R Race ▶ Juvenile Justice System Responses to Minority Youth Race and Ethnicity in Social Disorganization Theory April Fernandes 1 , Suzanna Ramirez 2 and Robert D. Crutchfield 1 1 University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA 2 The University of Queensland, St. Lucia, Australia Overview Race and ethnicity were central to the early formulations of Social Disorganization Theory, and consideration of these social categories remains significant in contemporary criminolog- ical research. In what came to be known as the Chicago School, scholars took Durkheimian conceptions of social solidarity and social disrup- tion and created what today is known as Disorga- nization Theory to explain changes that were happening in the city around them. Many transi- tions were occurring in Chicago, as well as other Midwestern and Northeastern cities, but one of the most important of those was dramatic demo- graphic shifts in the population as a result of migration. While earlier streams of immigrants to the United States came predominantly from Western and Northern Europe with physical features, cultural practices, and patterns of behav- ior that were not too dissimilar from the native population, the latter part of the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries saw an increasing number of migrants coming from Eastern and Southern Europe. Large groups of immigrants began to populate Chicago and other American cities from countries like Italy, Greece, Poland, and Czechoslovakia. They were predominately Catholic, with languages and cultural traditions that differed dramatically from the previous immi- grant waves from England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, France, and Scandinavian countries. During this same period, as a result of what has come to be known as the Great Migration, African-Americans moved out of the rural South to escape the oppression of Jim Crow laws and to find a better economic future into the cities of the North and West. Cities like Chicago, which needed industrial workers, were prime places for these movers to settle. Similarly, rural whites, also seeking a better economic future, moved into these cities looking for jobs. For those early American sociologists, the changing city became their urban laboratory. They wanted to know how the changes they observed impacted social life, and a central con- cern was how these social forces affected crime and delinquency. Social Disorganization Theory became a critical tool for exploring and explaining the patterns that they observed. Because racial and ethnic differences were G. Bruinsma, D. Weisburd (eds.), Encyclopedia of Criminology and Criminal Justice, DOI 10.1007/978-1-4614-5690-2, # Springer Science+Business Media New York 2014