Home > crime, legal and law enforcement, National Criminal Justice Reference Service, social and cultural issues > The Structural and Cultural Dynamics of Neighborhood Violence

The Structural and Cultural Dynamics of Neighborhood Violence

June 29, 2011

The Structural and Cultural Dynamics of Neighborhood Violence (PDF)
Source: National Criminal Justice Reference Service

Urban ethnographies have for decades revealed the seemingly paradoxical coexistence of law-abiding beliefs and law-violating behaviors in disadvantaged neighborhoods. Our findings suggest that cultural frames such as legal cynicism go a long way towards explaining this paradox. Legal cynicism emerges not as some monolithic set of values, but as an adaptation to neighborhood structural conditions and interactions between neighborhood residents and the law, especially the police. Once emerged, cynical perceptions of the law become solidified through social interaction, whereby neighborhood residents develop a shared meaning of the behavior of the law. In addition to supporting much of the findings of urban ethnography, our quantification of legal cynicism further allows us to compare and contrast the impact of such cultural frames and more traditional structural determinants of neighborhood violence. The strong effect of legal cynicism, net of structural conditions and neighborhood social processes, suggests that “neighborhood effects” research needs to consider both socialstructural and cultural mechanisms in order to fully understand the bases of neighborhood rates of homicide. More traditional structural analyses of neighborhood behavior would do well to bring culture back into deeper theoretical and empirical consideration.

About these ads
Categories: crime, legal and law enforcement, National Criminal Justice Reference Service, social and cultural issues
Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 490 other followers

%d bloggers like this: