Why in the 1920s and 1930s, particularly in the city of Chicago, did the notion of blaming “the city” for the nation’s crime problem become a dominant explanation or theory for the causation of crime and criminal behavior?
Most early theories assumed that examining the social environment or the external circumstances does not provide sufficient insight into the causes of crime. They placed full responsibility on the individual offenders for the crime issues. However, at the beginning of the 20th century, the crime outbreak in the United States...