Delinquent-Prone Communities [Paperback]

This book puts forward a model of delinquent-prone communities showing that disadvantage causes crime through disruption of the parenting process.Despite a century of effort, criminologists do not yet fully understand the relationship between disadvantage and crime. Weatherburn and Lind challenge the conventional view that disadvantage causes crime because it motivates people to offend, and argue instead that the transmission mechanism linking economic and social stress to crime is not offender motivation but disruption to the parenting process. The book puts forward an epidemic model of the genesis of delinquent-prone communities and shows how this model resolves the empirical anomalies facing conventional interpretations of the disadvantage/crime relationship.Despite a century of effort, criminologists do not yet fully understand the relationship between disadvantage and crime. Weatherburn and Lind challenge the conventional view that disadvantage causes crime because it motivates people to offend, and argue instead that the transmission mechanism linking economic and social stress to crime is not offender motivation but disruption to the parenting process. The book puts forward an epidemic model of the genesis of delinquent-prone communities and shows how this model resolves the empirical anomalies facing conventional interpretations of the disadvantage/crime relationship.This book challenges the conventional view that disadvantage causes crime because it motivates people to offend. It argues that disadvantage causes crime because it disrupts the parenting process. The theory put forward in the book maintains that it takes a long time for disadvantage to increase the level of crime in a neighborhood. However, once the level of economic and social stress in a neighborhood reaches a critical level, it can set off an epidemic of juvenile offending.List of figures and tables; Acknowledgements; Overview; 1. The ESIOM paradigm and its problems; 2. The insidious effectsls$