Chicago School Flashcards
Influences
Durkheim’s macro approach - crime as influenced by social environment; anomie as breakdown of social rules
Mead - meanings as formed by interpersonal interactions
George Herbert Mead
Symbolic interactionism
Emergence of Chicago School
1920s America - immigration, industrialisation, urbanisation, massive population growth
Emphasises…
Place and environment as source of crime - social disorganisation
Crime as reponse to social conditions
Appreciative criminology
Seeks to understand from POV of person experiencing it
Two strands
1) social and human ecology of areas
2) cultural transmission
Park (1921)
Cities arranged in naturally occurring, not planned, patterns
Behaviour must be understood in terms of city interactions
Parkes and Burgess
5 city zones, including ‘zone of transition’
Shaw and McKay
Deviant behaviour is learned and transmitted through generations by social contact (family and peers)
Crime occurs where there is social/economic/cultural deprivation - systematic problem resulting from deprivation caused by social disorganisation
Park
Crime is reaction of normal people to abnormal social conditions
Process of social disorganisation
1) rapid change
2) breakdown in social control
3) development of delinquent areas - geographically rooted, transmitted through interactions
Sutherland (1947)
Differential association
Crime as a learned behaviour; techniques, rationalisations, and attitudes
Social plurality and cultural conflict may cause crime - cultrual relativity
Sees social world of the delinquent as organised and meaningful, even if not conventional
