Social Behavior Analysis

There are five aspects of urban neighborhoods. These aspects characterize areas of high deviance within cities. To my knowledge, no member of the Chicago school ever listed this particular set, but these concepts permeate their whole literature starting with Park, Burgess, and McKenzie's classic. The City (1925), And they are especially prominent in the empirical work of the Chicago school (Faris and Dunham, 1939; Shaw and McKay, 1942), Indeed, most of these factors were prominent in the work of 19th-century moral statisticians such as the Englishmen Mayhew and Buchanan, who were doing ecological sociology decades before any member of the Chicago school was born. These essential factors are (1) density; (2) poverty; (3) mixed use;

(4) transience;

However, in addition to these characteristics of places, the theory also will incorporate some spe- cific impacts of the five on the moral order as people respond to them. Four responses will be assessed: (1) moral cynicism among residents; (2) increased opportunities for crime and deviance; (3) increased motivation to deviate; and (4) diminished social control.

Finally, the theory will sketch how these responses further amplify the vol- ume of deviance through the following consequences: (1) by attracting devi- ant and crime-prone people and deviant and criminal activities to a neighborhood; (2) by driving out the least deviant; and (3) by further reduc- tions in social control.

The remainder of the paper weaves these elements into a set of integrated propositions, clarifying and documenting each as it proceeds. Citations will not be limited to recent work, or even to that of the old Chicago school, but will include samples of the massive 19th-century literature produced by the moral statisticians. The aim is to help contemporary students of crime and deviance rediscover the past and to note the power and realism of its meth- ods, data, and analysis. In Mayhew's (1851) immense volumes, for example, he combines lengthy, first-person narratives of professional criminals with a blizzard of superb statistics on crime and

Of course not. For one thing, as Gans (1962), Suttles (1968), and others have recognized, bonds among human beings can endure amazing levels of stress and thus continue to sustain com- mitment to the moral order even in the slums. Indeed, the larger culture seems able to instill high levels of aspiration in people even in the worst eco- logical settings. However, the fact that most slum residents aren't criminals is beside the point to claims by human ecologists that aspects of neighbor- hood structure can sustain high rates of crime and deviance. Such proposi- tions do not imply that residence in such a neighborhood is either a necessary or a sufficient condition for deviant behavior. There is conformity in the slums and deviance in affluent suburbs. All the ecological propositions imply is a substantial correlation between variations in neighborhood character and variations in crime and deviance rates. What an eclogical theory of crime is meant to achieve is an explanation of why crime and deviance are so