What America's Safest City might tell us about a changing America

America's Safest City is an essential addition to the classics of criminological control theory, namely Travis Hirschi's Causes of Delinquency and Robert Sampson's Great American City. It provides new ideas about empathy and trust, and how social control is layered across institutions of family, schools, and community. America's Safest City is also about the American Dream of home ownership in advantageous suburban communities. But the American Dream is no longer as accessible to under-employed college graduates; their student debt is at all-time highs, with the return on educational investments increasingly in doubt. Instead of suburbia being a roadway to a good adult life, this paper suggests that it may increasingly look like a suburban "cul de sac.".