Synopses & Reviews
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"The crime decline that began in the early 1990s and ran for more than a decade is the largest sustained drop in crime rates ever recorded in the United Statesand yet this remarkable event has gone largely unheralded. Parker illuminates this unexplored terrain by shining a light on the unevenness of the decline across key subgroups defined especially by race, gender and class. Her book is required reading for anyone interested in the make up of this fascinating piece of criminology history."—Gary LaFree, author of Losing Legitimacy: Street Crime and the Decline of Social Institutions in America
"There has been much speculation as to the source and meaning of the crime drop of the 1990s. Yet, relatively unexamined is whether crime rates declined uniformly across all groups and, if not why not? In this important book, Parker carefully examines homicide trends for different combinations of race and gender specific groups over three decades and convinces us that crime trends are far from uniform. What then accounts for the race and gender disparities in homicide trends? Parker offers more nuanced explanations by exploring how changes in the urban landscape over several decades have differentially affected blacks and whites and males and females. Parker's book is a significant achievement, merging sophisticated quantitative techniques and analysis with sociological insights about structural changes in our cities that also affect urban crime rates. She has raised important questions about the crime drop and at the same time has provided a number of new directions for future research. This is a provocative and stimulating book which should prompt criminologists to more carefully deconstruct crime patterns and trends by race and gender."Sally S. Simpson, author of Corporate Crime, Law, and Social Control
Crime in most urban areas has been falling since 1991. While the decline has been well-documented, few scholars have analyzed which groups have most benefited from the crime decline and which are still on the frontlines of violence and why that might be. In Unequal Crime Decline, Karen F. Parker presents a structural and theoretical analysis of the various factors that affect the crime decline, looking particularly at the past three decades and the shifts that have taken place, and offers original insight into which trends have declined and why.
Taking into account such indicators as employment, labor market opportunities, skill levels, housing, changes in racial composition, family structure, and drug trafficking, Parker provides statistics that illustrate how these factors do or do not affect urban violence, and carefully considers these factors in relation to various crime trends, such as rates involving blacks, whites, but also trends among black males, white females, as well as others. Throughout the book she discusses popular structural theories of crime and their limitations, in the end concentrating on todays issues and important contemporary policy to be considered. Unequal Crime Decline is a comprehensive and theoretically sophisticated look at the relationship among race, urban inequality, and violence in the years leading up to and following Americas landmark crime drop.
Review
"Parker's theoretical integration is so straightforward and intuitive that it makes one wonder why it took so long for sociologists to consider such an amalgamation. Sociologists interested in the urban economy should seriously consider the ways in which labor market changes stratify racial groups along dimensions of crime and violence. Meanwhile, criminologists would do well to heed Parker's call for a richer and more dynamic theoretical treatment of the economy in their models of changing crime rates." "All of this can be summarized in the following three reasons that Parker's book is important: she begins with a question that deserves an answer, she demonstrates how that question is far more complex than most have thought, and she offers an answer that is theoretically rich."
“The crime decline that began in the early 1990s and ran for more than a decade is the largest sustained drop in crime rates ever recorded in the United States—and yet this remarkable event has gone largely unheralded. Parker illuminates this unexplored terrain by shining a light on the unevenness of the decline across key subgroups defined especially by race, gender and class. Her book is required reading for anyone interested in the make up of this fascinating piece of criminology history.”
“There has been much speculation as to the source and meaning of the crime drop of the 1990s. Yet, relatively unexamined is whether crime rates declined uniformly across all groups and, if not why not? In this important book, Parker carefully examines homicide trends for different combinations of race and gender specific groups over three decades and convinces us that crime trends are far from uniform. What then accounts for the race and gender disparities in homicide trends? Parker offers more nuanced explanations by exploring how changes in the urban landscape over several decades have differentially affected blacks and whites and males and females. Parker’s book is a significant achievement, merging sophisticated quantitative techniques and analysis with sociological insights about structural changes in our cities that also affect urban crime rates. She has raised important questions about the crime drop and at the same time has provided a number of new directions for future research. This is a provocative and stimulating book which should prompt criminologists to more carefully deconstruct crime patterns and trends by race and gender.”
“Essential.”
Review
Review
“Her analysis is not only a thorough review of the debate on the link between violent crime and unemployment; it is an exploration into the complex intertwining between ethnicity, gender, population composition and political economy in violent crime . . . a hugely rewarding read.”
- British Journal of Criminology
Synopsis
Crime in most urban areas has been falling since 1991. While the decline has been well-documented, few scholars have analyzed which groups have most benefited from the crime decline and which are still on the frontlines of violence-and why that might be. In Unequal Crime Decline, Karen F. Parker presents a structural and theoretical analysis of the various factors that affect the crime decline, looking particularly at the past three decades and the shifts that have taken place, and offers original insight into which trends have declined and why. Taking into account such indicators as employment, labor market opportunities, skill levels, housing, changes in racial composition, family structure, and drug trafficking, Parker provides statistics that illustrate how these factors do or do not affect urban violence, and carefully considers these factors in relation to various crime trends, such as rates involving blacks, whites, but also trends among black males, white females, as well as others. Throughout the book she discusses popular structural theories of crime and their limitations, in the end concentrating on today's issues and important contemporary policy to be considered. Unequal Crime Decline is a comprehensive and theoretically sophisticated look at the relationship among race, urban inequality, and violence in the years leading up to and following America's landmark crime drop.
Synopsis
2009 Choice Outstanding Academic TitleCrime in most urban areas has been falling since 1991. While the decline has been well-documented, few scholars have analyzed which groups have most benefited from the crime decline and which are still on the frontlines of violence—and why that might be. In Unequal Crime Decline, Karen F. Parker presents a structural and theoretical analysis of the various factors that affect the crime decline, looking particularly at the past three decades and the shifts that have taken place, and offers original insight into which trends have declined and why.
Taking into account such indicators as employment, labor market opportunities, skill levels, housing, changes in racial composition, family structure, and drug trafficking, Parker provides statistics that illustrate how these factors do or do not affect urban violence, and carefully considers these factors in relation to various crime trends, such as rates involving blacks, whites, but also trends among black males, white females, as well as others. Throughout the book she discusses popular structural theories of crime and their limitations, in the end concentrating on todays issues and important contemporary policy to be considered. Unequal Crime Decline is a comprehensive and theoretically sophisticated look at the relationship among race, urban inequality, and violence in the years leading up to and following Americas landmark crime drop.
Synopsis
Relying on women's own words in letters and journals, Rosenzweig refutes the prescriptive literature of the times with its dire predictions of inevitable rifts between Victorian mothers and their daughters, the new women of the twentieth century. Instead Rosenzweig shows us mothers who rejoiced in their daughters' educational successes and, while they did not always comprehend the nature of the changes taking place, were only too happy to see their daughters escape some of their own restrictions and grief.
Extremely useful to scholars and teachers of women's history and family history, The Anchor of My Life should also be fascinating to the general public for the accurate window that it provides on these complicated family relationship in our history.
Laurie Crumpacker , Department of History, Simmons College
"Drawing on a broad array of historical sources, The Anchor of My Lifechallenges the common assumption that mother-daughter relationships invariably are characterized by tensions and conflicts. This lively and moving book deserves a wide audience."
Emily K. Abel , author of Circles of Care: Work and Identity in Women's Lives
The relationship between mothers and daughters has been the subject of much research and study, in such fields as psychoanalysis, sociology, and women's studies. But rarely has the history and evolution of this relationship been examined.
In The Anchor of My Life, Linda W. Rosenzweig draws on a wide range of primary sources--letters, diaries, autobiographies, prescriptive advice or self-help literature, and fictionto reveal the historical nuances of this pivotal relationship. Rosenzweig's distinctive approach focuses on the interaction between mothers and daughters of the American middle class at the turn of the century, revealing that mothers and daughters managed to sustain close, nurturing relationships in an era marked by a major female generation gap in terms of aspirations and opportunities. Illustrated with photographs and portraits of the time, The Anchor of My Life provocatively challenges the facile, late twentieth-century assumption that the mother-daughter relationship is necessarily defined by hostility, guilt, and antagonism.
About the Author
Karen F. Parker is Professor of Sociology and Criminology at the University of Delaware. She is the 2008 winner of the Coramae Richey Mann Award from the Division on People of Color and Crime of the American Society of Criminology for her outstanding contributions of scholarship on race/ethnicity, crime, and justice.