Criminal Justice Social Disorganization

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Presentation Details: Social Disorganization The Chicago School Slides: 10 Duration: 00:19:29 Filename: C:\Users\PadenSL\Desktop\Social Disorganization The Chicago School.pptx Description:

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Slide 1 The Chicago school Duration: 00:00:39 Advance mode: Auto

Notes: THE CHICAGO SCHOOL Hello. In this presentation, I’m going to give a short overview of the “Chicago School of Criminology.” This perspective is also called the social ecological perspective of crime, but it is most often referred to as the Social Disorganization theory of crime. I’ll trace the history of this perspective for you to show you how the theory developed and then briefly describe a few of the newer developments in this theory by Sampson, Bellair, and others, which you will read about in your articles and chapters this week.

Slide 2 Social Ecological Approach Duration: 00:01:59 Advance mode: Auto

Notes: SOCIAL ECOLOGICAL APPROACH The social ecological perspective on crime was developed in the early 1900s, and is considered one of the first Sociological explanations of crime. Up until this point, explanations of crime had focused heavily on the biological factors we talked about in the last module. With the focus on biology, people assumed that there was something different about the kinds of people who committed crime. This perspective changed that focus. Rather

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than asking why some people were criminal and what was unique about them, this theory focused on social environment and social factors and asked whether some places were more criminogenic than others. That is, this perspective presented a “kinds of places” (rather than a kinds of people) explanation of crime and said that certain conditions and environments bred crime (and that it wasn’t about the types of people who happened to live there). This marked a sharp contrast to the biological explanations of crime that had flourished up until then. Not only did it put American Criminology on the map, but it also put American Sociology on the map by showing how much people’s environment shaped things like crime and showing that place mattered So how did the perspective developed? Well, it unfolded almost like a natural experiment in Chicago during the late 1800s and early 1900s. Chicago (like many other cities in the U.S.) was experiencing radical changes and several sociologists at the University of Chicago were in the perfect position to watch these changes unfold, in many cases right outside their back door.

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Slide 3 Chicago History Duration: 00:02:45 Advance mode: Auto

Notes: CHICAGO HISTORY Like many other cities in the U.S., Chicago was undergoing massive social changes in the late 1800s and early 1900s, that were affecting nearly all aspects social life in the city First, cities like Chicago were going through the industrial revolution and the U.S. economy was transforming. We were going from a rural society, where people lived in small towns and communities and worked on farms, to an economy driven by industry. There was massive expansion of industries like steel refineries, manufacturing, assembly line production, and in Chicago, massive growth in the large scale meat packing industry. If you’ve read Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle,” then you have a good idea of what industry was starting to look like in Chicago at the turn of the

20 th

century. These changes in industry created many new jobs with decent wages, which drew people to the city. So we saw some of the largest waves of immigration the U.S. has ever seen, mostly from European countries like Germany, Ireland, Poland, and then Italy, Eastern Europe, and in-migration of African Americans from the rural south up to the north and northeast for these manufacturing jobs. Essentially, these groups came in successive waves looking for new jobs and opportunity.

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These waves of immigration led to some of the largest urban population growth we have ever seen in the U.S. and the population of cities like Chicago seemed to explode overnight. For example, the U.S. census shows that the Chicago population went from about 500k residents in 1880 to over a million in 1890. Just 20 years later, the population had doubled again to more than 2.1 million in 1910. We’re talking about a 3 fold increase in population of the city in the span of 30 years (imagine this happening in your city/town). This was unprecedented population growth and it had profound effects on social life in Chicago. And luckily several researchers at the University of Chicago were perfectly poised to watch these changes unfold and study how they affected crime and other social problems.

Slide 4 Slide 4 Duration: 00:00:23 Advance mode: Auto

Notes: PHOTOS Just to give you a sense of what these scholars were seeing, here are photos of Chicago in the early 1900s. Hopefully, these can give you a sense of what life looked like during these changes. This first photo shows the union stockyards in downtown Chicago for the meat packing plants.

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Slide 5 Slide 5 Duration: 00:00:49 Advance mode: Auto

Notes: PHOTOS 2 And this was where many of the new migrants lived. As you can see, the row houses and communities were crowded, cramped, and usually backed right up to the stock yards and factories. They were tough places to live, filled with crime, disease, and other social problems. But they were cheap and gave new migrants a place to get their feet on the ground and start a new life in America.

Slide 6 Slide 6 Duration: 00:00:26 Advance mode: Auto

Notes: PHOTOS 3 Also, because there wasn’t much in terms of public transportation (and the immigrants often had few resources) they needed to be able to walk to the steel mills and meat packing plants shown here. So they often did what they had to do and lived in these slums, which had popped up seemingly overnight in downtown Chicago (or what became downtown Chicago the span of just a couple of decades)

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Slide 7 Park and Burgess – Concentric Zones Model Duration: 00:05:11 Advance mode: Auto

Notes: PARK AND BURGESS As I mentioned just a minute ago, sociologists at the University of Chicago were perfectly poised to watch and study these changes, which is exactly what they did. Two researchers (urban sociologists) by the names of Park and Burgess were really interested in how the city of Chicago would handle all these changes and how this growth would take shape. They wanted to know how cities grow and develop, and they were able to watch it unfold in Chicago over the span of a couple decades. They made some key observations, which shaped the way that we think about urban areas even today. They called their model of city growth the “Concentric Zones” model, and said that cities experienced a kind of “natural” expansion and growth process similar to the way that plants and forests expand (with trees and plants pushing outward for light, soil, and space). They said city growth was similar to this plant ecology growth (which is why this model is called the ecological model). As they watched Chicago grow, they saw that the city grew from the center outward and expanded radially. They saw natural rings or areas of the city develop, which are listed here, starting with the downtown central business district, then the zone of transition, working class, residential, and commuter zones. Generally, the best residential areas were on

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the outskirts of the city in the commuter zone. As you got closer to the industrial center of the city, the housing and social problems like crime got progressively worse and reached their peak in the zone of transition (where most of the new immigrants settled due to the cheap housing). They said that the city grew through a process of invasion and succession, where new residents flooded the zone of transition. Although these areas had a lot of problems, they were often the only option for new immigrants who couldn’t afford to live in other areas. No one wanted to live in the zone of transition or thought it would be a permanent home. It was “transitional” housing. They simply did it to get their feet on the ground in this new world. But as they flooded into this area, it became more crowded and the residents who were already there that could afford to leave did (often in waves based on nationality/ethnicity), and moved to the next zone out, crowding that zone, which pushed others into the zone beyond. It was a chain reaction that pushed people outward further and further in search of better housing, less crowded and less crime ridden conditions, more space, and an escape from the problems of the areas closer to the city center. But the people themselves didn’t just move outward and invade each successive zone. The zones themselves started to push outward and the city itself expanded. As business

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grew, the CBD poured over into the zone of transition (which is partly why it is called a zone of transition… it is transitional because it is partly an industrial area and partly a residential area). And then each of these zones began to expand outward, pushing into the next zone as more and more people flooded into each area and crowded into the limited space of these communities. Park and Burgess saw this model as the natural growth patterns of cities and believed that this was simply how cities developed (again, like natural plant ecology growth). And in many cities in the U.S. today, their picture of the concentric zones still looks pretty accurate, especially in the Northeast and Midwest. In many of these cities you could start in the suburbs and outlying areas, walk toward the city center, and pass through neighborhoods that looked a lot like these zones.

Slide 8 Shaw and McKay Duration: 00:01:25 Advance mode: Auto

Notes: SHAW AND MCKAY Building on the work of Park and Burgess, two other scholars at the University of Chicago were interested in the patterning of social problems across these zones in Chicago, and wanted to know what happened to problems like crime, illness, mental illness, and infant mortality as the city grew and expanded. They mapped these problems using public health, hospital, and arrest records of juvenile

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offenders and found that all of these problems were clustered in the zone of transition, and all of the problems gradually diminished across each of the other residential areas (and were fewest in the commuter zone). On their maps, the zone of transition looked like a pincushion of dots marking arrests and cases of illness and other social problems. All of the social problems they could map were concentrated in the zone of transition.

Slide 9 Shaw and McKay’s Findings Duration: 00:02:26 Advance mode: Auto

Notes: SHAW AND MCKAY’s FINDINGS But the real key observation of their research came when they watched what happened to these patterns over time. The immigration to Chicago and the movement out of the zone of transition often occurred in waves. So the German migrants tended to move in and then move out followed successive waves of Irish, then Polish, then Italian migrants and so on, followed last by an influx of African Americans from the South. At the time, people assumed that there was something about “those immigrant groups” that made them more criminal than native-born Americans. After all, they had very high arrest rates while living in the zone of transition. The names on the arrest records that Shaw and McKay studied had many German, Irish, Polish names, and so on. But Shaw and McKay saw that as these groups moved out of the zone of transition over time, their crime rates dropped.

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Once the German and Irish migrants moved out of zone 2 into better residential and commuter zones, German and Irish names stopped showing up on police reports. Instead it was Polish and Italian names that were on arrest records. But as those groups moved out of the zone of transition, their names stopped showing up on arrest records too. And it wasn’t just crime. All of the other social problems had the same pattern. They stayed in zone 2, even when the residents moved out and other replaced them. It didn’t matter who lived in the zone of transition, they all had major problems when they lived there. And more importantly, as soon as they left, their crime rates and other social problems started to improve. It wasn’t something about “those Irish immigrants” or “those Italian immigrants.” It was something about the place that generated crime and problems for anyone who lived there.

Slide 10 Model of Social Disorganization Duration: 00:03:26 Advance mode: Auto

Notes: MODEL OF SOCIAL DISORGANIZATION So what was it about the zone of transition that made it so crime-prone compared to the other areas of the city? Shaw and McKay said that there were 3 major factors that caused crime and other social problems to flourish in this area. First, they said many of these problems were due to poverty. The residents in the zone of transition had few resources and almost

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nothing besides the wages they were bringing in. They were working long hours and were dirt poor in many cases, which made it really hard to fix problems in the community like crime. You didn’t have resources to fix up the houses, address the health problems in your family or building, or develop social resources or lobby for more help from city hall or law enforcement. Fixing up an area and stopping problems like crime takes time and money, and the resident in the zone of transition had neither. Second, Shaw and McKay saw that zone 2 experienced high levels of residential mobility or population turnover. New residents were constantly pouring into the zone of transition. Likewise, others were constantly moving out. No one planned to stay long in this community. They planned to live there just long enough to get their feet on the ground, save up some money, and leave as soon as they could. There were so many problems in the area that no one wanted to make it a permanent home. They saw it as a temporary landing spot. But when everyone sees it that way and no one stays in the community for long, it is really hard to get to know one another and build the types of relationships you need to build with other people to stop problems like crime. You don’t know if the person going into the house next door is your new neighbor, or someone breaking in to rob them. And if you aren’t planning to stay in the community longer than a few months or years, you may not care to find out. Instead, you just keep your head down and mind your own business. But this

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means that people rarely get to know one another and work together to make life in the community better. Last, Shaw and McKay said that the population heterogeneity in the community contributed to crime. As you probably saw on the maps I showed you a few slides ago, many different groups of immigrants lived in the zone of transition. And they didn’t always see eye to eye. They disagreed about what types of behavior were acceptable in the neighborhood. But even when they did have common goals (like not being a victim of crime) they had a very tough time communicating and achieving these goals because they didn’t even speak the same language. Taken together, Shaw and McKay said these 3 factors (and others have also added family disruption) made communities “socially disorganized” and this disorganization of communities created crime. Furthermore, once crime was established, Shaw and McKay said that it created a type of criminal subculture in the community that had a life of its own. Once crime became an established part of the social fabric of the community, residents got used to it, tolerated it, and kids learned that it was just part of life in these poor neighborhoods (and something you may be pulled into pretty easily).