one Theory.
             Clifford Shaw and Henry McKay were researchers at the Chicago's Institute for Juvenile Research and maintained a close relationship with Chicago's Sociology department. They were interested in Park and Burgess's conception of the "natural urban area" of Chicago and used this model to investigate the relationship between crime rates--mainly delinquency--and the various zones of Chicago. They found that the crime rate was distributed throughout the city, delinquency occurred in the areas nearest to the business district, that some areas suffered from high consistent delinquency rates no matter the makeup of the population, that high delinquency areas were characterised by a high percentage of immigrants, non-whites, lower income famines, and finally, and that high-delinquency areas had an acceptance of non-conventional norms, which competed with conventional ones. They collected their data from over 56,000 juvenile court records with covered a period of time from 1900-1933.
             However, there were problems with the concept of social disorganisation and these problems are what contributed to its decline. First, it confused cause and effect. That is, it described community factors related to crime and deviance, but it must be able to distinguish the consequences of crime from disorganisation itself; it didn't. Many early social disorganisation theorists were not careful in clarifying the concept of disorganisation. Second, social disorganisation was rather subjective and judgmental, all the while pretending to be objective. Observers failed to free themselves from biases and placed their own value judgements on behaviours. Third, it tried to explain crime as an almost entirely lower-class phenomenon, and in no way included middle and upper class deviance and crime rates. Thus, it was biased, in that it favoured middle-class standards. Those in the lower strata were assumed to have higher levels of crime rates because...