This article explores whether local institutions matter for controlling neighborhood violence. Disadvantaged neighborhoods have difficulty attracting and maintaining conventional institutions that help control crime. At the same time, institutional settings that are conducive to violence are more prevalent. This article assesses whether certain local institutions provide a mechanism linking economic deprivation and residential instability to criminal violence. Rates of total and individual violent crimes are examined for census tracts in Columbus, Ohio for 1990. The findings show that communities may reduce violent crime somewhat by developing a larger base of certain types of local institutions (e.g., recreation centers) and preventing the encroachment of others (i.e., bars). Still, such institutional mechanisms do not explain why economic deprivation and residential instability are strongly linked to violent crime. This suggests that efforts to substantially reduce violence in local communities must counter the macro-structural forces that increase economic deprivation and lead to innercity decline.
Drawing on structural racism and urban disadvantage approaches, this article posits a broad influence of citywide racial residential segregation on levels of violent crime across all urban neighborhoods regardless of their racial/ethnic composition. Multilevel models based on data from the National Neighborhood Crime Study for 7,622 neighborhoods in 79 cities throughout the United States reveal that segregation is positively associated with violent crime for white and various types of nonwhite neighborhoods. Nonetheless, there is a lack of parity in violence across these types of communities reflecting the larger racialized social system in which whites are able to use their privileged position to reside in the most advantaged neighborhoods, while African-Americans and Latinos live in the most disadvantaged urban communities and therefore bear the brunt of urban criminal violence.
In 1995, Sampson & Wilson assessed the state of knowledge on race and violence and set forth an approach for future research. We review macrostructural analyses of race, ethnicity, and violent crime since 1995 to evaluate progress in explaining inequality in criminal violence across racial and ethnic groups. Among the important advances are studies that attempt to gain insights from explicit comparisons of racially distinct but structurally similar communities, expansion of work beyond the black-white divide, and incorporation of macrostructural factors into multilevel models of racial/ethnic differences in violence. Yet, progress is limited in all these directions, and additional questions remain. Thus, we offer a perspective and suggestions for future research that will expand knowledge on this important topic.
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