Chicago School

During the 19th and early 20th centuries, individualistic theories of crime dominated the criminological literature. Cesare Lombroso's biological theory and Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic approach enjoyed much popularity during the early 20th century. Several American criminal anthropologists, such as Arthur McDonald, Charles Henderson, and [Page 93]Henry Boies, and constitutional theorists, such as Ernest Hooton and William Sheldon, shared the biologically based “positivistic” background of the era. Individualistic theories—whether biological or psychological—focused on traits of individuals and ignored the influences of the social environment on crime. By the mid-20th century, biological theories had been largely displaced by the sociological approach, heralded by the concept of cultural ecology, reflected in the 1940s work of the “Chicago school” sociologists Clifford Shaw and Henry McKay.

In 1892, the first American academic program in sociology was begun at the University of Chicago, marking the birth of what became known as the Chicago school of sociology. Its adherents were inspired by the 19th-century French “cartographic school” statisticians Adolphe Quetelet and Andre Michel Guerry, who had published separate but similar works on the social statistics of crime in 1829. They looked at factors such as age, sex, poverty, geography, education, race, and crime.

In that era, the United States was a rapidly developing country, changing itself from a land of farming communities into a land of crowded cities that were located around industrial areas. Chicago was one of those cities experiencing rapid social and economic change while getting more and more crowded. In 1840, 10 years after the original town was plotted, the population numbered 4,770. It reached 1,000,000 by 1900 and was well over 2,000,000 by 1910. Like other crowded cities, Chicago was the settling place for many racial ethnic groups, such as African Americans and immigrants from Europe.

In such an environment, scholars at the University of Chicago believed that studying the changes in society was much more important than studying the traits of individuals. The key was to understand crime and delinquency occurring in rapidly changing neighborhoods. This entry provides an overview of the Chicago school. Specifically, it discusses Burgess's concentric zone theory, Shaw and McKay's Chicago research, differential systems of values, differential social organization, and the Chicago Area Project (CAP).