The Chicago School
- Created by: EmilyEther
- Created on: 06-01-20 18:18
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- The Chicago School (part 1)
- Background
- Cities seen as the cause of crime (something to do with the urban environment - more people in these areas)
- Rapid growth of Chicago - around 2.5 million more people in 100 years - industrial reasons
- Mixed population - people from Europe due to famines, south of US (former slaves). Mostly these poorer people lived in Zone 2
- Housing was very poor in the slum areas as it could not be build with the rate of the growing population
- Crime as a social problem, not due to individual / moral / irrational reasons
- Society as an ecological system
- Robert Park: believed that you should see the conditions of the thing(s) that you are studying
- Principles of ecology:
- City as a super-organism that has sub-parts that are all inter-related and connected
- Anomie and Strain: functionalism: integrated parts of a society make up a whole
- Places where people live / work / travel all come together as a super-organism
- Each area plays a role in the city as a whole - all parts are 'symbiotic relationships' (all dependent on each other)
- City as a super-organism that has sub-parts that are all inter-related and connected
- Human ecology:
- Study city life to identify social processes and how they impact human behaviour
- Classical School - studied how the social contract affected human behaviour
- Everything has a function - need to work out how they relate and impact on one another
- Study city life to identify social processes and how they impact human behaviour
- Robert Burgess' Zonal Theory
- 5 zones of each city (Chicago as an eg) that have their own characteristics that are developing with the city urbanisation
- Zone 1, The Loop / Central Business District
- Low pop, high property values - not a lot of people there as it was difficult to afford houses
- Many transport resources, Chicago is near a harbour (trade)
- Less street crime, more corporal crime (White Collar Crime)
- Zone 2, the Zone in Transition
- Not settled due to social disorganisation - any disturbance, disruption, conflict or lack of consensus within a social group or society which affects established social habits of behaviour, social institutions or social controls
- Sutherland - said the social organisation of groups has got to do with a crime
- Not 'high standard' - high disease rates, poor sanitation, high poverty rates, run-down housing, lots of crime
- Not a strong sense of community - high turnover of people in the area - get out asap
- Most newcomers come here first (cheapest, communication is difficult)
- Some labourers lived here - low travel costs to get to Zone 1
- Low commitment to the area - people earn money to try to move out
- Social Control: Containment theory - social pulls (the environment of Z2) keeping you away from good behav
- Conflict theories: capitalism degrades the poor. Those in Z2 have bad housing etc - this degrades them and leads them to criminality. Gov don't want to spend money on better housing which would arguably help their situation - they want to make a profit instead
- Not settled due to social disorganisation - any disturbance, disruption, conflict or lack of consensus within a social group or society which affects established social habits of behaviour, social institutions or social controls
- Zone 3, Working Class, Working Men's, Zone
- Better housing and higher living costs - nicer to live there
- Adequate housing - there was heating and a lot better sanitation
- Zone 4, middle class, the Residential Zone
- Higher incomes, bigger houses, smaller fams (fewer children)
- Have better children so they can give them more - better education
- Zone 5, the Communter Zone
- Economic prosperity and stability - settled people live here
- People who live here may work in the Loop and could afford to travel
- Far away from the business of the city and Zone 2
- More property based crimes (tech and expensive things) but low crime rates
- Shaw & McKay’s theory of juvenile delinquency
- Used juvenile court data to see if it applied (CJS data)
- Crime rates correspond to the zones (highest = Z2, lowest = Z5)
- People moving out of Z2 did not bring crime with them - crime to do with the area, not the people (social disorganisation in Z2)
- Social disorganisation promote crime - children left to their own devices and surrounded by people with pro-crime values
- Labelling and Stigmatisation: radical non-intervention: we must not intervene with criminality in Z2 to ensure that it does not become a master status and then is taken with them into other zones
- Cultural transmission of values: del behav is transmitted down through successive generations of boys
- Sutherland - DA - favourable message to violate the law
- Subculture theory - studied how the transmission of values caused delinquency
- New methods in studying crime
- Quantitative methods
- Positivism - believed in empirical studies
- Stats - mapped out where crime is committed and where criminals live (Shaw and McKay)
- Qualitative methods
- PP-observation - enter the world of the deviant
- Delinquents interviewed
- Looking at fewer people in greater depth
- Quantitative methods
- Criticisms of the Chicago School
- Tautology (arguing in circles) crime is caused by S.D which is turn is caused by crime - what comes first?
- Ecological fallacy: individual level inferences from group-level data (assumptions and predictions)
- Not everyone in Z2 will be criminal
- How to obtain reliable data of S.D? - probs with self-report methods (Shaw and McKay)
- Legacy of the Chiago School
- Changed perspectives - about SD not individual reasons
- Impact on criminology - where people live and who they socialise with shouldn't be ignored
- 'Cure' society, not the individual (do something about the area, not the person)
- If there is a sense of community. there will more control in the area (eg. sports parks, education centres)
- Standards of homes improve - general better health of the pop
- Background
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