Causes Of Urban Crime

Crime and fear in urban setting can be vividly seen to be increasing in all cities as it happens in many cities in various parts of the world and it is unavoidable and it is bound to happen in the big scale area where social activities can happen in every corner of the streets. Usually crime is always associated with the behaviour of deviance and delinquency, the feelings that surrounds these types of personalities is mostly fear. This essay will focus on trying to unfold why crime happens and why do people do this when they know it is wrong.

Firstly, the definition of Crime is that, it is a “harmful act or omission against the public which the State wishes to prevent and which, upon conviction, is punishable by fine, imprisonment, and/death”

The researchers were concerned with neighbourhood structure and its connections with the levels of crime that has been done. Chicago School theory researchers such as Clifford Shaw and Henry McKay (1942) where they were focusing with the deleterious effects of racial and ethnic heterogeneity, residential mobility and low socioeconomic status on an area’s ability to get rid of crime from happening. Nevertheless, the work of Shaw and McKay and more researchers that who gain a wide social approach to the study of urban crime have also identified a number of “disorganizing” factors that includes group peers to unhealthy and activities that would later resulting to crime, where according to Sampson and Groves (1989), by using self-reported data based on both criminal offending and criminal victimization, Sampson and Groves construct crime and delinquency rates that were not dependent on the official reaction of the criminal justice system. It also enables the researchers to create and measure both of the social disorganization and crime rates for around 200 local communities and to test directly basic hypothesis derived from Shaw and McKay’s community level of crime and rate of delinquency. Moreover, Sampson and Groves found that was the ability of a community to supervise and control teenage peer groups such as gangs. It has been perfectly

Lewis conducted a study of Puerto Ricans in both Puerto Rico and New York that indicates by being a member of a group that has been poor for generations constitutes to a belonging to a separate culture. The literature on the culture of poverty is a measurement of the vivid gap in communication that existed between the very poor people and the middle class people such as the social workers, teachers, physicians, priests who has the major responsibility for carrying out the antipoverty related programmes. Lewis (1966) also stated that by observation, their behaviours seemed “clearly patterned and reasonably predictable” which leads to shocking discovery of their choice of life ways which is the “inexorable repetitiousness and the iron entrenchment”. The Puerto Ricans that is in a setting of cash economy with wage labour and the production of profit with a persistently high rate of unemployment and underemployment, similarly to Moynihan (1965) where he stated that “work is precisely the one thing the Negro family head in such circumstances has not received over the past generation”. This is due by which the society failed to provide them social,