ABSTRACT

The general hypothesis is that low economic status, ethnic heterogeneity, residential mobility, and family disruption lead to community social disorganization, which, in turn, increases crime and delinquency rates. The most general test of social-disorganization theory concerns its ability to explain total crime rates. In general terms, social disorganization refers to the inability of a community structure to realize the common values of its residents and maintain effective social controls. The unique design of the British Crime Survey enables us to create measures of both social disorganization and crime rates for more than 200 local communities and, therefore, to test directly basic hypotheses derived from C. R. Shaw and Henry D. McKay’s community-level theory of crime and delinquency. The extent of community friendship ties is inversely related to both street robbery and total victimization. The proportion of the total effects of family disruption accounted for by unsupervised youth is 50%, 23%, and 27% for mugging, stranger violence, and total victimization, respectively.