Abstract
Crime is not equally distributed across communities. Instead, it is concentrated in particular locations, leaving some neighborhoods to suffer from a disproportionate amount of crime while other areas are relatively crime free. Over the past century, American criminologists have developed theories to help explain spatial patterns of crime. In Communities and Crime: An Enduring American Challenge, Pamela Wilcox, Francis T. Cullen, and Ben Feldmeyer provide an intellectual history of the study of communities and crime. The intellectual history includes tracing the development, influences, connections, and nuances of each of the most prominent community-level theories.
The authors organize the book around “images of community” (p. 2) that, they argue, reflect empirical reality as well as also being socially constructed. These images of community “have shaped the development of theory, research, and policy in the area of communities and crime” (p. 2). Chapters Two to Eight each examine one of the seven images of community in criminological thought: as socially disorganized, as a system, as the truly disadvantaged, as a criminal culture, as a broken window, as a criminal opportunity, and as collective efficacy. These chapters will be particularly informative to scholars who are more familiar with crime theories that use the individual as a unit of analysis rather than theories that take the community as the unit of analysis.
The chapters on the community as socially disorganized and the community as truly disadvantaged (Chapters Two and Four) are perhaps the strongest in establishing the connection between the influence of historical context on images of community and how these images shaped research and the development of theory. In Chapter Two, the authors begin the intellectual history of communities and crime in the city of Chicago and the sociology department at the University of Chicago. In the early to mid-1900s, Chicago experienced rapid population growth, with European immigrants accounting for most of the increase. Upon arriving in Chicago, many of the immigrant poor temporarily settled in communities that had overcrowded and dilapidated housing and high rates of poverty and crime rates. In time, many of the immigrants moved to what were commonly referred to as more organized and prosperous neighborhoods. Their participation in criminal activities declined after relocating. The consequences of rapid demographic changes in the city of Chicago influenced scholars at the University of Chicago to correlate crime with disorganized communities rather than associating crime to individual characteristics such as race or ethnicity.
As described in Chapter Four, by the 1970s, urban communities were different than they were when the Chicago School developed the theory of social disorganization to explain why particular communities experienced high rates of crime. Instead of waves of European immigrants temporarily residing in disorganized urban areas before moving to wealthier neighborhoods, a new group settled in these neighborhoods: African Americans. Unlike the European immigrants before them, African Americans’ residence in the inner city was not ephemeral. These changes compelled researchers to think about community and crime differently and to develop new theories to explain spatial patterns of crime. The historical changes occurring in urban communities in the 1970s informed the “truly disadvantaged” perspective, most notably associated with Wilson (1987). The “truly disadvantaged” perspective posits that structural factors such as changes in global and urban economies were responsible for concentrating disadvantage in African American inner-city neighborhoods and decreasing opportunities for mobility.
Significant advances in understanding the effects that communities have in facilitating or reducing criminogenic conditions have occurred over the past century. Despite these advances, there are substantial gaps in our understandings about the relationship between communities and crime. In the concluding chapter, Wilcox, Cullen, and Feldmeyer confront these key issues and forecast future research directions. Scholars acquainted with community-level theories of crime will likely find the most significant contribution of the book in the concluding chapter.
One of the issues addressed in the concluding chapter is the definition and measurement of community. There is currently no consensus about how best to define and measure a community. As a result, measures of community vary from as small as a block to as large as a city. The authors predict that in the future, communities and crime research will move away from debates on how best to define and measure communities to instead embrace the image of the “multicontextual community” (p. 201). The multicontextual approach to community recognizes that community takes various forms.
Second, the authors speculate that the future image of community may change from one that assumes all residents of high-crime neighborhoods engage in criminal activities to one that more accurately concedes that most residents avoid criminal involvement, including those who reside in high-crime neighborhoods. Third, the future image of community may change from one that theorizes that the sources of crime are the same across racial and ethnic groups to an approach that more fully attends to the unique disadvantages that black urban communities experience. Finally, the authors speculate that the future image of the community may expand beyond the urban core to include the suburbs, small towns in rural areas, and communities outside of the United States.
Wilcox, Cullen, and Feldmeyer’s Communities and Crime: An Enduring American Challenge is a comprehensive, detailed, and much-needed book that provides an intellectual history of the study of communities and crime. The book contributes to an understanding of the historical conditions that influence the images of communities, which thereby impacts theories, research, and policies on communities and crime. While the book provides an informative overview of theories on communities and crime, I would have preferred a more robust engagement with current issues community and crime scholars are grappling with than what is contained in the concluding chapter. Nonetheless, the book stands among the best comprehensive studies on the intellectual history of communities and crime.