Communities and Crime : An Enduring American Challenge

Social scientists have long argued over the links between crime and place. The authors of Communities and Crime provide an intellectual history that traces how varying images of community have evolved over time and influenced criminological thinking and criminal justice policy.

The authors outline the major ideas that have shaped the development of theory, research, and policy in the area of communities and crime. Each chapter examines the problem of the community through a defining critical or theoretical lens: the community as social disorganization; as a system of associations; as a symptom of larger structural forces; as a result of criminal subcultures; as a broken window; as crime opportunity; and as a site of resilience.

Focusing on these changing images of community, the empirical adequacy of these images, and how they have resulted in concrete programs to reduce crime, Communities and Crime theorizes about and reflects upon why some neighborhoods produce so much crime. The result is a tour of the dominant theories of place in social science today.

Pamela Wilcox is Professor of Criminal Justice and Fellow of the Graduate School at University of Cincinnati. She is the co-author of Criminal Circumstance: A Dynamic Multicontextual Criminal Opportunity Theory and co-editor of Challenging Criminological Theory: The Legacy of Ruth Rosner Kornhauser.  Francis T. Cullen is Distinguished Research Professor Emeritus and Senior Research Associate in the School of Criminal Justice at the University of Cincinnati. He is co-author of Criminological Theory: Context and Consequences and co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Criminological Theory.   Ben Feldmeyer is an Associate Professor in the School of Criminal Justice at the University of Cincinnati.​