This course provides students with an overview of the
research devoted to crime in urban spaces from both a geographical
and cultural perspective. As such, the course considers the
intersection of urban spatial geography and cultural criminology,
and in that regard, it centers on the structures of urban places
given their peculiar social, economic, and demographic
characteristics and arrangements. The role of urbanization must be
discussed and the consequences of urban growth and decline must be
examined in order to understand the impact of urban spatial
structure on crime. Most of all, the course will be driven by the
work of cultural criminologists and the work of new criminologists,
and students will read several ethnographies that illuminate the
context of crime and criminals from a cultural perspective. Lectures
will highlight the more theoretical issues associated with crime in
urban spaces while our discussions will attempt to integrate our
readings into a cultural understanding of doing crime in urban
spaces. Some of the issues covered in this course include:

	1.  The role segregation (i.e., income, age, and racial
segregation) plays in affecting individual behavior in urban spaces.
In that regard, we recognize the significance of differentials in
racial composition, age, sex, and income as important factors in
explaining the incidence of crime in urban areas. This is because
urban areas are the seed beds for establishing loci of power and
conflict for scarce resources and self-interested desires.

	2.  Drug use has devastated many urban areas; therefore, it
is important to consider the extent and the impact of drug use in
urban spaces.

	3. City streets and neighborhood life frame opportunities
for crime and crime participation. Therefore, it is important to
consider the distribution and the selection of targets of
opportunity as factors that influence the mobility of offenders in
space. But there are other sites that inform our understanding of
crime in urban spaces. For example, Purnima Mankehar "show how the
stores can serve as a space of familiarity reminding shoppers of the
range of homelands associated with the Indian subcontinent. . . The
store may also represent an extension of patriarchal control,
perpetuating an ominous form of surveillance from the point of view
of women who may be victims of domestic violence" (Kane 2004:312-
313).

	4. The course also considers environmental design and its
influence on the incidence and the prevention of crime in urban
areas.

Some Considered Texts:
	Anderson, Elijah (2000) Code of the Street. New York: W. W.
Norton and Co.

	Becker, Howard S. (1963) Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology
of Deviance. New York: Free Press.
	
	Bourgeois, Philippe (2003) In Search of Respect: Selling
Crack in El Barrio. New York: Cambridge University Press.

	Ferrell, Jeff and Hamm, Mark S. (1998) Ethnography at the
Edge : Crime, Deviance, and Field Research. Boston: Northeastern
University Press.
	
	Fleisher, Mark S. (1995) Beggars and Thieves: Lives of Urban
Street Criminals.  Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press.

	Oliver, William (1994) The Violent Social World of Black
Men. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass
	
	Sanders, William (1994) Gangbangs and Drive-Bys: Grounded
Culture and Juvenile Gang Violence. Hawthorne, NY: Aldine de Gruyter.

	Sharif, Jagna Wojcicka (1998) King Kong on 4th Street:
Families and the Violence of Poverty on the Lower East Side.
Boulder, CO: West view Press.

	Wright, Richard T. and Decker, Scott H. (1997) Armed Robbers
in Action. Boston: Northeastern University

Class meeting:  Mondays and Wednesdays, 11:15-12:30

Open to Honors Students only
Obtain on-line authorization for section from Honors

Instructor:  Professor Leon Pettiway, criminal justice department