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"In his magisterial Great American City, Robert J. Sampson puts social scientific data behind an argument that we all feel and experience everyday: the neighborhood you live in has a big effect on your life and the city you live in. Not only does your neighborhood determine where your nearest hospital is, what kind of schools your children can attend, or how many police officers you might encounter (and how they respond to you), it affects how you feel, how you think about the world and your place in it. Like many sociologists before him, Sampson looks to Chicago to make his insightful interventions, based on extensive data collected across the city's diverse neighborhoods. This edition includes a new afterword by Sampson reflecting on changes in Chicago and the country that have occurred since the book was initially published. He notes the increase in gun violence, both among civilians and police killings of civilians, as well as steady or growing rates of segregation despite an increase in diversity. With these changes have come new research, much of it a continuation or elaboration of the work in Great American City. He updates readers on the status of the research initiative that serves as the basis of Great American City, the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods (PHDCN), and summarizes how scholars have taken up his work. Many of these scholars have new tools at their disposal with the rise of big data; Sampson remarks on these changes in the field"--

Although it is by now well known that incarceration in America went off the rails in the latter quarter of the twentieth century, the magnitude and rapidity of the shift took most scholars by surprise at the time. Indeed, virtually the same year that Blumstein and Cohen (1973) published their thesis asserting "the stability of punishment," prison gates across the country seemed to swing wide open to accommodate a surge of new entrants. It took a while, but the unprecedented rise of imprisonment triggered considerable attention within the academy. Something of a consensus seems to have formed -- on balance, there is little evidence that the increase in imprisonment has achieved much good. It is true that crime rates have declined at a historic pace in many cities and incarceration no doubt played a role, but the marginal effects of high rates of imprisonment especially from the 1990s onward appear to be modest at best (Raphael and Stoll 2013, 236). Many scholars go further and claim that high rates of incarceration have exacerbated inequality (e.g., in educational attainment and employment) and inflicted outright harm, especially among African Americans, who have experienced the deepest penetration of imprisonment's reach (Pettit and Western 2004). The editors of this volume of The ANNALS probe what is less well known about America's punitive turn -- its consequences for civil society. Their thesis is provocative and turns tables on the usual framing: put simply, they argue that punishment shapes politics. Thus, rather than seeking to ask how politics led to the run-up in incarceration, the editors commissioned articles from an impressive lineup of scholars to focus instead on the question of how punishment has reshaped the polity. Four broad issues are examined: (1) legitimacy, (2) citizenship, (3) socialization, and (4) spillovers for families and communities. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Inc., copyright The American Academy of Political and Social Science.]

I present a theoretical framework and analytic strategy for the study of place as a fundamental context in criminology, with a focus on neighborhood effects. My approach builds on the past 15 years of research from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods and from a recent book unifying the results. I argue that "ecometrics" can be applied at multiple scales, and I elaborate core principles and guiding hypotheses for five problems: 1) legacies of inequality and developmental neighborhood effects; 2) race, crime, and the new diversity; 3) cognition and context, above all the social meaning of disorder; 4) the measurement and sources of collective efficacy in a cosmopolitan world; and 5) higher order structures beyond the neighborhood that arise in complex urban systems. Although conceptually distinct, these hard problems are interdependent and ultimately linked to a frontier in criminology: contextual causality.

This article revisits neglected arguments of the Moynihan Report to yield insights for a contemporary understanding of racial inequality in American cities. The author argues that the logic of Moynihan's reasoning implies three interlinked hypotheses: (1) the tangle of 'pathology,' or what today we call social dislocations, has a deep neighborhood structure, as does socioeconomic disadvantage; (2) the tangle of neighborhood inequality is durable and generates self-reinforcing properties that, because of racial segregation, are most pronounced in the black community; and (3) neighborhood 'poverty traps' can ultimately only be broken with government structural interventions and macro-level policies. Examining longitudinal neighborhood-level data from Chicago and the United States as a whole, the author finds overall support for these hypotheses. Despite urban social transformations in the post-Moynihan era, neighborhoods remained remarkably stable in their relative economic standing. Poverty is also stubbornly persistent in its ecological concentration with other social disadvantages, especially in the black community. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Inc., copyright The American Academy of Political and Social Science.]

This article revisits neglected arguments of the Moynihan Report to yield insights for a contemporary understanding of racial inequality in American cities. The author argues that the logic of Moynihan's reasoning implies three interlinked hypotheses: (1) the tangle of "pathology," or what today we call social dislocations, has a deep neighborhood structure, as does socioeconomic disadvantage; (2) the tangle of neighborhood inequality is durable and generates self-reinforcing properties that, because of racial segregation, are most pronounced in the black community; and (3) neighborhood "poverty traps" can ultimately only be broken with government structural interventions and macro-level policies. Examining longitudinal neighborhood-level data from Chicago and the United States as a whole, the author finds overall support for these hypotheses. Despite urban social transformations in the post-Moynihan era, neighborhoods remained remarkably stable in their relative economic standing. Poverty is also stubbornly persistent in its ecological concentration with other social disadvantages, especially in the black community.