Crime is often concentrated in geographic locales such as neighborhoods. Crime rates in neighborhoods tend to be consistent over time, yet rates can vary greatly between neighborhoods. Factors at the neighborhood level such as poverty, racial makeup, single-parent households, and residential mobility rates are often correlated with crime and criminal activity. Crime and criminal behavior is commonly associated with individual-level factors such as age, gender, substance use, and antisocial traits. However, neighborhood-level factors are equally important in understanding crime rates in geographic areas. By including neighborhood-level factors in crime analyses, researchers can understand the structural factors that may impact individual-level factors and contribute to overall crime. This perspective provides alternative solutions for reducing crime rather than only arrest and incarceration for individual offenders. This entry discusses formal and informal social control, social disorganization theory, collective efficacy, coercive mobility, broken windows theory, deviant culture, and racial and economic segregation as they relate to neighborhood and crime. This entry ends with a brief discussion of the methodological challenges in studying the association between neighborhood and crime.
Formal and Informal Social Control
Social control is how societies, organizations, neighborhoods, or any kind of group ensures that its members follow established norms and rules and behave in an ordered way. Formal social control is enacted by police officers, courts, and other social actors, like child welfare workers, who formally sanction individuals for violating laws. Sanctions take the form of counseling or educational classes, probation, or incarceration. Informal social control is enacted by group members to admonish, chastise, or otherwise address the behaviors of other group members whose actions violate group norms, expectations, or laws. Examples of informal social control include a teacher reprimanding students for not waiting for their turn or not raising their hand before speaking, a neighbor admonishing teens for loitering on the street corner, and a minister counseling a parishioner. This informal social control creates expectations and norms for behavior through both disseminations of information and active intervention in addressing behavior that falls outside of expected norms. When informal social control breaks down, norm violations and unlawful activity occur. Most explanations for why neighborhoods and crime are associated are concerned with the breakdown of informal social control at the neighborhood level.
Social Disorganization Theory
Social disorganization theory posits that residential instability, low socioeconomic status, and ethnic–racial heterogeneity in a neighborhood represent social disorganization, which contributes to a lack of communication and shared values in its residents, leading to an inability to address problems in the community. This social disorganization allows crime and delinquency to flourish in these neighborhoods. Residential instability is the movement in and out of neighborhoods, and ethnic–racial heterogeneity is the diversity of race or ethnicity in a neighborhood; these factors can lead to a loss of communication and shared values among neighbors, resulting in social disorganization. This ecological theory arose from observations that juvenile delinquency persisted in some neighborhoods despite changes in the racial and ethnic composition of the neighborhood over time.
Later theories of social disorganization introduced the idea of social control as the mediating factor between social disorganization and crime. In this model, friendship networks, participation in local organizations, and unsupervised peer groups represent the amount of social control in a neighborhood and contribute directly to crime. Additional structural factors such as urbanization and family disruption were added to the previous structural factors of residential instability, socioeconomic status, and racial–ethnic heterogeneity as constructs of social disorganization. This social disorganization contributes to weak social networks, low participation in local organizations and institutions, and unsupervised teens, which in turn leads to crime.
Extensions of social disorganization theory have included concepts such as social ties, social capital, formal social control, culture, and urban political economy as possible important components of social disorganization. Overall, there has been mixed empirical support for these additions to the theory.
Collective Efficacy
Building on social disorganization theory is collective efficacy, which is the ability for neighborhoods to engage in purposeful action to address deviance and crime. This is enacted not only through informal social control on its residents, especially juveniles, but also through community mobilization around issues of safety. This sense of collective efficacy is established through the formation of social cohesion and trust, which is supported by social networks and social support established between residents. Residents do not have to maintain close social ties, but more importantly there is shared belief that others share the same values, are willing to help each other, and can be trusted. For example, residents who believe that fellow residents will enact informal social control to curtail delinquent behavior among teens or fight for services for the neighborhood have higher rates of collective efficacy. Neighborhoods with high collective efficacy are able to overcome components of social disorganization such as concentrated disadvantage and residential instability in controlling crime.
Coercive Mobility
Another extension of social disorganization theory considers the impact of formal social control, incarceration rates, and corresponding release rates from jail and prison back into a community on neighborhood crime. The removal of individuals in the neighborhood due to incarceration and their return to the community upon release is called coercive mobility. Coercive mobility is another type of residential instability that is the direct result of formal social control in the form of public safety policies, mainly incarceration. This adds to the overall residential instability in a neighborhood that can further erode informal social control as neighbors feel isolated from each other, social integration is low between newcomers and stayers, and a sense of commitment to the neighborhood is undermined by a feeling of impermanence.
While removing individuals who are committing crimes from a neighborhood should improve the neighborhood through removal of the unsafe element and improving social cohesion among those not offending, there may be a point when the gains from more incarceration are negated by the effects of coercive mobility, especially when individuals removed from a neighborhood due to incarceration tend to return to the same neighborhood upon release. Furthermore, as incarceration rates tend to be highly concentrated within certain neighborhoods, the effects of coercive mobility may be felt more acutely in these neighborhoods. For example, in neighborhoods with high formal control, the belief in informal control as a means to deter crime may be undermined. In turn, the erosion of informal social control can lead to more crime.
Broken Windows
Broken windows theory links urban decay and minor forms of public disorder with crime and criminal activity. Visibly noticed phenomena such as graffiti, abandoned properties, and litter serve as signs that residents are unresponsive to low levels of rule-breaking. The belief is that this permissiveness toward low-level disorder leads to more serious criminal offending. In an attempt to prevent more serious offending, formal social control takes the place of informal social control in that police officers spend much time and energy attending to low-level behaviors like trespassing, loitering, graffiti, and minor drug possession. The logic is that engaging in swift and certain punishment for low-level offenses through arrests helps to prevent more serious offending.
Deviant Culture
Deviant culture stems from the belief that deviance is a learned behavior and individuals, especially teens, engage in deviant behavior through exposure to antisocial attitudes, values, and norms. Deviance and antisocial attitudes are culturally transmitted through exposure to others who engage in these behaviors and possess these attitudes. There are two major explanations for deviant culture: cultural heterogeneity and cultural attenuation. Cultural heterogeneity is when youth are exposed to both prosocial and antisocial behaviors and attitudes within a community. This dual exposure is more likely to happen in neighborhoods with concentrated disadvantage, whereas youth in middle-class neighborhoods are not exposed to the antisocial perspective. Cultural attenuation occurs in disadvantaged neighborhoods with high social isolation where a subculture of violence may seem more of the norm. This orientation attenuates the neighborhood normative values that results in the inability of the community to execute informal social control and contributes to social disorganization.
Racial and Economic Segregation
Crime rates differ greatly in neighborhoods within the same city. On a surface level, these differences can be attributed to the racial makeups of the neighborhoods, with Black communities experiencing the highest crime rates and White n eighborhoods experiencing the lowest crime rates. However, this explanation ignores other important factors contributing to neighborhood racial differences in crime. Theories highlight the ways U.S. society is structured around race, with the dominant group acquiring and maintaining privileged positions, and the reproduction of these hierarchies throughout the major institutions in the United States such as schools, labor market, criminal justice, and health care contributes to social and economic disadvantage within the nondominant groups. One prime example of this is residential segregation in which years of policies that privileged Whites in the housing market produced practices such as redlining, real estate blockbusting, and predatory housing loans that have resulted in extreme racial residential segregation. This residential segregation along with society’s structures results in the racial–spatial divide in which racial and ethnic minorities live in inner-city disadvantaged neighborhoods and have the worst prospects for educational and employment opportunities. These practices have led to neighborhoods organized by race with neighborhoods of color experiencing more disadvantages, leading to more crime. However, higher crime rates in these neighborhoods may also be the result of location of the neighborhood itself, with higher crime neighborhoods embedded in disadvantaged areas, which also experience structural disadvantage. Conversely, White neighborhoods experience low internal disadvantage and are likely to be embedded in a context of other advantaged neighborhoods, amplifying the effects of residential segregation.
Methodological Challenges
There are many methodological challenges in studying neighborhood and crime. Neighborhoods can be defined in many different ways, even by individuals living in the same geographic locations. Researchers have used census block designations or other administrative agency boundaries in defining neighborhoods, but this can be problematic as these boundaries may not correspond with how individuals within neighborhoods use and perceive them. In addition, there are similar problems with how other concepts are defined and measured. There have been inconsistencies in the operational definitions of important constructs, making comparisons across studies difficult.
Another methodological challenge for studying neighborhoods is potential selection bias, that individuals prone to criminal activity select to live in certain neighborhoods and it is the individuals, not the neighborhood effects, who contribute to crime.
Finally, testing the theories of neighborhood and crime, like social disorganization theory, has always been a methodological challenge as the theory was first developed before there was the ability to accurately analyze multilevel phenomena. While research methodologies have advanced, there are still many challenges in unraveling exactly how social disorganization impacts crime.
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