The Criminal's Image of the City

105 Pages·1979·5.881 MB·English

by  Ronald L. Carter and Kim Q. Hill (Auth.)

Pergamon Policy Studies on
Crime and Justice
O'Brien & Marcus— Crime and Justice in America
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System
h PERGAMON
POLICY ON CRIME AND JUSTICE
STUDIES
The Criminal's
Image of
the City
Ronald L. Carter
Kim Q. Hill
Pergamon Press
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Copyright © 1979 Pergamon Press Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging In Publication Data
Carter, Ronald L. 1942-
The Criminal's Image of the city.
(Pergamon policy studies)
Includes bibliographies and index.
1. Criminal psychology. 2. Geographical perception.
3. Crime and criminals—United States. I. Hill, Kim
Q.. joint author. II. Title
HV6080.C39 1979 364.3 79-12624
ISBN 0-08-024633-8
All Rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means:
electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying,
recording or otherwise, without permission in writing from the
publishers.
Printed in the United States of America
To
Christopher Harrison Carter
and
Patricia Hurley
plus
those individuals who
bring us spatial patterns
of crime
Preface
Crime has been a problem of major concern since the beginnings of
civilization. The causes of crime are many, and a multiplicity of
scholars and practitioners have concerned themselves with the search
for solutions. Unfortunately, despite the efforts of all concerned,
practically all commonly defined types of crime are still on the increase
in the United States. It is also unfortunate that individual students of
crime tend to pursue solutions along single disciplinary or paradigmatic
paths. This book brings to bear some additional perspectives on the
factors that give rise to crime patterns within cities. It is fair to
characterize this work itself as operating within a single general
perspective, which might be termed a spatial approach, as defined
below. An important motivation for this work was the recognition of the
limitations in single approaches and in customary applications of the
spatial perspective itself.
This book offers what can be seen as a synthesis and reformulation
of several earlier approaches. The basis of this revision is a focus on
criminals' environmental perceptions as influences on their behavior.
Since our work is based to some degree on synthesis and extension, it
does not revolutionize the understanding of criminal behavior patterns.
Instead it redirects and adds to the explanatory power of a very long
research tradition. Our reformulation appears particularly successful in
light of the considerable predictive potency of the empirical analysis of
Chapter 4.
The interdisciplinary thrust of this work reflects the divergent
backgrounds and experiences of the authors - one a geographer and the
other a political scientist. Carter's background in geography reflects a
concern with what that discipline refers to as the spatial perspective.
This perspective attempts to explain human behavior in terms of the
interaction of individuals with their environment. Hill's political science
background, on the other hand, is steeped in concern with public policy.
Both these disciplinary orientations have been instrumental in shaping
the content of this book. Yet the final product is not simply two halves
IX
x Preface
written by two authors and joined tenuously at the middle. Instead, the
book is a synthesis drawing on the concerns of other disciplines as well
as those of the authors; its character is the result of a continual
concern for breadth of focus.
In addition to the preceding thoughts on the intent of this research,
some early caveats are in order. First, it should be noted that we do not
deal with why people choose to be criminals. Although criminogenesis is
itself of considerable interest, it is not the prime concern of this book.
Our work makes the assumption that some people become criminals and
moves toward an explication of their resultant behavior patterns.
Second, this book focuses on a subset of all criminals: conventional
property criminals. We have not attempted to examine the underlying
reasons for the spatial patterning of such violent crimes as homicide,
rape, or assault. Although these latter crimes may themselves have
definite spatial patterns within cities, they tend to be based upon
decision calculi very different from those of property crimes. The
analytic perspective of the present research, focusing on criminals'
images of areas and the resultant effects on their behavior, would not
appear applicable to violent personal crimes. Rather, it is likely that
some other explanatory approach - focusing on social situational factors
- is necessary to account for the occurrence and patterning of personal
crimes.
In the course of this work we have benefited from the assistance of
a number of individuals. First we wish to express our deep gratitude to
our secretary, Gladys Broome, for her countless hours of typing, and
retyping all the drafts of the manuscript. James R. Bohland of the
University of Oklahoma influenced the initial inspiration for this work
and doggedly challenged one of the authors to complete a first
manuscript. Keith Harries of Oklahoma State University also provided
encouragement toward the completion of this book. John Grider, former
Director of the Oklahoma Department of Corrections, unlocked many
doors, both figuratively and literally, to give a geographer access to
criminals when others were asking why in the world a geographer would
wish to know anything about crime. At the University of Houston at
Clear Lake City, Alfred R. Neumann and Louis J. Rodriguez both
provided constant encouragement and critical research resources which
were instrumental in the completion of this project.
Finally, we should note that Chapters 3 and k draw upon, but extend
considerably, our previously published articles on this project:
Carter, R.L. and Hill, K.Q. 1976. The criminal's image of the city and
urban crime patterns. Social Science Quarterly 57: 597-607.
Carter, R.L. and Hill, K.Q. 1978. Criminals' and noncriminals' percep-
tions of urban crime. Criminology 16: 353-372.
Permission from the publishers, Sage Publications and the University of
Texas Press, respectively, to quote from these articles is gratefully
acknowledged.
1
The Study of
Urban Crime
This book is concerned with patterns of crime in urban settings. The
intention is to offer the beginnings of an explanation for why criminals
choose particular targets in the city for their offenses. The conceptual
and empirical analyses focus on conventional property criminals
(burglars, robbers, and larcenists) whose crimes are oriented toward
specific locales more than toward specific individual victims. It is hoped
that research such as this will contribute both to the theoretical
understanding of criminal behavior and to public policy efforts to deal
with it.
The conceptual approach adopted in this book is a rather new one in
the study of crime. This approach probes how individual criminals
perceive their urban environment and how they make criminal behavior
choices in response to those perceptions (Carter and Hill 1979). That is,
an understanding of the perceptual basis upon which criminals choose
certain areas over others in which to commit their offenses is sought.
As indicated above, this approach to understanding crime patterns is
novel. It is also as yet only partially developed, so that the study must
be seen as rather exploratory, lacking as it does an extended body of
prior literature.
A major assumption of this work is that, viewed from this
perspective, criminals are not very different from noncriminals. Both
groups perceive and respond to their environment in terms of particular,
individual motives. As Letkemann (1973, p. 9) has observed, ". . .the
criminal like the tourist, the farmer, or potential resident makes
evaluations on the basis of factors relevant to his interests." Such
environmental evaluations on the part of criminals, and the conse-
quences thereof, are the concerns of this book.
This chapter explores the background for the present study. Briefly
reviewed are conventional approaches to the study of crime patterning
and the limitations of such approaches. The reader is not burdened with
an extended review of all prior literature on urban crime. That task has
been accomplished elsewhere with varying degrees of inclusiveness and
1
2 The Criminal's Image of the City
critical insight. The purpose is simply to indicate the principal
conceptual basis upon which different approaches to understanding
crime proceed.
Historically, the study of criminal behavior has tended to be
compartmentalized according to the academic discipline of the scholar
undertaking the study. While it is generally recognized that the crime
problem transcends the borders of any single traditional academic
discipline, several distinct and sometimes mutually exclusive academic
approaches to the subject may be identified. For example, depending
upon one's fundamental beliefs about crime causation, one might assume
a psychodynamic, a biological, or a sociological perspective. Each
orientation has both classical and modern practitioners.
The psychodynamic approach, which traces its roots primarily from
Sigmund Freud, contends that one is inclined toward a life of crime by
inner urges and motives which derive from one's earlier experiences. In
its purest form psychodynamic theory contends that human behavior,
specifically criminal behavior, is a direct result of a variety of inner
frustrations and fixations. "The criminal commits his crime for two
reasons: he is confronted with an unconscious conflict; and he solves
this conflict by committing an act motivated by an infantile pre-oedipal
pattern which is also unconscious" (Podolsky 1965, p. 3). Another
approach that blends both psychology and biology from a deterministic
position suggests that individuals with certain personalities, physical
features and body types will be more prone to become criminals than
others. The most notable practitioner of this perspective was Caesar
Lombroso. His was the concept of the "born criminal" who was easily
identified by physical peculiarities or mental abnormalities (Radzinovitz
1965, p. 1047).
More devoted biological theorists have pointed to genetic disorders
and other physiological malfunctions as the underlying causes of deviant
human behavior. Consider, for example, the following conjecture:
"Crime might be due to a perversion of the instinctive drives which are
more or less related to deficiencies and unbalances of the endocrine
glands, and certain types of crime might be associated with certain
types of endocrine malfunctioning" (Snyder 1964, p. 23). Contemporary
researchers who contend that different races are superior in intellect to
others exemplify this category. One may also associate the biological
perspective with those researchers engaged in the heredity versus
environment learning theory controversy.(l)
The most widely accepted modern approaches to understanding
crime have arisen, however, out of a sociological perspective. Most
sociologists suggest that man's behavior is largely a product of social
forces and societal interactions and the roles one chooses or becomes
labeled with by society. In the study of deviant behavior one may trace
a continuum of research beginning with the work of Durkheim and
Weber to that of Parsons, Sutherland, Cohen, and Cloward and Olin.
Such notable sociological theories as cultural transmission, differential
association, and differential opportunity have formed the basis of
modern criminology.
The Study of Urban Crime 3
THE ECOLOGICAL APPROACH
Research on urban crime patterns - the subject of this book - has been
dominated by one particular variant of sociological theory, that known
as the social ecology perspective. The ecological approach is character-
ized primarily by the construction of analogies between certain
biological principles and human behavior. The key relationship in the
ecological approach is the interaction of an organism with its
environment and the manner in which this interaction affects both the
organism and the environment. The primary concepts of this approach
are symbiosis, community, natural areas, and invasion and succession -
notions that are distinctly biological.
Scholars working from this perspective have considerably advanced
the understanding of both criminogenesis (why some individuals adopt a
life of crime) and crime patterns (why criminals commit crimes where
they do). There are, nonetheless, some significant limitations on the
adequacy of social ecology explanations for urban crime patterns. In
order to understand those limitations and the impetus for this book, it is
necessary to review the historical development of social ecology
research on crime.
Classical Ecological Analyses
Beginning about 1830, several crime studies appeared which have since
been referred to as cartographic or geographic. These early works,
based upon emerging national crime statistics in England and France,
sought to discover correlations between various crime types and an
area's socioeconomic characteristics. Quite simply, the method was to
construct one map depicting the spatial extent of a certain type of
crime occurrence and another depicting the area's socioeconomic
characteristics, then overlaying the displays. If any of the patterns
coincided, conjectures on causation were offered.
Although these early studies resulted in rather crude correlations,
the patterns that emerged were not much different from those exposed
by present day analyses. One of the first of the cartographic studies was
conducted in France by Guerry (1832). His study, considered innovative
at the time, led to several conclusions. He found, for example, that
crimes against property were usually more prevalent in cities than in
rural areas, with some exceptions. Other area characteristics, such as
literacy and wealth, also tended to have a positive relationship to
property crime rates. Conversely, he found that literate and wealthy
areas had lower rates of crimes against persons.
Another similar study was reported in England 17 years later.
Fletcher (1849), who, like Guerry, was interested in the effect of
education on the crime rate, found that higher levels of education did
not appear to lower the rates of crime against property. His conclusion
was that the higher socioeconomic areas tend to be the collecting
grounds for criminals, while the lower socioeconomic areas tend to be
the breeding grounds. With the exception of white collar crime, in which
4 The Criminal's Image of the City
the inverse is true, this conclusion remains largely unchallenged.
Many other works of the cartographic criminologists might be
discussed (for a more comprehensive treatment see Phillips, 1972). With
some small variations, however, most early cartographic criminologists
reached essentially the same conclusions as discussed above. The most
important observation about these and other studies such as those by
Rawson (1839), Quetelet (1842), Glyde (1856), and May hew (1862) is that
the patterns that they discovered are consistent with those present in
various urban areas of the world. This correlation continues to intrigue
the imaginations of criminological and geographical scholars. As shall
be shown, later studies in this area have simply attempted to refine the
relationships that were discovered very early. In this respect, contem-
porary ecological studies are distinguished from early analyses only in
their more rigorous statistical methods.
Modern Ecological Sociology
The studies discussed above were primarily descriptive in nature and
produced only crude explanations. Building upon this early foundation
and injecting a large amount of ecological theory, Shaw and McKay
(1929, 1942) offered the first major refinement in their work, Juvenile
Delinquiency and Urban Areas. Shaw and McKay were associated with
the so-called "Chicago School" of sociology, along with the noted human
ecologists Park, Burgess, and McKinzey. The ecological perspective on
urban sociology, as developed by the Chicago School, views human
behavior as a normative response to social forces such as population
densities, neighborhood and housing characteristics, and ethnic groups
present in the urban milieu. As indicated earlier, certain biological
processes underlie this contention. Although Shaw and McKay noted
that they were not fully committed to human ecology, their work
remains the classical ecological study of one city's urban crime.
In their analysis of juvenile delinquency in Chicago, Shaw and McKay
(1942) adopted the "concentric zone" model of urban form postulated by
Park, Burgess, and McKinzey (1925) to explain a variety of urban social
processes and their interaction with the urban environment. Park,
Burgess, and McKinzey's original model, presumed to be applicable to
many early twentieth century eastern and midwestern American cities,
is widely discussed in traditional texts.
Shaw and McKay analyzed the areas of residence on samples of
juvenile delinquents in Chicago. In summary form, their major findings
were that:
1. Rates of delinquency vary widely in different neighborhoods of a
city.
2. The highest delinquency rates generally occur in the low-rent
areas located near the center of the city; and the rates decrease
with increasing distance from the city's center.
3. High delinquency areas tend to maintain high rates over time,
even though the population composition of the area may change
radically within the same time period.