Divergent Social Worlds

A Volume in the American Sociological Association’s Rose Series in Sociology

“Divergent Social Worlds should help set the agenda for law enforcement and related social policy as well as criminal justice research for years to come.”
—GREGORY D. SQUIRES, George Washington University

“Divergent Social Worlds is the most important book on urban crime since Shaw and McKay’s pioneering Juvenile Delinquency and Urban Areas was published over fifty years ago. Spanning more than two decades of research, Ruth Peterson and Lauren Krivo have produced a rigorous and creative analysis of new data from their National Neighborhood Crime Study. This important dataset on neighborhoods within each of ninety-one of the largest cities of the United States allows Peterson and Krivo to craft a structural race theory of neighborhood crime based on racial inequality, residential segregation, and spatial inequality. They empirically show how racial inequities in the housing market produce residential segregation, spatial inequality, and separate social worlds, which, in turn, undermine local social control and thereby foster high rates of criminal violence. This book is must reading for criminologists, students of race, and urban sociologists, and is destined to become a classic.”
—ROSS L. MATSUEDA, University of Washington 

“Reporting on a new and unique data collection, Ruth Peterson and Lauren Krivo show how residential segregation and economic disadvantage combine to divide blacks from whites in American cities. In an important analysis, the authors show how this polarization of city life accounts for much of the inequality in urban violence and the high rates of crime in African American neighborhoods.”
—BRUCE WESTERN, Harvard University

More than half a century after the first Jim Crow laws were dismantled, the majority of urban neighborhoods in the United States remain segregated by race. The degree of social and economic advantage or disadvantage that each community experiences—particularly its crime rate—is most often a reflection of which group is in the majority. As Ruth Peterson and Lauren Krivo note in Divergent Social Worlds, “Race, place, and crime are still inextricably linked in the minds of the public.” This book broadens the scope of single-city, black/white studies by using national data to compare local crime patterns in five racially distinct types of neighborhoods. Peterson and Krivo meticulously demonstrate how residential segregation creates and maintains inequality in neighborhood crime rates.

Based on the authors’ groundbreaking National Neighborhood Crime Study (NNCS), Divergent Social Worlds provides a more complete picture of the social conditions underlying neighborhood crime patterns than has ever before been drawn. The study includes economic, social, and local investment data for nearly nine thousand neighborhoods in eighty-seven cities, and the findings reveal a pattern across neighborhoods of racialized separation among unequal groups. Residential segregation reproduces existing privilege or disadvantage in neighborhoods—such as adequate or inadequate schools, political representation, and local business—increasing the potential for crime and instability in impoverished non-white areas yet providing few opportunities for residents to improve conditions or leave. And the numbers bear this out. Among urban residents, more than two-thirds of all whites, half of all African Americans, and one-third of Latinos live in segregated local neighborhoods. More than 90 percent of white neighborhoods have low poverty, but this is only true for one quarter of black, Latino, and minority areas. Of the five types of neighborhoods studied, African American communities experience violent crime on average at a rate five times that of their white counterparts, with violence rates for Latino, minority, and integrated neighborhoods falling between the two extremes.

Divergent Social Worlds lays to rest the popular misconception that persistently high crime rates in impoverished, non-white neighborhoods are merely the result of individual pathologies or, worse, inherent group criminality. Yet Peterson and Krivo also show that the reality of crime inequality in urban neighborhoods is no less alarming. Separate, the book emphasizes, is inherently unequal. Divergent Social Worlds lays the groundwork for closing the gap—and for next steps among organizers, policymakers, and future researchers.

RUTH D. PETERSON is Distinguished Professor of Social and Behavioral Sciences, professor of sociology, and director of the Criminal Justice Research Center at Ohio State University.

LAUREN J. KRIVO is professor of sociology and criminal justice at Rutgers University.