Week 10 Lecture Overview

This week we will focus on the Chicago School of Criminology. This theoretical branch focuses on understanding how neighborhood-level variables are connected to crime rates. We will review the work of Burgess and Park and their concentric zones map, as well as the seminal work of Shaw and McKay. We will also review more contemporary approaches to studying social disorganization.

Learning Objectives

By the end of this week, you will be able to:

• Describe how the model presented by Chicago theorists explains the development of cities and the causes of crime in varying regions of a city.
• Discuss Shaw and McKay’s theory of social disorganization.
• Evaluate policies that have come from the Chicago/social-disorganization theories of crime.

Workflow

Reading

Chapter 4 in Tierney, John. Key Perspectives in Criminology, McGraw-Hill Education, 2009. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/bmcc/detail.action?docID=480635.

Get the chapter here.

Key_Perspectives_in_Criminology_-_4_Chicago_School

Videos

A longer documentary on one of the largest housing projects in the U.S. – The Pruitt-Igoe Project (use BMCC email credentials to sign up for this free video service): https://bmcccuny.kanopy.com/video/pruitt-igoe-myth-0

Discussion Forum

Discussion Forum 10: How Can We Organize Neighborhoods?

PowerPoint