Introduction
The Chicago School (the term refers to a broad-based intellectual movement that started at the University of Chicago) rejected traditional criminological theories that focused on issues of individual morality and volition and concentrated instead on factors external to the individual. This new model viewed America as a "criminogenic" society in which ghettos and slums taught the people who lived there how to become criminal by giving them deviant cultural values.
Three fundamental concepts of Chicago school
One of the more important contributions of the Chicago School was the defining features of a "gang." For the Chicago School, ganging was not a cultural carry-over from the old world, but a product of the new. Rather than locate the criminality and violence associated with gangs in ethnic or racial temperament, Park and his colleagues firmly located these problems in social disorganization. Park, Wirth and others in the Chicago School were staunch enemies of bigotry and racism. Three fundamental concepts of the Chicago school are:
The Urban Ecological System
“Gangland is a phenomenon of human ecology. As better residential districts receded before the encroachments of business and industry, the gang develops as one manifestation of the economic, moral, and cultural frontier, which marks the interstice.” (Thrasher 1927, 23)
The gang, for Frederic Thrasher and the Chicago School, was above all to be studied in the context of the physical processes and changing shape of the modern city, with Chicago as the universal model. As Richard Sennett has pointed out, the Chicago School broke with earlier European urban studies by looking at the city not as an ideal type, but as an organism that needed to be understood through direct observation of its parts. (Richard Sennett, 1969)
Immigrants lived, and second generation gangs formed, in natural areas near life sustaining work Chicago mills.......
