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10.6: Social Ecology and Concentrated Disadvantage

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    324938
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    The social ecology approach to crime emphasizes how neighborhood characteristics influence crime rates and encounters with the criminal legal system. Research in this tradition has consistently demonstrated that communities with high levels of concentrated disadvantage—marked by poverty, unemployment, single-parent households, and population turnover—experience higher rates of violence and other street crimes (Ulmer et al. 2012) Due to historical and ongoing residential segregation, communities of color, particularly African American neighborhoods, are disproportionately likely to exhibit these characteristics.

    Sociologists Robert Sampson and Byron Groves found that poverty, ethnic heterogeneity, and family disruption strongly correlate with social disorganization—the weakened social bonds and institutional resources that ordinarily facilitate informal social control. Their research indicates that racial disparities in crime are largely explained by differential exposure to these ecological conditions rather than by race itself. However, this structural explanation must be balanced with recognition of how law enforcement practices intensify surveillance in disadvantaged communities of color, creating a feedback loop where higher policing leads to more arrests, reinforcing perceptions of criminality.


    10.6: Social Ecology and Concentrated Disadvantage is shared under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by LibreTexts.