Shaw and McKay (1942) focused their research on the rapidly expanding city of Chicago Illinois in the early 1900’s. Cullen and Agnew (2011) stated that the population of Chicago expanded from 1 million people in 1890 to double that size within 20 years. According to Cullen and Agnew (2011) it was in this era of rapid expansion that researches begin to think differently about crime. Cullen and Agnew (2011) stated that the researchers began to think that the understanding of crime may not be found in the studying of an individual criminal traits but the study of the traits of the environment in which a criminal lives and interacts. According to Cullen and Agnew (2011) this led to a question in which researchers thought a possible solution of controlling and explain crime would be found in changing environments and neighborhoods rather than changing people.
According to Cullen and Agnew (2011) the Social Disorganization theory was developed in the mid 1940’s by Clifford Shaw and Henry McKay while they were researchers studying at the Institute for Social Research in Chicago. Shaw and McKay (1942) based their research of the study of crime in Chicago off of the work that Ernest Burgess theorized in how urban areas grow through a process of continual expansion from their inner core toward outlying areas. According to Cullen and Agnew (20011) one of the primary arguments in the social disorganization theory is the idea that there are settlement patterns in the development of cities, and how these patterns impact neighborhood characteristics and corresponding crime levels. Shaw and McKay developed a theory based off the settlement pattern research that Ernest Burgess conducted. According to Cullen and Agnew (2011) Ernest Burgess stated ...
... middle of paper ...
...any other city that was built off of the auto industry and to see if the “zones of transition” shift to areas in which new employment opportunities arise after the major employer was lost.
Works Cited
Cullen, T.F., Agnew, R. Criminological Theory: Past to Present. New York, Oxford: Oxford
University Press. (Intro, Chapters III, 7, 8)
Feldmeyer, B. Seminar in Criminology. Lecture notes 2/26/2014.
Park, Ezra, R., Burgess, E.W., and McKenzie, R.D. (1967). The City. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press. (Pp.105-110)
Sampson, R., and Groves, W. ( 1989). Community Structure and Crime: Testing Social-
Disorganization Theory. American Journal of Sociology 94: 774-802.
Shaw, C., and McKay, H. (1942) “Juvenile Delinquency and Urban Areas”. Pp 98-104 in
Criminological Theory: Past to Present, edited by Cullen, T.F., Agnew, R. New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Criminology. The. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2012. Print. The. Shakur, Sanyika.
Hickey, T. J. (2010). Taking Sides: Clashing Views in Crime and Criminology, 9th Edition. New York, NY: The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
Akers, R, & Sellers, C. (2009). Criminological theories: introduction, evaluation, and application. New York: Oxford University Press, USA.
The term Chicago is often used to refer to the University of Chicago 's sociology department which is one of the oldest and one of the most prestigious. The video uploaded by Mark Cambridge discuss the Chicago School and its role in Classical Criminology. According to Cambridge, he stated that: The Chicago school is an ecological approach to understanding crime, ecology basically means the relationship between different species and wider society (Cambridge). The ecological approach is an ecological systems theory that was developed by Urie Bronfenbrenner who believed that a person 's development was affected by everything in their surrounding environment. The Chicago school includes the broken window theory which focuses on the importance of disorder in generating and sustaining more serious crime. The broken window theory is not directly linked to serious crime however disorder leads to increased fear and withdrawal from residents. According to Wayne G. Lutters and Mark S. Ackerman the Chicago School embraced many of the concerns of American sociology such as urban decay, crime, race relations, and the family, while adopting a more formal, systematic approach data collection and analysis which had been a trend in Germany to yield a “science” of sociology (Lutters and Ackerman). The Chicago School was a distinct reaction against the state of American sociology of that time period and the Chicago School was shaped by the unique interests of its primary researchers. According to the Geographic Society of Chicago stated that: Influenced by the natural sciences, in particular, evolutionary biology, members of the Chicago School forwarded an ecological approach to sociology emphasizing the interaction between human behavior, social structures and the built environment (Chicago). Ernest Burgess
Chapt6 [2] Haralambos and Holborn 2002 [3] Merton. R 1968 [4] Hagedorn 1996 new perspective in criminology, chapter 13
Shaw and McKay’s social disorganization theory had a profound impact on the study of the effects of urbanization, industrialization and immigration in Chicago neighborhood on crime and delinquency rates. However, Shaw and McKay faced much criticism when they first released their findings. One criticism of the social disorganization theory had to do with researcher’s ability to accurately test the social disorganization theory. Although Shaw and McKay collected data on characteristics of areas and delinquency rates for Chicago communities and were able to visually demonstrate a relationship between by using maps and other visuals, their research did not have an actually test that went along with it (Kurbin, 2010). Kurbin (2010) states that “the
Two major sociological theories explain youth crime at the macro level. The first is Social Disorganization theory, created in 1969 by Clifford Shaw and Henry McKay. The theory resulted from a study of juvenile delinquency in Chicago using information from 1900 to 1940, which attempts to answer the question of how aspects of the structure of a community contribute to social control. The study found that a community that is unable to achieve common values has a high rate of delinquency. Shaw and McKay looked at the physical appearance of the neighborhoods, the average income of the population, the ethnicity of the neighborhood, the percent of renters versus owners, and how fast the population of the area changed. These factors all contribute to neighborhood delinquency.
Maguire, M., Morgan, R., and Reiner, R. (2012) The Oxford Handbook of Criminology. 5th ed. United Kingdom: Oxford University Press.
Jock Young’s book “The Criminological Imagination” very clearly spells out the author’s feeling that orthodox criminology has lost its way and has been swallowed up into obscurification through bogus, post-modern positivism. Young postulates, the cost of this phenomena is the loss of critical thinking and objectivity in the field of criminology. Young contends criminology can be rescued from obscurity if returning to its orthodox beginnings by reducing the impact of neo-liberalism with critical imagination, and not simply succumbing to empirical data to try to explain everything. Young contends, doing so seems to simply cloud the view, thus giving rise to a host of incomplete and overly politicized theories.
Why are some neighborhoods more prone to experience violent episodes than others? What is the extent and in what sociologically measurable ways do communities contribute to the causation and prevention of crime in their neighborhoods? Are neighborhood-level predictors adequate to explain differences in violent crime rates in the respective communities? These are some of the questions addressed by this statistically intense paper published in Science 1997, by Sampson, Raudenbush and Earls.
Lilly, Robert J., Francis T. Cullen, and Richard A. Ball. 2011. Criminological Theory: Context And Consequences. 5th ed. California: SAGE.
Winslow, R. W., & Zhang, S. (2008). Contemporary Theories of Crime. Criminology: a global perspective (). Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Pearson/Prentice Hall.
Therefore, the community has informal social control, or the connection between social organization and crime. Some of the helpful factors to a community can be informal surveillance, movement-governing rules, and direct intervention. They also contain unity, structure, and integration. All of these qualities are proven to improve crime rate. Socially disorganized communities lack those qualities. According to our lecture, “characteristics such as poverty, residential mobility, and racial/ethnic heterogeneity contribute to social disorganization.” A major example would be when a community has weak social ties. This can be caused from a lack of resources needed to help others, such as single-parent families or poor families. These weak social ties cause social disorganization, which then leads higher levels of crime. According to Seigel, Social disorganization theory concentrates on the circumstances in the inner city that affect crimes. These circumstances include the deterioration of the neighborhoods, the lack of social control, gangs and other groups who violate the law, and the opposing social values within these neighborhoods (Siegel,
Williams, F., & McShane, M. (2010). Criminological Theory, (5th Edition). New Brunswick, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall.
Williams, F., & McShane, M. (2010). Criminological Theory, 5th Edition. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Pearson Education, Inc.