What Causes Crime?

The industrial age brought with it the birth of a dream, competition lead the world into a new era and America was at the forefront. The lucrative markets offered a new way of life for anyone willing to work hard and the era was filled with revolutionary creations to make life more comfortable. As a result many people flocked to the cities from their once segregated communities in hopes to find work and live the dream but expectations were not achievable for all. The inner cities quickly became overcrowded with people of different cultural backgrounds forced to live and assimilate with one another bringing about a break in the order of human life, this is where the social roots of crime would be discovered and Chicago sat center stage. It was during this time that Chicago won the rights to hold the World’s Fair and with it saw a rise in the city’s population and where researchers of the Chicago School and elsewhere would dispel crime as a reasoned action or genetic circumstance. Crime would be found right in the heart of growing cities, like that of Chicago, and rapid invasion would lead to disorganization and strain.

Robert E. Parks and Ernest Burgess would lead the way in theorizing that the city was at the root of life’s social process. The city’s enclaves according to Parks brought about conflict forcing people to assimilate and associate with others causing cultural clashes that laid the framework of what many theorist would study as reason to crime (Lilly, Cullen, & Ball, 2011). The natural socialization process had been interrupted according to Parks similar to that of ecological structure found in nature and as such was seen as one of the factors that impacted human behavior. Burgess furthered the study by creating a diag...

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...of the time might have even been a necessary evil as Durkheim implied making it more likely for civil disobedience to subsequently arise out of this time period.

References

Akers, R. L., & Sellers, C. S. (2013). Criminological theories: introduction, evaluation, and application (Sixth ed.). New York: Oxford University Press.

Brym, R. J., & Lie, J. (2010). Sociology: your compass for a new world, the brief edition (Enhanced 2nd ed.). Belmont, California: Wadsworth Cengage Learning.

Jacoby, J. E., Severance, T. A., & Bruce, A. S. (2012). Classics of criminology (4th ed.). Long Grove, Ill.: Waveland Press.

Lilly, J. Robert, Francis T. Cullen, & Richard A. Ball. (2011). Criminological Theory: Context & Consequences (5th ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA, USA: Sage Publications, Inc.

Weatherburn, D. (2001). What causes crime?. BOCSAR NSW Crime and Justice Bulletins, 11.