Social Disorganization Theory - Robert J. Sampson

Robert J. Sampson

Sampson (1993) claims that any theory of crime must begin with the fact that most violent criminals belonged to teenage peer-groups, particularly street gangs, and that a gang member will become a full-time criminal if social controls are insufficient to address delinquent behaviour at an early age. He follows Shaw and McKay (1969) in accepting that if the family and relatives offer inadequate supervision or incomplete socialisation, children from broken families are more likely to join violent gangs unless others take the parents' place. But, even children from unstable families are less likely to be influenced by peer groups in a community where most family units are intact. Tight-knit communities are more likely to identify strangers, report deviants to their parents, and pass warnings along. High rates of residential mobility and high-rise housing disrupt the ability to establish and maintain social ties. Formal organizations like schools, church, and the police act as surrogates for family and friends in many communities, but poor, unstable communities often lack the organisation and political connections to obtain resources for fighting crime and offering young people an alternative to deviant behaviour. Sampson concludes that "the empirical data suggest that the structural elements of social disorganisation have relevance for explaining macro level variations in violence." Social disorganisation may also produce crime by isolating communities from the mainstream culture. Sampson and Wilson (1995) proposed a theory of race and urban inequality to explain the disproportionate representation of African Americans as victims and offenders in violent crime. The basic idea proposed was that community-level patterns of racial inequality give rise to the social isolation and ecological concentration of the truly disadvantaged, which in turn leads to structural barriers and cultural adaptations that undermine social organisation and ultimately the control of crime. Sampson and Wilson (1995) pursued this logic to argue that the community-level causes of violence are the same for both whites and blacks, but that racial segregation by community differentially exposes members of minority groups to key violence-inducing and violence-protecting social mechanisms, thereby explaining black-white disparities in violence. Their thesis has come to be known as "racial invariance" in the fundamental causes of crime.