Chicago Area Project

The Chicago Area Project (CAP) originated in research conducted by two prominent sociologists, Clifford Shaw and Henry McKay, who began their research relationship as graduate students at the University of Chicago. Designated as the leading sociology department in the early 1900s and called simply the Chicago School, the sociology department at the University of Chicago had two objectives: to develop sociology as a science and to use information gathered in research to inform and enact social reform.

Shaw and McKay expanded on the research of Robert E. Park and Ernest W. Burgess, two well-known professors at the Chicago School. Park and Burgess studied ecology as it related to urban development and proposed that urban areas consisted of concentric zones that radiated from the central city to the suburbs. Using this model, Shaw and McKay developed an ecological theory of delinquency that examined the role of the community in producing delinquency. Until this point, delinquency theory had concentrated on biological explanations, stating that criminal and delinquent behavior was either hereditary or a result of a biological deficiency. However, Shaw and McKay believed that the sources of delinquent behavior were the urban environment and the community in which the individual lived, not her or his inherent characteristics. Shaw and McKay's ecological theory of delinquency contained ideas similar to the central tenets of the Chicago School regarding delinquency. First, a deviant individual is a human being who has more similarities to than differences from nondeviants. Second, social context is important when examining delinquency. Finally, the community plays an instrumental role both in causing and preventing delinquency.

To test this new ecological theory of delinquency, Shaw and McKay conducted research that examined the delinquency rates in Chicago. They found that delinquency was concentrated in a particular area of the city classified by Park and Burgess as the “zone of transition”—an area changing from residential living to a business district. Shaw and McKay noted that the zone contained economically, politically, and socially disadvantaged inhabitants, often immigrants and minorities. Additionally, the area was marked by social disorganization, a condition resulting from rapid social change in which deterioration appears in the basic institutions of social control such as family, neighborhoods, and schools. Shaw and McKay also reported that social disorganization caused high rates of disease, infant mortality, delinquency, and truancy.

Further examination of the pattern of delinquency showed that delinquency decreased as the distance from the central city increased. Shaw and McKay also found that delinquency remained a problem in transition areas, regardless of who lived there. Delinquency [Page 49]thrived as newly arriving immigrants inhabited these areas. However, when immigrants became assimilated and moved to other sections of the city and new immigrants moved in, delinquency remained high. Therefore, Shaw and McKay concluded that delinquency resulted from social factors and to prevent delinquency, treatment should be directed toward changing the environment of the neighborhood, rather than toward changing the individual.