the perception of insecurity in one of the most popular neighborhoods in the Extremaduran city of Caceres, known as the Aldea Moret neighborhood. Social cohesion is one of the main concepts used by one of the most important ecological theories in criminology in recent years, such as the theory of collective efficacy, to explain the relationship between the community and crime. This study not only allows us to get to know issues related to social cohesion and the perception of insecurity in a neighborhood, but also to study criminological theories little worked in our country.

The author investigates the impact of law-and-order schools, defined as those that rely heavily on exclusionary discipline (i.e., suspension and expulsion) as a form of punishment, on neighborhood crime. Additional analyses are performed to assess whether the effects of punitive school discipline on local crime are moderated by neighborhood disadvantage. Findings suggest that suspensions are associated with increases in local crime—evidence of a macro-level school-to-prison pipeline—while expulsions are generally associated with fewer crime incidents. Although disciplinary exclusions appear to increase crime at fairly consistent rates across levels of neighborhood disadvantage, both exclusion types are associated with more aggravated assault in areas with higher levels of disadvantage. As such, institutional processes of the school appear to help explain variations in community crime.

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.

Since the 1970s, racial diversity within neighborhoods and cities has been increasing. Although social disorganization theorists have long argued that diversity reduces social cohesion leading to increases in crime, the association between diversity and crime may be more nuanced than previously thought. More specifically, neighborhood processes occur within the broader context of the cities within which they are embedded. The current investigation uses data from 9,593 census tracts nested within 91 large U.S. cities from the National Neighborhood Crime Study (NNCS) to test whether the association between neighborhood diversity and crime differs by city diversity. Results indicate an interaction between neighborhood and city diversity, such that the effect of neighborhood diversity on crime becomes weaker as city diversity increases.

Urban sociologists and criminologists have long been interested in the link between neighborhood isolation and crime. Yet studies have focused predominantly on the internal dimension of social isolation (i.e., increased social disorganization and insufficient jobs and opportunities). This study highlights the need to assess the external dimension of neighborhood isolation, the disconnectedness from other neighborhoods in the city. Analyses of Chicago's neighborhood commuting network over twelve years (2002-2013) showed that violence predicted network isolation. Moreover, pairwise similarity in neighborhood violence predicted commuting ties, supporting homophily expectations. Violence homophily affected tie formation most, while neighborhood violence was important in dissolving ties.

Understanding how offenders choose a crime location is a classic criminological topic. However, previous research on offenders' crime location choice did not consider the impacts of ambient population and surveillance cameras on street robbery. Based on the literature, this study integrates ambient population and surveillance cameras data, from the perspective of guardianship. The discrete spatial choice modeling is used to test the impact of their guardianship role on street robbers' crime location choice, accounting for accessibility and proximity, crime attractors and generators, and social disorganization. The results demonstrate that ambient population and surveillance cameras have a significant hindering impact on street robbers' crime location choice, and they play a guardianship role in street robbers' criminal activities. In particular, we find that the guardianship effect of ambient population is greater than that of surveillance cameras. Further, the inclusion of ambient population and surveillance cameras increases the fitness of the model, which underscores the guardianship role of these two factors on street robbers' choice of location on committing a robbery. These findings can have important implications for the role of the ambient population and the deployment of surveillance cameras for crime reduction.

In recent years, concern about the most vulnerable of Bangladeshis, street children, has increased significantly. Urban life presents these children with immense challenges to their general development and their place in society. Through hypothesizing a theoretical framework, this paper evaluates the lives and situations of street children living in the capital, Dhaka. Having reviewed the relevant literature, the hypothesis is grounded on a theoretical framework that contextualizes the lives of children living on the streets of Dhaka. The study finds that due to social disorganization and a lack of recognition, further stress is placed upon the city’s street children.

Les premieres etudes ethnographiques suggerent que les interventions de la police devraient etre comprises dans le cadre d'un plus grand contexte. Quoi qu'il en soit, le nombre d'etudes mettant l'accent sur l'ecologie de la force demeure restreint comparea celles qui etudient les facteurs individuels et situationnels. De plus, le Canada demeure presque entierement absent de la litterature universitaire sur l'usage de la force par les policiers. En presumant que la force n'est pas utilisee de maniere spatialement aleatoire, cet article cherche a tester les propositions des principales perspectives macrosociologiques utilisees par la litterature portant sur l'usage de la force : la theorie de la desorganisation sociale, l'hypothese de la menace des minorites et la theorie de la vigueur policiere. Un autre objectif de cette etude est d'investiguer si, au niveau du Secteur de recensement (SR), les influx de visiteurs predisent les actions des policiers. Un modele de regression binomiale negative est utilise pour predire l'occurrence de 1 411 usages de force autodeclares dans 506 SR. Les resultats montrent que la desorganisation sociale est l'explication la plus predictive pour la frequence de situations ou la force est utilisee au sein d'une region. L'analyse appuie aussi la proposition que la frequence de situations ou la force est utilisee comporte un lien positif au taux de crime de la region. Bien que l'inclusion des influx de visiteurs a ameliore l'analyse des variations spatiales de l'usage de la force par la police de maniere importante, elle contribue relativement peu aux autres explications. Il n'y avait rien pour appuyer ni l'hypothese de la menace des minorites ni la theorie de Klinger sur la vigueur policiere. Early ethnographic studies suggested that police intervention should be understood within its larger context. Still, the number of studies focused on the ecology of force remains small compared to those of studies on individual and situational factors. Furthermore, Canada remains nearly absent from the academic literature on police use of force. Assuming that force does not occur in a spatially random manner, this article aims to test propositions for the main macrosociological perspectives in the use-of-force literature: social disorganization theory, the minority-threat hypothesis, and the theory of police rigour. Another purpose of this study is to investigate whether, at the level of the census tract (CT), visitor inflows are predictive of police action. Negative binomial regression modelling is used to predict the occurrence of 1,411 self-reported uses of force in 506 CTs. The findings show that social disorganization is the most predictive explanation for the frequency of use-of-force situations in an area. The analysis also supports the proposition that the frequency of use-of-force situations is positively related to the level of crime in the area. While the inclusion of visitor inflows significantly improves the analysis of spatial variations of police use of force, it contributes relatively little relative to other explanations. No support was found for the minority-threat hypothesis, nor for Klinger's theory of police vigour.

Objective: To date, much of what we know about the immigration–crime link is based on the United States setting. Yet, contextual features unique to the United States may produce distinct outcomes for immigration and crime that do not hold elsewhere. This study therefore tests the applicability of ecological frameworks largely derived from the United States experience (such as the immigration revitalization thesis) in a country with a greater mixture of ethnic groups and where immigration policy is focused on recruiting skilled immigrants. Methods: Utilizing an innovative hybrid modeling approach, this article draws on three waves of census data and nine years of official recorded crime incident data to examine the effect of immigration on violent crime across 882 neighborhoods located in two Australian cities. Results: The results offer little evidence that neighborhoods with a greater concentration of immigrants have more crime or that increases in the immigrant population over time are associated with increased violence. Diversity however appears to have a more problematic effect on violent crime in both cities. Conclusions: While these findings are relatively consistent with previous research in the United States, whether this similarity is due to a process of revitalization requires further investigation.

Social scientists have long known that crime is higher in minority versus White neighborhoods. Predominant accounts of this pattern invoke a racial invariance thesis, which posits that (1) accounting for inequalities in structural disadvantages substantially diminishes ethno-racial gaps in neighborhood crime and (2) key predictors operate uniformly across neighborhoods of different ethno-racial types. Unfortunately, little work examines the second assertion of racial invariance, leaving conclusions about the thesis tentative. We address this omission with unique data from the National Neighborhood Crime Study that includes information on neighborhood levels of property and violent crime for majority White, Black, Latino, minority, and integrated neighborhoods nested within a representative sample of 87 large cities. Findings show notable similarity in the influence of key predictors of both violent and property crime across the five ethno-racial neighborhoods. When differences are detected, they are due generally to magnitude and not direction. On the whole our work provides healthy support for a perspective that traces ethno-racial disparity in crime across neighborhoods to the structural underpinnings of urban inequality.

For the past generation scholars have written about violence, crime, and conflict in Rio de Janeiro’s favelas. While this scholarship has developed an extensive understanding of the problem of violence and criminal control of the city’s favelas it has not yet effectively engaged in a discussion of the implications of differential types of crime creating local security orders. Building on research in two different city regions in Rio de Janeiro, this article examines how different types of crime groups emerge from varied forms of social disorganization and contribute to particular models of social control and order. The article examines the varying relationships and exchanges built by drug gangs in Rio de Janeiro’s Zona Norte (Northern Zone) and milícias in the city’s Zona Oeste (Western Zone). The actions of these criminal organizations emerge from and promote orders that affect the lived political, social, and economic experiences of residents of favelas.

This study explains the influences of environmental variables on the emergence of varying policing models. It empirically tests a new perspective on the influences of community variations to police...

Chapter 3 analyzed social network density in three barrios of Caracas: Catia/23 de Enero (henceforth, Catia), Petare, and Santa Cruz del Este/Minas de Baruta (henceforth, Baruta). It found that social network density was high in all three studied barrios. Such findings point toward some structural composition of social capital present in all the studied barrios. This factor of social capital is necessary for social capital to exist, as it lowers transaction costs of organization-building toward goals like imparting informal social control. The present chapter contributes to the discussion on social capital’s structural composition, and its moderating role of urban violence, by analyzing its second structural factor, collective efficacy, in these three studied barrios. However, two sub-factors compose collective efficacy: Social disorganization and collective action within the institutional context. This chapter shows that high social disorganization does not correspond with high violence rates. Hence, it is an irrelevant sub-factor of social capital. Regarding collective action within the institutional context, the chapter shows that in all the barrios attempts at collective action were not sustainable, likely because of rent-seeking organizations’ presence. This chapter found that only in the barrio of Baruta was there evidence of sustainable collective action. However, the evidence presented has some limitations.

The purpose of this correlational panel study was to test Shaw and McKay’s theory of social disorganization by examining the relationship between demographic diversity and hate crime rates. The study focused on the relationship between the level of diversity, residential mobility, unemployment, family disruption, proximity to urban areas, and population density in all 21 New Jersey counties and hate crime rates. The existing data of Federal Bureau of Investigations’ hate crime rates and the U.S. Census Bureau’s demographic diversity were operationalized as the percentage of Whites over all other races, and social disorganization from the 21 counties of New Jersey between the years 2007 through 2011, for a total sample size of 105 cases of reported hate crimes. Results of the multiple linear regression analysis indicate that ethnic diversity did not significantly predict hate crimes; residential mobility and population density had positive effects on hate crime rates. Concentrated disadvantage, characterized by the number of reported unemployment rates, had a negative effect on hate crime rates. The results of the study supported social disorganization theory in reference to residential mobility and population density.