Concentrated disadvantage, residential instability and weak local networks reduce informal social control and thereby raise some forms of crime.
Shaw and McKay found in 1942 that Chicago's high-delinquency areas stayed high across decades while their ethnic composition changed completely, which pointed at the place rather than the people. The mechanism proposed was the neighbourhood's reduced capacity to supervise its own young, and the finding survived the succession of populations through it.
In practice
- A block whose tenancies turn over every eight months has neighbours who cannot recognise a stranger.
- An estate where the same families have lived for thirty years has informal supervision no policing budget could buy.
- Possible explanations
- The explanation is informal control: where residents change frequently and networks are thin, adults do not intervene in minor trouble, and the absence of that supervision permits more of it.
- In its favour
- Shaw and McKay's finding that high-delinquency areas stayed high while their populations changed completely still holds, and later work on collective efficacy gives the mechanism a measurable form.
- Against it
- Critics argue that neighbourhoods described as disorganised are often differently organised, and that inferring individual behaviour from area-level rates is a standard error.
- Standing
- Criticised for treating neighbourhoods as disorganised when they may be differently organised, and for inferring individual processes from area-level data. Collective efficacy is the modern successor.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Law & Politics
- Essay
- Competing accounts of how power works