Shaw And Mckay's Social Disorganization Theory In The Juvenile Justice System

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In the field of criminal justice, we ask why crime happens and try to come up with theories to explain the actions of others. Coming up with theories and explaining them in the juvenile justice system is something that we have discussed in class and while doing service learning hours, I have come to find some theories being very prevalent in the environment that I was introduced to. Talking about theories and actually seeing them in action in the “real” world opens your eyes to the depth behind some of theories out there trying to explain crime. For my twelve hours of community service I went to the Boys & Girls club in Erie, Pennsylvania. While at the Boys and Girls club I had noticed a variety of different things in regards to the population …show more content…

Social control can either be informal (parents etc.) or formal (police etc.) and without these controls, juveniles become more susceptible to delinquency (Shaw,McKay,1942). In the city of Erie, there are a lot of neighborhoods in which are breaking down, especially the one around the Boys and Girls club. On my last day at the Boys and Girls club, a young girl was jumped just a few blocks down from the center; she was just walking home. The city of Erie itself has pocket communities of poverty which are in close proximity to communities which are more prosperous. From others who I had talked to at the club, those who worked their often had to deal with parents who did not care, were not around, or were negative influences in the child’s life. A few of the older kids at the Boys and Girls club had been involved with gangs, drug abuse and selling, and have been effected in some way by the violence in the low income neighborhoods they lived in. Staff had notified me that sometimes the programs in which the schools or juvenile …show more content…

The three dimensions of social disorganization 108 J. Law, M. Quick 123 identified by Shaw and McKay were found to be significant explanatory variables of the location of young offenders in the present study: economic deprivation (percentage of residents receiving government transfer payments), population turnover (1-year residential mobility), and ethnic heterogeneity (index of ethnic heterogeneity)” (Law, J., & Quick, M.

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