Cities and towns; Social psychology; Sociology; Sociology, Urban
It is probably the breaking down of local attachments and the weakening
of the restraints and inhibitions of the primary group, under the
influence of the urban environment, which are largely responsible for
the increase of vice and crime in great cities. It would be interesting
in this connection to determine by investigation how far the increase in
crime keeps pace with the increasing mobility of the population and to
what extent this mobility is a function of the growth of population. It
is from this point of view that we should seek to interpret all those
statistics which register the disintegration of the moral order, for
example, the statistics of divorce, of truancy, and of crime.
What is the effect of ownership of property, particularly of the home,
on truancy, on divorce, and on crime?
In what regions and classes are certain kinds of crime endemic?
In what classes does divorce occur most frequently? What is the
difference in this respect between farmers and, say, actors?
To what extent in any given racial group, for example, the Italians in
New York or the Poles in Chicago, do parents and children live in the
same world, speak the same language, and share the same ideas, and how
far do the conditions found account for juvenile delinquency in that
particular group?
How far are the home mores responsible for criminal manifestations of
an immigrant group?
_Crisis and the courts._—It is characteristic of city life that all
sorts of people meet and mingle together who never fully comprehend one
another. The anarchist and the club man, the priest and the Levite, the
actor and the missionary who touch elbows on the street still live in
totally different worlds. So complete is the segregation of vocational
classes that it is possible within the limits of the city to live in an
isolation almost as complete as that of some remote rural community.
Walter Besant tells the following anecdote of his experience as editor
of the _People’s Palace Journal_:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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