Criminology and Penology
Theories
Anomie
Differential Association Theory
Deviance
Labelling Theory
Rational Choice Theory
Social Control Theory
Social Disorganisation Theory
Social Learning Theory
Strain Theory
Subcultural Theory
Symbolic Interactionism · Victimology
Types of crimes
Blue-collar crime · Corporate crime
Juvenile crime
Organised crime
Political crime · Public order crime
Public order case law in the U.S.
State crime · State-corporate crime
White-collar crime
Penology
Deterrence · Prison
Prison reform · Prisoner abuse
Prisoners' rights · Rehabilitation
Recidivism · Retribution
Utilitarianism
See also Sociology
See also Wikibooks:Social Deviance

In criminology, the Social Disorganisation Theory was one of the most important theories developed by the Chicago School, related to ecological theories. Image File history File links Scale_of_justice. ... Criminology is the study of crime as a social phenomenon, including the causes and consequences of crime, criminal behavior, as well as the development of, and impact of laws. ... Penology (from the Latin poena, punishment) comprises penitentiary science: that concerned with the processes devised and adopted for the punishment, repression, and prevention of crime, and the treatment of prisoners. ... Anomie, in contemporary English, means the absence of any kind of rule, law, principle or order. ... Differental association - A theory developed by Edwin Sutherland that holds that through interaction with others, individuals learn the values, attitudes, techniques, and motives for criminal behavior. ... Deviant behavior is behavior that is a recognized violation of social norms. ... Labeling Theory is a sociological approach to explaining how criminal behavior is perpetuated by the police and other labelers. The theory hypothesizes that the labels applied to individuals influence their behavior, particularly that the application of negative labels (such as criminal or felon) promote deviant behavior. ... In criminology, the Rational Choice Theory restates the Utilitarian belief that man is a reasoning actor who weighs means and ends, costs and benefits, and makes a rational choice. ... asss This page is a candidate for speedy deletion. ... Observational learning or social learning refers to learning that occurs as a function of observing, retaining and replicating behaviour observed in others. ... In criminology, the Strain Theories state that social structures within society may encourage citizens to commit crime. ... In criminology, Subcultural Theory emerged from the work of the Chicago School on gangs and developed into a set of theories arguing that certain groups or subcultures in society have values and attitudes that are conducive to crime and violence. ... Symbolic interactionism is a sociological perspective which examines how individuals and groups interact, focusing on the creation of personal identity through interaction with others. ... Victimology is the study of why certain people are victims of crime and how lifestyles affect the chances that a certain person will fall victim to a crime. ... Blue-collar crime is regarded as consisting of violent crimes such as murder, rape, kidnapping, and vandalism, as well as things like shoplifting and burglary -- as opposed to white-collar crime. ... Corporate crime refers to criminal practices by individuals that have the legal authority to speak for a corporation or company. ... Juvenile delinquency refers to antisocial or criminal acts performed by juveniles. ... Organized crime is crime carried out systematically by formal criminal organizations. ... In the standard sense of the phrase, a political crime is an action deemed illegal by a government in order to control real or imagined threats to its survival, at the expense of a range of human rights and freedoms. ... In criminology public order crime is defined by Siegel (2004) as ...crime which involves acts that interfere with the operations of society and the ability of people to function efficiently, i. ... In criminology, public order crime case law in the United States is essential to understanding how the courts interpret the policy of laws where the moral and social order of the state appears to be threatened by clearly identified behavior. ... In criminology, state crime is activity or failures to act that break the states own criminal law or public international law. ... In criminology, the concept of state-corporate crime refers to crimes that result from the relationship between the policies of the state and the policies and practices of commercial corporations. ... White-collar crimes (a term coined by Edwin Sutherland in 1939) or business crimes are those crimes specifically performed by white collar employees. ... Deterrence ALOHA!! is a means of controlling a persons behavior through negative motivational influences, namely fear of punishment. ... Prison reform is the steady improvement of conditions inside prisons, aiming at a more effective penal system. ... Prisoner abuse is the mistreatment of persons while they are under arrest or incarcerated. ... The movement for Prisoners rights is based on the principle that prisoners, even though they are deprived of liberty, are still entitled to basic human rights. ... This theory of punishment is based on the notion that punishment is to be inflicted on a offender so as to reform him, or rehabilitate him so as to make his re-integration into society easier. ... Recidivism is the act of a person repeating an undesirable behavior after they have either experienced negative consequences of that behavior, or have been treated or trained to extinguish that behavior. ... The neutrality of this article is disputed. ... This article or section does not cite its references or sources. ... Social interactions of people and their consequences are the subject of sociology studies. ... Criminology is the study of crime as a social phenomenon, including the causes and consequences of crime, criminal behavior, as well as the development of, and impact of laws. ... In sociology, the Chicago School refers to the first major attempt to study the urban environment by combined efforts of theory and ethnographic fieldwork in Chicago. ... Ecology is sometimes used incorrectly as a synonym for the natural environment or environmentalism. ...

William Isaac Thomas and Florian Znaniecki

Thomas and Znaniecki (1918-1920) introduced the idea that a person's thinking processes and attitudes are constructed by the interaction between that person's situation and his or her behaviour. Attitudes are not innate but stem from a process of acculturation. Any proposed action will have social importance to an individual both because it relates to the objective situation within which the subject has to act, and because it has been shaped by attitudes formed through a lifetime of social and cultural experiences. This is based on the "four wishes" of the Thomas theorem, viz., "If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences". These four wishes are the desire for new experiences, the desire for recognition, the desire for domination, and the desire for security. Combined with the cultural values of a pre-existing situation, the four wishes give rise to certain attitudes which are subjectively defined meanings and shared experience, strongly emphasised and embodied in specific institutions. The root of new attitudes arises from the formation of new relationships and interaction between the person and the world outside the community. For example, the emergence of economics as an independent sphere reflected the tendency to reduce quality to a quantity in barter transactions and led to the development of money. Pocahontas, in England, as Mrs John Rolfe, 1616: engraving after Simon Van de Passe Acculturation is the obtainment of culture by an individual or a group of people. ... The name Thomas theorem refers to a fundamental principle in sociology formulated by William I. Thomas. ...

Robert Ezra Park and Ernest W. Burgess

Park and Burgess (1925) developed a theory of urban ecology which proposed that cities are environments like those found in nature, governed by many of the same forces of Darwinian evolution, i.e. competition, that affects natural ecosystems. When a city is formed and grows, people and their activities cluster in a particular area, i.e. the process of "concentration". Gradually, this central area becomes highly populated, so there is a scattering of people and their activities away from the central city to establish the suburbs, i.e. "dispersion". They suggested that, over time, the competition for land and other scarce urban resources leads to the division of the urban space into distinctive ecological niches, "natural areas" or zones in which people share similar social characteristics because they are subject to the same ecological pressures. As a zone becomes more prosperous and "desirable", property values and rents rise, and people and businesses migrate into that zone, usually moving outward from the city centre in a process Park and Burgess called "succession" (a term borrowed from plant ecology) and new residents take their place. At both a micro and macro level, society was thought to operate as a superorganism, where change is a natural aspect of the process of growth and neither chaotic nor disorderly. Thus, an organised area is invaded by new elements. This gives rise to local competition and there will either be succession or an accommodation which results in a reorganisation. But, during the early stages of competition, there will always be some level of disorganisation because there will be disruption to, or a breakdown in, the normative structure of the community which may or may not lead to deviant behaviour. Thus, although a city was a physical organisation, it also had also social and moral structures that could be disorganised. This article is about Darwinism as a philosophical concept; see evolution for the page on biological evolution; modern evolutionary synthesis for neo-Darwinism; and also evolution (disambiguation). ... In ecology, the word ecosystem is an abbreviation of the term, ecological system. ...

Their model, known as Concentric Zone Theory predicted that, once fully grown, cities would take the form of five concentric rings with areas of social and physical deterioration concentrated near the city centre and more prosperous areas located near the city's edge. This theory seeks to explain the existence of social problems such as unemployment and crime in specific Chicago districts, making extensive use of synchronic mapping to reveal the spatial distribution of social problems and to permit comparison between areas. In the post-war period, the cartographic approach was criticised as simplistic in that it neglected the social and cultural dimensions of urban life, the political and economic impact of industrialisation on urban geography, and the issues of class, race, gender, and ethnicity. Synchronic linguistics deals with a language at a specific point in time; it is opposed to diachronic linguistics (also called historical linguistics), which deals with how languages change over time. ...

Edwin Sutherland

Sutherland adopted the concept of social disorganisation to explain the increases in crime that accompanied the transformation of preliterate and peasant societies where "influences surrounding a person were steady, uniform, harmonious and consistent" to modern Western civilisation which he believed was characterised by inconsistency, conflict and un-organization (1934: 64). He also believed that the mobility, economic competition and an individualistic ideology that accompanied capitalist and industrial development had been responsible for the disintegration of the large family and homogenous neighbourhoods as agents of social control. The failure of extended kin groups expanded the realm of relationships no longer controlled by the community and undermined governmental controls leading to persistent "systematic" crime and delinquency. He also believed that such disorganisation causes and reinforces the cultural traditions and cultural conflicts that support antisocial activity. The systematic quality of the behaviour was a reference to repetitive, patterned or organised offending as opposed to random events. He depicted the law-abiding culture as dominant and more extensive than alternative criminogenic cultural views and capable of overcoming systematic crime if organised for that purpose (1939: 8). But because society is organised around individual and small group interests, society permits crime to persist. Sutherland concluded that "if the society is organised with reference to the values expressed in the law, the crime is eliminated; if it is not organised, crime persists and develops (1939:8). In later works, he switched from the concept of social disorganisation to differential social organisation to convey the complexity of overlapping and conflicting levels of organisation in a society.

Ruth Shonle Cavan

Despite producing Suicide (1928) as a study of personal disorganisation in which she confirmed that the mortality rate is relatively stable regardless of economic and social conditions, Cavan was excluded from faculty status at Chicago, served on various research committees for six years and then moved to Rockford College in Illinois. She was particularly interested in dance halls, brothels, insanity, divorce, nonvoting, suicide, and other forms of socially problematic behaviour of interest to the political reformers, studying the working lives of "business" girls and their dispersal throughout the zones of Chicago (1929). Partly as a result of her studies, Cavan (1953) emphasised the importance to the efficient functioning of the entire social order of the regulation of sex. While there are variations in the specific arrangements, all societies contain family groups, forbid incest, sanction marriage, approve more highly of legitimate than of illegitimate births, and look upon marriage as the most highly approved outlet for sexual expression of adults. She has continued the work to review delinquency in different countries (1968), returning to write of the Chicago School itself in 1983.

Clifford R. Shaw and Henry D. McKay

Mapping can show spatial distributions of delinquency and crime, but it cannot explain the results. Indeed, such research has often been used politically to attribute immorality to specific population groups or ethnicities. Social Disorganisation Theory and Cultural Transmission Theory examine the consequences when a community is unable to conform to common values and to solve the problems of its residents. Shaw and McKay (1942) applied Sutherland's theory of systematic criminal behaviour, and claimed that delinquency was not caused at the individual level, but is a normal response by normal individuals to abnormal social conditions. Thus, if a community is not self-policing and imperfectly policed by outside agencies, some individuals will exercise unrestricted freedom to express their dispositions and desires, often resulting in delinquent behaviour. They considered the Concentric Zone Theory and produced a diachronic analysis to demonstrate that delinquency was already dispersed in urban areas, and that more wealthy and important groups moved to avoid the existing social disorganisation. Their concepts, hypothesis, and research methods have been a strong influence on the analysis of delinquency and crime. Their dependent variables in the delinquency rates were measured by arrests, court appearances, and court adjudications of institutional commitment. Their independent variables were economic conditions by square-mile areas, ethnic heterogeneity, and population turnover. These variables were based on where delinquents lived and consisted of 10 to 16 year-old males who were petitioned to juvenile court (56,000 juvenile court records were used as data from 1900-1933). The time frames they selected showed strong patterns of immigrant migration, believing that they could demonstrate whether delinquency was caused by particular immigrant groups or by the environment in which the immigrants lived, i.e.: Diachronic study is the study of the development of a language over a period of time. ...

• if high delinquency rates for particular immigrant groups remained high during their migration through the city’s different ecological environments, then delinquency could be associated with their distinctive constitutional or cultural features;
• if delinquency rates decreased as immigrants moved through different ecological environments, then delinquency could not be associated with the particular constitution of the immigrants, but must somehow be connected with their environment.

Shaw and McKay demonstrated that social disorganisation was endemic to the urban areas which were the only places the newly arriving poor could afford to live. In these areas, there was a high rate of turnover in the population (residential instability) and mixes of people from different cultural backgrounds (ethnic diversity). Shaw and McKay's analyses relating delinquency rates to these structural characteristics established key facts about the community correlates of crime and delinquency:

• The rates of juvenile delinquency were consistent with an ordered spatial pattern with the highest rates in the inner-city areas and declining with distance from the city centre.
• There was an identical spatial pattern revealed by various other indexes of social problems.
• The spatial pattern of delinquency rates showed significant long-term stability even though the nationality structure of the population in the inner-city areas changed greatly throughout the decades.
• Within inner-city areas the course of becoming delinquent occurred through a network of interpersonal relationships involving family, gangs, and the neighbourhood.

Comparing the maps, Shaw and McKay recognised that the pattern of delinquency rates corresponded to the "natural urban areas" of Park and Burgess’ Concentric Zone Model. This evidenced the conclusion that delinquency rates always remained high for a certain region of the city (ecological zone 2), no matter which immigrant group lived there. Hence, delinquency was not "constitutional", but was to be correlated with the particular ecological environment in which it occurs. In this context, Shaw and McKay asserted that ethnic diversity interferes with communication among adults, with effective communication less likely in the face of ethnic diversity because differences in customs and a lack of shared experiences may breed fear and mistrust.

There are a number of problems in Shaw and McKay's work. As defined, social disorganisation downplays the significance of ethnic and cultural factors in delinquency. Some ethnicities may encourage criminal activity because the behaviour is not considered criminal or wrong. Although research in different countries has tended to support their findings that delinquent rates are highest in areas with economic decline and instability, that research has not found that crime rates spatially disperse from the city centre outward. In fact, in some countries, the wealthy live in the centre, while the poorest zones are near its fringes. Further, their work does not consider why there is significant non-delinquency in delinquency areas. Thus, the theory identifies social causes of delinquency that seem to be located in specific geographical areas, and its conclusions are not completely generalisable. For a general discussion of their work, see Snodgrass (1976).

Robert E. Lee Faris

Faris (1955) extended the concept of social disorganisation to explain social pathologies and social problems in general, including crime, suicide, mental illness, and mob violence. Defining organisation as definite and enduring patterns of complementary relations (1955: 3), he defined social disorganisation as the weakening or destruction of the relationships which hold together a social organisation (1955: 81). Such a concept was to be employed objectively as a measurable state of a social system, independent of personal approval or disapproval. When applied to crime, Faris' central proposition was that, "A crime rate is ...a reflection of the degree of disorganisation of the control mechanisms in a society." In turn, crime also contributes to disorganisation, and disorganisation of such conventional mechanisms is especially likely in large, rapidly growing industrial cities where such disorganisation permits highly organised criminality as well as less organised forms of group and individual crime and delinquency.

Robert J. Sampson [1]

Sampson (1993) claims that any theory of crime must begin with the fact that most violent criminals belonged to teenage peer-groups, particularly street gangs, and that a gang member will become a full-time criminal if social controls are insufficient to address delinquent behaviour at an early age. He follows Shaw and McKay (1969) in accepting that if the family and relatives offer inadequate supervision or incomplete socialisation, children from broken families are more likely to join violent gangs unless others take the parents' place. But, even children from unstable families are less likely to be influenced by peer groups in a community where most family units are intact. Tight-knit communities are more likely to identify strangers, report deviants to their parents, and pass warnings along. High rates of residential mobility and high-rise housing disrupt the ability to establish and maintain social ties. Formal organisations like schools, church, and the police act as surrogates for family and friends in many communities, but poor, unstable communities often lack the organisation and political connections to obtain resources for fighting crime and offering young people an alternative to deviant behaviour. Sampson concludes that "the empirical data suggest that the structural elements of social disorganisation have relevance for explaining macro level variations in violence." Social disorganisation may also produce crime by isolating communities from the mainstream culture. Sampson and Wilson (1995) proposed a theory of race and urban inequality to explain the disproportionate representation of African Americans as victims and offenders in violent crime. The basic idea proposed was that community-level patterns of racial inequality give rise to the social isolation and ecological concentration of the truly disadvantaged, which in turn leads to structural barriers and cultural adaptations that undermine social organisation and ultimately the control of crime. Sampson and Wilson (1995) pursued this logic to argue that the community-level causes of violence are the same for both whites and blacks, but that racial segregation by community differentially exposes members of minority groups to key violence-inducing and violence-protecting social mechanisms, thereby explaining black-white disparities in violence. Their thesis has come to be known as "racial invariance" in the fundamental causes of crime. More generally, see Sampson and Bean (2006).

External links

• Social Disorganisation Theories of Crime. [2]
• Social Disorganisation Theory. [3]

References

• Burgess, Ernest & Bogue, Donald J. (eds.).(1964). Contributions to Urban Sociology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0226080552
• Burgess, Ernest & Bogue, Donald J. (eds.) (1967). Urban Sociology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0226080560
• Bursik, Robert J. (1984). "Urban Dynamics and Ecological Studies of Delinquency". Social Forces 63: 393-413.
• Cavan, Ruth S. (1969). Juvenile delinquency (2nd edition). New York: J.B. Lippincott.
• Cavan, Ruth S. (1963). The American Family. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Co.
• Cavan, Ruth S. (1928). Suicide. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Cavan, Ruth Shonle, (1929). Business girls : a study of their interests and problems.
• Cavan, Ruth S. (1948). Criminology. Thomas Y. Crowell.
• Cavan, Ruth Shonle and Jordan T. (1968). Delinquency and Crime: Cross-Cultural Perspectives. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Co.
• Cavan, Ruth Shonle. (1983). "The Chicago School of Sociology, 1918-1933". Urban Life 11. (January): 407-420
• Faris, R. E. L. (1955) Social Disorganization. 2nd edition. New York: The Ronald Press Company. ASIN B0007DEVLE
• Ferdinand, T.N. (1988). "Ruth Shonle Cavan: An Intellectual Portrait". Sociological Inquiry 58 (No. 4) 1988: 337-43
• Franklin Frazier. (1932). The Negro Family in Chicago.
• Hawley, Amos H. (1943). "Ecology and Human Ecology". Social Forces 22: 398-405.
• Hawley, Amos H. (1950). Human Ecology: A Theory of Community Structure. New York: Ronald Press.
• Hirschi, T. (1969). Causes of Delinquency. Berkeley: University of California Press. (2001) Transaction Publishers. ISBN 0765809001
• McKenzie, R. D. "The Ecological Approach to the Study of the Human Community". American Journal of Sociology 30 (1924): 287-301.
• Park, Robert E. "The City: Suggestions for the Investigation of Human Behavior in the City Environment". American Journal of Sociology 20 (1915): 577-612.
• Park, Robert E., Burgess, Ernest W. & McKenzie, R. D. (1925). The City: Suggestions for Investigation of Human Behavior in the Urban Environment. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967.
• Park, Robert & Burgess, Ernest W. (1921). Introduction to the Science of Sociology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (3rd revised edition, 1969). ISBN 0226646041
• Park, Robert. (1952). Human Communities: The City and Human Ecology. Glencoe, Ill: Free Press. ASIN B0007EOJQA
• Reckless, Walter C. (1940). Criminal Behavior. New York: McGraw-Hill.
• Reckless, Walter C. (1933). Vice in Chicago. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Sampson, Robert J. (1993). "The Community Context of Violent Crime". in Sociology and the Public Agenda, edited by William Julius Wilson. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications. pp267-74. ISBN 0803950837
• Sampson, Robert J. & Wilson, William Julius. (1995). "Toward a Theory of Race, Crime, and Urban Inequality" in Crime and Inequality, edited by John Hagan & Ruth D. Peterson. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. ISBN 0804724776
• Sampson, Robert J & Bean, Lydia. (2006). "Cultural Mechanisms and Killing Fields: A Revised Theory of Community-Level Racial Inequality" in The Many Colors of Crime: Inequalities of Race, Ethnicity and Crime in America, edited by Ruth Peterson, Lauren Krivo, and John Hagan. New York: New York University Press. ISBN 0814767206 [4]
• Shaw, Clifford R. & McKay, Henry D. (1942). Juvenile Delinquency in Urban Areas. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Shaw, Clifford R., Zorbaugh, Harvey, McKay, Henry D. & Cottrell, Leonard S. (1929). Delinquency Areas. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Shaw, Clifford R. (1952). Brothers in Crime. Philadelphia: Albert Saifer.
• Snodgrass, Jon. (1976). "Clifford R. Shaw and Henry D. McKay: Chicago Criminologists". The British Journal of Criminology 16 (Jan.): 1-19.
• Sutherland, Edwin. (1924, 34. 39). "Principles of Criminology.
• Thomas, W. I. & Znaniecki, F. (1918-20). The Polish Peasant in Europe and America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.