Communities and Crime

Pamela Wilcox is Professor of Criminal Justice and Fellow of the Graduate School at University of Cincinnati. She is the co-author of Criminal Circumstance: A Dynamic Multicontextual Criminal Opportunity Theory and co-editor of Challenging Criminological Theory: The Legacy of Ruth Rosner Kornhauser.  Francis T. Cullen is Distinguished Research Professor Emeritus and Senior Research Associate in the School of Criminal Justice at the University of Cincinnati. He is co-author of Criminological Theory: Context and Consequences and co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Criminological Theory.   Ben Feldmeyer is an Associate Professor in the School of Criminal Justice at the University of Cincinnati.

"Wilcox, Cullen, and Feldmeyer provide an intellectual history of communities and crime in the US. They look at seven perceptions of the inner-city community—community as socially disorganized, as system, as truly disadvantaged, as criminal culture, as broken window, as criminal opportunity, and as collective efficacy—devoting a chapter to each. The authors emphasize the macro context, i.e., the idea that though particular images of community convey static differences, inner-city criminalistic communities are not islands but have distinct ongoing linkages with surrounding communities and neighborhoods and with the larger region of the city.... Summing Up: Recommended."--Choice