Catholic School Closures and Neighborhood Crime
Catholic School Closures and Neighborhood Crime
Chapter 3 suggests that the closure of Catholic elementary schools generates disorder and suppresses social cohesion in urban neighborhoods — findings that support the conclusion that Catholic elementary schools create neighborhood social capital. This chapter extends the empirical inquiry to whether closures might also affect crime rates. As before the chapter uses school and parish leadership characteristics to create an exogenous (instrumental) factor that predicts which Catholic schools might close in urban Chicago, and used that factor, with sociodemographic variables, to predict police-beat-level crime rates. Catholic school closures apparently slow the rate of decline of crime in a police beat compared to beats with no Catholic school closure, and that that higher perceived disorder predicted higher initial levels of crime. The findings provide insight into which policing policies are effective and the benefits of involving religious institutions in crime-prevention efforts.
Keywords: schools, crime, social capital, disorder, Chicago, Catholic, empirical, urban
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