Wait a second!
More handpicked essays just for you.
More handpicked essays just for you.
Strategies to reduce crime
Factor affecting criminal behavior
Factors affecting criminal behaviour
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
Recommended: Strategies to reduce crime
This article evaluates the historical development of the social disorganization theory and explores the social mechanisms that can prevent crime. Further, it reviews community development strategies that can attempt to reduce crime. The chapter discusses how such strategies can further develop and evaluate to promote development of crime prevention.
Sampson, R. J., Raudenbush, S., & Earls, F. (1997). Neighborhoods and Violent Crime: A Multilevel Study of Collective Efficacy.
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.
Robert J. Sampson is a well respected sociologist and criminologist who was born on July, 9th 1956 in Utica, New York. Sampson is best known for the numerous studies he has conducted that explains how an individual’s neighborhood can impact their criminal behavior. Sampson is currently the Henry Ford II Professor of the Social Sciences and the chair of the Sociology department at Hard University’s Cambridge campus. Also, he is the Director of the Boston Area Research Initiative and Affiliated Research Professor at the American Bar Foundation. Prior to becoming a professor at Hard University, Sampson served as the Department Chair of sociology and professor at the University of Chicago for twelve years. His first faculty position was at the
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
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,
This theory however as some have argued has emerged from social disorganisation theory, which sees the causes of crime as a matter of macro level disadvantage. Macro level disadvantage are the following: low socioeconomic status, ethnic or racial heterogeneity, these things they believe are the reasons for crime due to the knock on effect these factors have on the community network and schools. Consequently, if th...
Many of the theories and perspectives we have in criminology and sociology today have stemmed from the infamous sociology department, otherwise known as the “Chicago School”. Its emphasis on studying people and the natural interactions they have with their surroundings has led to the extensive examination of numerous neighbourhoods within Chicago. Social disorganization theory was one of the many theories that developed from this ecological thinking. It sought to identify the social problems that arose from rapid urbanization and industrialization. This paper will detail the elements associated with social disorganization theory, as well as supportive evidence of its validity and generalizability.
In 1997, Sampson, Stephen Raudenbush, Felton Earls conducted a study to measure how collective efficacy within a given community can have an impact of delinquency. They explained that a neighborhood that lacks strong collective efficacy can cause social disorganization. Sampson et al. (1997) explained that social disorganization theory focuses on an individual’s environment instead of his or her biological, psychological, and genetic makeup to determine their likelihood of committing a crime. They explain the four antecedent causes have been discovered that lead to a disorganized neighborhood. The first characteristic of a disorganized neighborhood is poverty. Extreme poverty often influences individuals to participate in illegal acts because of the lack of job opportunity that exists in poor neighborhoods. The second factor that has been associated with social disorganization theory is rapid population growth. An increase of residents in a particular area will increase the probability of crime and poverty (Sampson et al.,
Discuss the major social structure theories that apply to digital crime and explain how cyber stalking and harassment could be the result of strains.
Crime prevention programs and schemes are put in place to evaluate and address crime, and hopefully prevent it. The programs can be implemented for individuals, communities, or specific locations. Crime prevention programs are intended to have a specific, intended effect on crime, and to ultimately eliminate it. As stated in the book Prevention of Crime: Social and Situational Strategies, “situational strategies are based on the well-established notion that crimes occur most often in particular places, times, and circumstances” (Rosenbaum, Lurigio, & Davis, 1998). The predominant issue with crime prevention and situational strategies is that it is believed that crime is never truly “eliminated” and just relocated to a different area, which is how crime displacement comes into play. There are studies and theories that prove that even though crime is prevented in a certain area, it never actually disappears. There are several different types of “crime displacement” such as spatial, temporal, target, and tactical. All four of these are similar in which they relate to ...
In conclusion, we can see that violent crime rates are higher in urban areas than rural. We can see from the factors such as neighborhood instability, ethnic diversity, family disruption, economic status and density that both are directly affected by social disorganization, but urban cities do manage to hold higher violent crime rates. Urban and rural communities are both affected by social disorganization, however, the social disorganization of urban communities is more important to research in order to hopefully prevent future deviance and prevent violent crime in relation to social disorganization.
Community is a broad concept that represents different aspects of society. According to Crawford (1995), community can either be a shared locality, in terms of geographical or territorial boundaries, or a shared concern, which is best expressed as a ‘sense of community’ (Crawford, 1995). Communities in this context share normative values and attitudes which are enforced through informal social processes of control. This understanding of community has led to a belief that the existence of a sense of community leads to less crime, as members pool together to protect common interests and investments. These definitions however neglect the structural institutions from which crime prevention schemes derive their legitimacy. These definitions of community have led to communities taking different approaches in their involvement with crime prevention. However, crime remains a major driving force in the formation of community organizations such as neighborhood watch and resident associations (Skogan, 1988). Community crime prevention organizations assume that the police and other justice system organs cannot effectively deal with crime on their own (Skogan, 1988).
The origins of crime prevention can be traced back to Clifford Shaw and Henry McKay’s (1942) Chicago Area Project (CAP). This was one of the first projects to measure crime prevention starting in the 1930s (Welsh and Pfeffer, 2013, p. 537). CAP was initiated in three of the city 's highest crime areas to test delinquency prevention techniques. Shaw’s approach was to rally the parents to establish the Russell Square Community Committee. Also, his objective was to minimize the attraction of delinquency for gang youth. Ultimately, CAP showed that neighborhood self-help could be used as a powerful organizational principle upon which to build new mechanisms of control in crime-ridden minority communities.
Community networks,relationships and organizations often search for remedies to eliminate this issue but to no avail the answer is no where near simple. For decades improvement of community conditions has encompassed education, housing, economic development, workforce development and most recently crime. In the past many faith-based ,and community organizations have attempted to make a conscious effort to participate in crime reduction efforts to increase publi...
Social harmony has become a powerful and popular indicator to asset a population’s quality of life. So much so, people’s attitude toward crime rates has shifted from a lukewarm state to a profoundly sensitive level. Accordingly, the public’s increasing fears have translated into more and more restrictive policies to punish crimes. Therefore, crime prevention is considered as a strategic approach to lessen the probability of criminal behaviors in a political community, and to maintain social-control following the heated debates on civilians’ safety.