ATS1423 Chap.6 Community, Disadvantage and Crime
Community, Disadvantage and Crime
Community, Disadvantage and Crime steps back from agencies to the places they serve. The lecture maps crime against socio-economic disadvantage, then explains the link through social disorganisation, collective efficacy and social capital, and through poverty understood as a loss of agency.
The two required readings make the argument concrete: Braithwaite shows why secure housing is a precondition for rehabilitation, and Pogrebin and colleagues show that fees, fines and debts can defeat even employed parolees. The week's title asks whether communities are inputs to the system or outputs of it, and the answer is both.
The tutorial divides the class into research groups on education, employment, housing, business investment and healthcare access, and asks a pointed question: whose job is it to address these drivers of crime?
What this chapter covers
- 01
Crime and disadvantage across Australia and Melbourne
- 02
Social disorganisation: solidarity, cohesion and integration
- 03
Collective efficacy and social capital
- 04
Cumulative disadvantage and powerlessness
- 05
Poverty as a lack of necessities and of agency
- 06
Housing, recovery capital and CHIME
- 07
Financial obligations after release
Worked example · free
Explain why a released prisoner returns to custody
- 1Identify the type of breach: unpaid fees and a missed report are technical violations rather than new crimes.
- 1Apply Pogrebin et al.: supervision fees, testing costs, restitution and old debts can outrun wages, so employment alone is not enough.
- 1Apply Braithwaite: without secure housing and recovery capital, rehabilitation programs and supervision struggle to work.
- 1Link to the community loop: imprisonment removes the man again, weakening his household and the neighbourhood he came from.
Key terms
- Social disorganisation
- A state in which a community lacks agreement on norms, bonds and interaction, weakening its ability to exercise informal social control.
- Social capital
- The capacity of groups of people to organise and act in their own interests, which high collective efficacy helps to generate.
- Cumulative disadvantage
- The way early economic and educational differences compound over a life, producing starkly different opportunities later.
- Recovery capital
- The resources, such as secure housing, that a person needs before treatment and rehabilitation can take hold.
- Collective efficacy
- Social cohesion among neighbours combined with their willingness to intervene for the common good, which makes informal social control effective.
- Technical violation
- A breach of parole or probation conditions, such as an unpaid fee or a missed report, that is not a new criminal offence.
Community, Disadvantage and Crime FAQ
What is the difference between social disorganisation and collective efficacy?
Social disorganisation describes a community's structure and its capacity for informal social control. Collective efficacy adds that control also needs mutual trust and a willingness to intervene, so watchful residents alone are not enough.
How widespread is poverty in Australia according to the lecture?
The lecture states that about 13 per cent of Australians, or 3.3 million people, live in poverty, one child in six lives in poverty, and 31 per cent of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians live in households below the poverty line.
Why does Braithwaite focus on housing?
He argues that rehabilitation programs work only when clients have secure housing, that disadvantage has multiplicative effects on crime, and that justice reinvestment falls well short on its own without large investment in public and social housing.
Why isn't a job enough for successful reentry?
Pogrebin and colleagues found that parolees faced supervision fees, testing costs, restitution, child support and old debts that their wages could not cover, leaving them without an economic foothold even when employed.
What does CHIME stand for in Braithwaite's reading?
Connectedness, hope, identity, meaning and empowerment. Braithwaite argues that these precede recovery from mental illness, addiction or a criminal conviction, and that housing policy which denies people choice undermines them.
Assessment move
Draw the input and output loop from memory and label each arrow with a piece of evidence from the lecture or readings. Learn the difference between social disorganisation and collective efficacy precisely, because the two are easy to blur.
If you choose essay prompt 4, this chapter supplies the economic side of the argument: use Braithwaite on housing and Pogrebin on debt to argue either that community drivers overwhelm supervision or that supervision works when they are addressed.
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