ABSTRACT

People in the community perceive some neighborhoods as breeding grounds for delinquency and crime. Researchers may have general concurrence with community perceptions, differing to a degree because they have data on who commits what types of offenses where and the incidence of serious offenses in various neighborhoods over lengthy periods of time. Delinquency and crime producing characteristics are those aspects of the neighborhood milieu which are hypothesized to make it an arena for learning patterns of delinquent and criminal behavior and rationalizations for these behaviors. The incidence and prevalence of crime have, of course, been primary indicators that a neighborhood is delinquency and crime producing, a not entirely circular type of reasoning because each generation becomes a role model for those which follow. No matter how the neighborhoods were ranked as delinquency and crime producing or as having high offense rates in a total of nineteen ranking systems, there were fourteen neighborhoods which almost invariably had the highest possible score.