EXPLAINING THE CONTEXTS OF CRIME

THE PATTERNS AND PERSISTENCE OF CRIME

Criminal behavior is best understood as a social product that occurs in a patterned fashion, rarely fluctuating wildly from time to time or place to place. This observation was first made 170 years ago by Quetelet (1984). We believe that this enduring pattern occurs because the underlying factors that increase or decrease the risk of crime are not quick to change and exert fairly consistent effects on the appearance, distribution, and persistence of crime by attracting illegal behavior. However, although this pattern appears to be fairly regular, if not chronic, over time at the aggregate level, there are many factors that contribute on the micro level to the ever-changing landscape of crime incidents. Of interest to us here are how these factors may combine to encourage crime to start, how they affect the momentum of crime events over time, and how they can be manipulated to make crime stop.

The ideas that were developed and discussed by Quetelet and others about the origins and persistence of crime took on new urgency with the massive growth of American cities at the turn of the twentieth century, due to large waves of immigrants who began to flow into the United States and other Western countries. These migrants brought about changes in urban areas that caught the attention of researchers who were concerned about the negative impact that this rapid growth was having on communities. The consequences for urban planning, social reform, and economic transactions were transformative. Accompanying these changes were new concerns about crime and delinquency. In the heady days of urban research that ensued, Clifford Shaw and Henry McKay began to map urban areas and emphasized contextual factors related to delinquency. Shaw and McKay (1969) used this contextual mapping approach to document the areas in which crime had persisted over time.

Human ecologists (Park, McKenzie, & Burgess, 1925) talked about "natural areas," a term that appeared in studies of delinquency in Chicago in the early twentieth century. Natural areas, according to these researchers, were settings that had certain characteristics that led to predictable behavioral outcomes. Shaw and McKay reported through methodical observation that "natural areas" in Chicago appeared constant over time. They plotted delinquency incidents in Chicago over many decades and found that they concentrated in "transitional" zones. In addition, they reported that crime declined as one moved from the inner-city areas to the (outer) suburbs. A key observation from their research was that community characteristics and problems (for example, cultural conflict, gang behavior, conflict with families) stayed the same despite the changing attributes of the inhabitants (Hatt, 1946). As people came from and went into these areas, the social disorder and delinquency remained high, despite changes in the ethnic composition of inhabitants. Oddly, despite the importance of Shaw and McKay's finding that community characteristics matter for delinquency and its reduction and prevention, they overlooked it in their prescriptions for addressing the delinquency problems that interested them. They suggested instead that the behavior of people in these areas defined their qualities despite the physical characteristics that these areas exhibited. As Snodgrass points out:

To interpret their findings, Shaw and McKay relied most heavily upon the general concept of "social disorganization," the breakdown of social controls in the "communities" located in the transitional zone. The invasion by business and industries from the center of the city into the former residential areas created a wake of social disorganization in its advance which disturbed social cohesion and disrupted traditional conduct norms. Shaw and McKay explicitly and repeatedly mentioned industrial invasion as a primary source of communal disorganisation, although other sources, e.g. the influx of successive waves of highly mobile immigrant groups, were additional contributing factors, though not unrelated to business expansion. (Snodgrass, 1976, p. 9)

Their emphasis on social disorganization made sense to Shaw and McKay as social activists who believed that the causes of delinquency resided within the local traditions and cultural values of the inhabitants, even though, again, they were quick to point out that as different groups passed through these areas (particularly the zone of transition), the problems of delinquency and social disorder persisted. In other words, the factors that stayed consistent in these areas, that is, businesses and other physical features, were treated as tangential to the ways in which delinquency emerged and areas deteriorated.

As Snodgrass further points out:

A most striking aspect of Shaw and McKay's interpretation, then, is the absence of attempts to link business and industrial invasion with the causes of delinquency. The interpretation stayed at the communal level and turned inward to find the causes of delinquency in internal conditions and process within the socially disorganized area. Thus, their interpretation stopped abruptly at the point at which the relationship between industrial expansion and high delinquency areas could have gone beyond the depiction of the two as coincidentally adjacent to one another geographically. (p. 10)

In fact, Shaw and McKay did not see proximity to industry and commerce as causal but rather simply as an index of the areas where delinquency would be located. This failure to account for the effects of community characteristics, or environmental features, in attracting illegal behavior and spurring crime is surprising, given their huge effort in identifying spatial patterns of delinquency through mapping incidents, a project that went on for over 40 years.

Bursik (1988) points out that stability in ecological influence stayed constant before World War II in Chicago but changed thereafter, thus affording the opportunity to compare how these ecological factors influenced criminal behavior. In addition, generalizing the influence of environmental factors to the experience in other cities was hard to achieve and led to criticisms that Shaw and McKay's approach was not replicable (p. 526). But the observation that environmental factors can influence the nature of places is important and should not be lost in the disappointment concerning the inability to replicate Shaw and McKay's findings within Chicago over time or in another city in a predictable fashion. The external validity problem appears to originate not from the conceptualization of the importance of environment but from the limitations in the methodology used to measure its effects. It also derives from a fixation on the actors in crime...