Chicago Crime and Punishment

The vital issue facing urban America during the 1960's--the downward spiral of poverty, deterioration, and exploitation in poor neighborhoods--was attacked by The Woodlawn Organization (TWO) in Chicago. John Hall Fish, an active participant in TWO, tells the story of one of the most exciting, controversial, and significant experiments in community control. Founded in 1961 by a group of clergymen, with tactical advice from Saul Alinsky, TWO grew to become the major force for community development and self-government in the Woodlawn area. The author traces TWO's history as it struggled to achieve significant community control over the problems that threatened the black inner-city community. He concentrates on three controversial programs: the Youth Project (involving the Blackstone Rangers), the Woodlawn Experimental Schools project, and the Model Cities program. Although TWO ultimately failed to overcome the entrenched opposition of city agencies, its very survival, the author argues, is a measure of its success. For as the cumbersome urban bureaucracies prove ever more ineffective, it is the existence of organized and experienced community organizations that will determine the possibility of neighborhood rebirth and renewal. Originally published in 1973. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

What do you do if your alley is strewn with garbage after the sanitation truck comes through? Or if you're tired of the rowdy teenagers next door keeping you up all night? Is there a vacant lot on your block accumulating weeds, needles, and litter? For a century, Chicagoans have joined block clubs to address problems like these that make daily life in the city a nuisance. When neighbors work together in block clubs, playgrounds get built, local crime is monitored, streets are cleaned up, and every summer is marked by the festivities of day-long block parties.             In Chicago's Block Clubs, Amanda I. Seligman uncovers the history of the block club in Chicago--from its origins in the Urban League in the early 1900s through to the Chicago Police Department's twenty-first-century community policing program. Recognizing that many neighborhood problems are too big for one resident to handle--but too small for the city to keep up with--city residents have for more than a century created clubs to establish and maintain their neighborhood's particular social dynamics, quality of life, and appearance. Omnipresent yet evanescent, block clubs are sometimes the major outlets for community organizing in the city--especially in neighborhoods otherwise lacking in political strength and clout. Drawing on the stories of hundreds of these groups from across the city, Seligman vividly illustrates what neighbors can--and cannot--accomplish when they work together.

In the early 1990s, Chicago, the nation's third largest city, instituted the nation's largest community policing initiative. Wesley G. Skogan here provides the first comprehensive evaluation of that citywide program, examining its impact on crime, neighborhood residents, and the police. Basedon the results of a thirteen-year study, including interviews, citywide surveys, and sophisticated statistical analyses, Police and Community in Chicago reveals a city divided among African-Americans, Whites, and Latinos. Each faced distinctive problems when community policing came to Chicago in1993, and during the next decade the three communities took different routes. There were tremendous improvements in the citys predominately African-American districts, where crime and fear dropped the most. The city's largely white neighborhoods were already solidly behind the police, yet they tooregistered significant gains. Under pressure from immigration, the Latino population cleaved in two with predominately Spanish-speaking areas falling behind on multiple measures of crime, disorder and neighborhood decay. Immigration will only continue to grow both in Chicago and around the world.Skogan thus concludes his pathbreaking work with a challenge for the future: more effective ways of responding to the problems facing the city's newest immigrants must now be found.