Community Integration and the Social Control of Juvenile Delinquency.

It has been assumed that community integration and social control play important roles in the prevention of juvenile delinquency. The basic hypothesis taken in support of the assumption is that, in disorganized neighborhoods, individual adults will feel less responsibility for guiding other people's children into the paths of good behavior, and will ignore deviant acts when they see them being committed, unless they themselves are directly involved. To test whether this hypothetical picture represents what actually occurs, two areas where compared, chosen to be as similar as possible with respect to socio-economic status of residents, but still highly different in delinquency rates. The results of the comparison and their implication on juvenile delinquency research are detailed in this paper.