The Chicago School - an Evaluation

Evaluation

The Chicago School greatly helped to change the perspective of criminality. Before, the majority were individual-type explanations that could 'lay the blame'. However, the Chicago School focused on the social disorganisation of cities. They thought that this had an impact on high crime levels. The social disorganisation theory can also show the prevalence of high crime rate areas, especially in urban cities. Also, in the CS, they used a variety of quantitative and qualitative methods in order to gain information. Shaw and McKay, two theorists, used quantitative methods in order to assess the validation of high crimes rates in Zone 2. These findings supported the theory, and the court referral data is a reliable source, so this adds validation to the theory. However, there are always drawbacks to the theory. The first is that individual explanations were largely ignored in the theory. This therefore rejects any biological, psychological or mental illness and cognitive processes causes behind crimes. This is a big factor of criminality that has been ignored when it can actually provide lots of helpful insight as to why people commit crimes. Also, there is a tautology factor of the theory that is a drawback. For example, it is argued that crime is caused by social disorganisation, which in turn, causes crime. This argument goes round in circles and is not clear where it started, which suggests that the theory cannot properly explain crime. There is also an element of ecological fallacy, where the theory tries to explain individual-level references from group level data. This runs the risk of assumptions and predictions being made, which reduces the reliability and support for the results found by the theory. There is also an issue with qualitative methods used by the theory. They often include self-report methods which are unreliable and not replicable. This makes the findings of such methods not valid or accurate, therefore making the theory the same. Lastly, the theory cannot be applied to other settings, such as other countries or countrysides. This makes the findings of the theory not generalisable, which does not support the theory as it can only be applied to one major city (Chicago) and cannot be applied to the rest. This does not make the theory universal, and therefore, not a valid theory to apply to many other settings.