What are the shortcomings of the social structure approach to understanding and preventing crime? Can these shortcomings be overcome?

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

The social structure approach suffers from several problems. One is that empirical studies regularly find weak or nonexistent correlations between socioeconomic status and self-reported delinquency. In addition, the approach emphasizes environments as the powerful causes of criminality and essentially ignores the role of other possible causative factors (e.g., biological or psychological). Finally, social structure theories are unable to predict which individuals, or even what proportion of a given population, will turn to criminal behavior. Many of these shortcomings may be able to be overcome if researchers are willing to move past preconceived biases and merge the social structural approach with positivistic trait theories that consider other causes of crime and place more emphasis on predictions of individual risk.