Crime and Juvenile Delinquency

In "Crime and Juvenile Delinquency," Lawrence W. Sherman, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Department of Sociology, describes how changes in criminal and other dysfunctional behaviors could be measured. He relies on data from the National Crime Victimization Survey and the Uniform Crime Reporting System. Sherman describes how criminal behavior tends to be concentrated in inner-city neighborhoods. He contends that "it is misleading to compare homicide rates across cities or to look at national homicide rates without disaggregating them by the factors that are most strongly correlated with their existence." Although individual characteristics, such as age, race, and income, are important, he notes that "the effects of those characteristics are magnified by location and space."