Chicago Crime and Punishment

The legal profession is stratified primarily by the character of the clients served, not by the type of legal service rendered, as John P. Heinz and Edward O. Laumann convincingly demonstrate. In their classic study of the Chicago bar, the authors draw on interviews with nearly 800 lawyers to show that the profession is divided into two distinct hemispheres--corporate and individual--and that this dichotomy is reflected in the distribution of prestige among lawyers.

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.

"Readers will be heartened by this legal pioneer & her tireless efforts." Kirkus "[This] engaging narrative involves the reader & gives an excellent sense of the times in which Bradwell lived." Booklist