This might seem like an obvious statement: kids who grow up in the poorest and most segregated neighborhoods are the most likely to witness violence or get arrested. After all, they are living in areas with higher crime rates, and they tend to have the least access to the supports — like quality schools and good jobs — that help them avoid trouble.
But what if that isn’t entirely true?
A new study from Corina Graif, a sociologist at Penn State University, found that low-income teenage boys living in “extremely poor” neighborhoods — those in the bottom 5 percent for income — were actually more likely to get into trouble if their neighborhoods were surrounded by more affluent ones.
Graif’s paper, published in August in the journalCriminology, used a novel strategy to study the effect of geography on kids and crime. Instead of looking only at a teenager’s own census tract, an area that contains about 4,000 residents, Graif also considered the “extended neighborhood” — one’s own census tract plus the four that surround it. In an urban area, census tracts are geographically small; New York City, for example, contains over 2,000 tracts.
[For more of this story, written by Dana Goldstein, go to https://www.themarshallproject...ighbors?ref=hp-1-121]
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