Social Organization and Crime in Small Wisconsin Communities

ESEARCH into the causes of crime has dealt with twomajor subjects, viz., the individual criminal and the environmental factors conducive to crime. The broad frame of reference including both subjects makes generalization impossible and leads to the disparagement of causal analyses. The study and prediction of individual behavior (including criminal behavior) involves consideration of all geographical, biological, psychological, and sociological data. In criminology, this is the professional field which may be called criminal therapy. What might be called the sociology of crime concerns the social factors that affect the incidence of crime, holding constant, in effect, the individual differences of criminals and all nonsocial factors. As Michael and Adler contend,' the confusion of these two frames of reference has hampered the development of criminology. The project presented here is oriented toward the second of these approaches. Community Crime Rates. The incidence of crime must be expressed as rates the use of which necessitates the designation of population bases. Since Shaw's studies of delinquency areas, many ecological surveys of crime and perhaps as many criticisms of this approach2 have been made. The following three points summarize the suggested limitations to the use of areal rates: (i) rates are not comparable because the definitions of inclusion and exclusion of cases are not precise; (2) many of the areas used are not independent units and therefore the meaning of the rates is doubtful; (3) the areas are not homogeneous units and again the significance of the rates is distorted. Not only is the logic of these statements sound, but rates open to such limitations make untrustworthy their statistical manipulation. The writer contends that the use of relatively isolated local communities (villages and cities of not much over 2000) as units of investigation largely overcomes the second and third points above. At the same time, however, the first criticism becomes more pointed because one is dealing with different administrative units and a common definition of inclusion is more difficult. This difficulty is not insurmountable. The use of communities within a single state gives a common legal definition of crime. The present study made this limitation and there seems to be no reason why communities of many states could not be used since their laws are not very different. In this case, it probably would be more desirable to limit a study to specific crimes whose definitions are similar

Criminology · Political science · Social organization · Social science · Sociology · Crime Patterns and Interventions · Ecology and Vegetation Dynamics Studies · Wildlife Conservation and Criminology Analyses

• Community Context and Theories of Deviant Behavior

  Open Access•Marvin D Krohn, Lonn Lanza-Kaduce et al.•Sociological Quarterly•1984

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