Location & crime Flashcards
(10 cards)
Shaw and McKay study?
The central area was a ‘zone of transition’. A constantly shifting population. This means that new people arrive, make money and move out to higher income areas.
‘Socially disorganised zone’. An area where there are many ‘broken’ families, violence, and other social problems.
Shaw and McKay claim that these areas have high and increasing crime rates because the population is constantly changing, and in a large and anonymous urban setting there is less social control.
What is Zonal Hypothesis?
Zonal Hypothesis explains crime in three ways:
- Social disorganisation
- Cultural transmission
- Differential association
What is Social disorganisation?
Social disorganisation: High-population turn over prevents stable societies, the normal informal social controls and bonds were weak or not there.
What is Cultural transmission?
Cultural transmission: Delinquent subcultures are created, and a distinct set of values alternative to the mainstream. These criminal values are transmitted by generation.
What Differential association?
Differential association: Sutherland argued that the behaviour of someone is influenced by the behaviours of primary groups around them. If the primary groups engage in normal criminality then they would too.
What is Morris’s Croydon study?
Morris found the highest rates of crime were concentrated on council estates in the Croydon area.
Higher numbers of offenders living in council housing estates rather than city centres (Morris 1957).
Difficult to describe these council estates as socially disorganised – there was more evidence to suggest that they were tightly knit communities, where people knew neighbours quite well and with low levels of population change.
What is the Baldwin and Bottoms 1976 study?
heffield Council created sink estates.
Problem families were housed in certain areas – other types of family refused to take houses there.
Categorised the city into three main areas:
Owner occupied accommodation
Council tenants
Rented accommodation.
They found significant differences between the three areas, with council tenants and rented accommodation found to have the highest crime rates. Labelling and self-fulfilling prophecy take place.
How does the Baldwin & Bottoms study differ from the Shaw & McKay study?
Baldwin and Bottoms concluded there was no evidence for Shaw and McKay’s arguments regarding social disorganisation, and they found no correlation between a high population turnover and crime rates.
What is the Marshall & Johnson 2005 study?
Marshall and Johnson (2005) argued that anxiety and worry about all types of crime is less in rural areas compared to the city.
This is because people living in rural areas see themselves as less likely to be a victim of crime compared to those in urban areas.
However, Marshall and Johnson found that rural areas have a higher risk of burglaries in high income households -> in rural areas the poor rob the rich.
Whereas in urban areas, the low-income households have the highest risk of being burgled -> in urban areas the poor rob the poor.
