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The study outlined in this article drew on Elijah Anderson's (1999) code of the street perspective to examine the impact of neighborhood street culture on violent delinquency. Using data from more than 700 African American adolescents, we examined 1) whether neighborhood street culture predicts adolescent violence above and beyond an adolescent's own street code values and 2) whether neighborhood street culture moderates individual‐level street code values on adolescent violence. Consistent with Anderson's hypotheses, neighborhood street culture significantly predicts violent delinquency independent of individual‐level street code effects. Additionally, neighborhood street culture moderates individual‐level street code values on violence in neighborhoods where the street culture is widespread. In particular, the effect of street code values on violence is enhanced in neighborhoods where the street culture is endorsed widely.

Unfortunately, the nature‐versus‐nurture debate continues in criminology. Over the past 5 years, the number of heritability studies in criminology has surged. These studies invariably report sizeable heritability estimates (∼50 percent) and minimal effects of the so‐called shared environment for crime and related outcomes. Reports of such high heritabilities for such complex social behaviors are surprising, and findings indicating negligible shared environmental influences (usually interpreted to include parenting and community factors) seem implausible given extensive criminological research demonstrating their significance. Importantly, however, the models on which these estimates are based have fatal flaws for complex social behaviors such as crime. Moreover, the goal of heritability studies—partitioning the effects of nature and nurture—is misguided given the bidirectional, interactional relationship among genes, cells, organisms, and environments. This study provides a critique of heritability study methods and assumptions to illuminate the dubious foundations of heritability estimates and questions the rationale and utility of partitioning genetic and environmental effects. After critiquing the major models, we call for an end to heritability studies. We then present what we perceive to be a more useful biosocial research agenda that is consonant with and informed by recent advances in our understanding of gene function and developmental plasticity.

In this article, we develop and test a new approach to explain the link between social factors and individual offending. We argue that seemingly disparate family, peer, and community conditions lead to crime because the lessons communicated by these events are similar and promote social schemas involving a hostile view of people and relationships, a preference for immediate rewards, and a cynical view of conventional norms. Furthermore, we posit that these three schemas are interconnected and combine to form a criminogenic knowledge structure that results in situational interpretations legitimating criminal behavior. Structural equation modeling with a sample of roughly 700 African American teens provided strong support for the model. The findings indicated that persistent exposure to adverse conditions such as community crime, discrimination, harsh parenting, deviant peers, and low neighborhood collective efficacy increased commitment to the three social schemas. The three schemas were highly intercorrelated and combined to form a latent construct that strongly predicted increases in crime. Furthermore, in large measure, the effect of the various adverse conditions on increases in crime was indirect through their impact on this latent construct. We discuss the extent to which the social‐schematic model presented in this article might be used to integrate concepts and findings from several major theories of criminal behavior.