Edwin H. Sutherland's Social Disorganization Theory

Born on August 13, 1883, Edwin H. Sutherland was a sociologist who spent majority of his time teaching in the sociology department at Indiana University. Sutherland is known as one of the most influential criminologist of the 20th century due in part to coining the idea of differential association and defining “white-collar crime”. Shaw and McKay’s social disorganization theory was another theory that concluded that crime was a result of the environment or context in which an individual is embedded in. Sutherland’s theory of differential association is a micro theory that proposes why an individual is drawn to crime. To begin with, Sutherland believed that the context that individuals were brought up in, determined the amount of crime that a person would be involved in. Sutherland felt that this was because especially
Burgess’s model included five zones in which people lived according to competition. The “loop” consisted of commercial enterprises and locations best fit for transportation purposes. The second zone, however, was a particular cause for study, being because this zone included many immigrants and migrants who were too poor to stay farther away from the inner city. As a result, the majority amount of crime was seen to occur in this zone. The next three zones included the zone of working men’s homes, then the residential zone, and finally the commuter’s zone. Shaw and McKay concluded that the rate of crime decreased significantly as a person moved outward towards the commuter’s zone. It was believed that the more affluent families lived in this zone and thus, did not experience near as much crime. This observation led Shaw and McKay to conclude that, “…It was the nature of the neighborhood—not the nature of individuals within the neighborhood—that regulated involvement in crime” (Lilly, Cullen, & Bell,