Crime and Community: Continuities, Contradictions, and Complexities

This article explores the research on community crime prevention, fear of crime, and alternative crime control strategies that go beyond those of traditional criminal justice agencies. The discussion focuses on the competing paradigms for prevention and control that have been tried over the past 20 years and relates that debate to the larger questions of crime causation and public attitudes toward crime that fuel this competition. Alternative policy options are discussed and recommendations related to the most promising approaches are made. When we think about crime and community in the 1990s, we do not usually think about Al Capone, gangsters, and prohibition, yet our modern notions of community crime prevention grew out of the experience of Depression-era Chicago. The competing models of ways to prevent crime and improve communities were born in the slums and prisons of Chicago about 60 years ago. The Illinois Department of Corrections and the Joliet Penitentiary, in particular, provided the backdrop for the three theorists who would, in the years to follow, develop alternative visions of the best way to battle the effects of crime on communities. Clifford Shaw (Shaw et al., 1929), Joseph Lohman (1966), and Saul Alinsky (1946), working in the context of violence, drug abuse, and gangs, generated three alternative approaches to making communities more resilient and more resistant to criminal disorder. Their visions still dominate the debate about crime and community, and it is with these three approaches that I will begin the discussion of how the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) should examine its policies on crime and community disorganization. Alinsky and Lohman began to work for Shaw at the Institute for Juvenile Research (IJR) in Chicago in the early 1930s. IJR did research on juvenile delinquency, based in large measure on Shaw’s (1930) pioneering work on the life stories of young men who became criminals and Shaw and Ernest Burgess’ ecological theories of urbanization. This biographical work took the researchers both to the neighborhoods where the youths grew up