Segregation and Race/Ethnic Inequality in Crime: New Directions

This chapter proposes a broad and central role for segregation that recognizes it as embedded in multiple spatial layers and as relevant to a number of social dimensions that have implications for inequality in crime. It shows that segregation is critical to the understanding of criminal inequality because crime takes place within local spatial contexts that are highly differentiated by race, ethnicity, and economic status. The chapter also shows local segregation as helping to explain racial and ethnic inequality in crime through community interconnectedness that results from the spatial clustering of similarly disadvantaged and advantaged neighborhoods. The better understanding of racial and ethnic inequality in crime needs to come from incorporating multiple aspects of segregation into a broader conceptual model. How do physical and ecological outcomes of political and commercial decisions lead to variation and inequality in neighborhood crime? The authors suggest that these characteristics help shape patterns of guardianship to engage in informal social control.