Criminology Goes to the Movies: Crime Theory and Popular Culture

5. “You Talking to Me?”: Social Disorganization Theories and Taxi Driver

| 67 5 “You Talking to Me?” Social Disorganization Theories and Taxi Driver In recollecting his pioneering work in the formation of the Chicago school of sociology, W. I. Thomas recalled, “I explored the city.”1 Robert E. Park, another Chicago school founder, described his work this way: I wrote about all sorts of things and became in this way intimately acquainted with many different aspects of city life. I expect that I have actually covered more ground, tramping about in cities in different parts of the world, than any other living man. Out of all this I gained, among other things, a conception of the city, the community, and the region, not as a geographical phenomenon merely but as a kind of social organism.2 Explorations of the city lie at the heart of the theories, research questions, methods, and findings of the Chicago school, the community of scholars who, at the University of Chicago in the first half of the twentieth century, introduced social disorganization theories of crime. At a time when American cities were experiencing unprecedented growth, these sociologists were fascinated with the social changes that emerged out of this vast population shift. As the nation moved from rural, homogeneous, small towns to the complex, heterogeneous, industrial metropolis, new kinds of social problems bound up with poverty, immigration, and shifting values became apparent. The early Chicago school theorists laid the modern foundations for urban sociology and the study of social problems, including crime. For these social scientists, the study of criminality was grounded in a theory of human ecology, according to which the dynamic social conditions of the city, marked by dramatic population shifts and waves of immigration, are the source of crime. Chicago was an exemplary research site, having experienced the most intensive urban population explosion in the United States. The city’s population had shifted rapidly from thousands in the late 1800s 68 | “You Talking to Me?” to more than 2 million by the 1920s, with population influxes defined, as in most American cities, by waves of poor immigrants and the Great Migration north by recently freed slaves. The city was also experiencing a wave of crime and delinquency created by Prohibition, the period from 1919 to 1933 during which the sale, manufacture, and transportation of alcohol for consumption were illegal. Dramatic changes in norms, populations, and law often usher in new scientific paradigms, and the Chicago school brought with them a rigorous empirical approach to the collection of data and a qualitative emphasis that insisted people must be studied with close attention to their social settings . This research included deep observational studies and rich ethnographies of crime and delinquency that are used in criminology classes to this day. This fascination with the city and its role in shaping social life sits at the heart of both social disorganization theories and popular culture. In this chapter, we explore how these theories mark a sharp turn away from the individual in their emphasis upon the role of the social environment and the city in shaping crime. After revisiting the central findings and perspectives of the Chicago school, we will turn to contemporary perspectives on social disorganization. Then, through the worldview of one of Hollywood’s most troubled and complex characters, Travis Bickle, the antihero of Martin Scorsese’s classic Taxi Driver (1976), we will illustrate some of the assumptions of social disorganization theories. More recent films, too, have also explored these perspectives, including Neil Jordan’s The Brave One (2007), a film that, borrowing heavily from Taxi Driver and Death Wish (1974), traces the transformation of a traumatized New York woman, a victim of random violent crime. Social Disorganization Theories The Chicago School At the end of the 1920s, a new major criminological tradition took hold, one that argued that the city, now central to American society, had become a criminogenic force in its own right. Chicago school sociologists argued that the key to understanding crime was found in its social roots, an explanatory framework that continues to play a primary role in criminological theory today. Contrary to biological and psychological theorists, social disorganization researchers perceived criminals and delinquents to be normal individuals whose criminal acts were stimulated by their environment, the ghettos and slums emerging at the centers of the metropolis. In this way, the city was “You Talking to Me?” | 69 constructed by Chicago school sociologists as a strategic research site—in fact...