Simon I. Singer, America’s Safest City: Delinquency and Modernity in Suburbia

Abstract

America’s Safest City: Delinquency and Modernity in Suburbia is an impressive book. It adds an inspiring theoretical idea to the criminological literature: the importance of what the author calls Brelational modernity^ for the maturation of recent and current generations of young Americans. It examines, in a rich empirical analysis, consequences of relational modernity for crime and delinquency, supporting the idea with impressive and original qualitative and statistical data. And it directs the scholarly lens at the suburb, a geographic area that has begun to house the majority of Americans but that has been vastly disregarded by criminological researchers. The material is eminently well organized, and the manuscript reads exceedingly well. This is one of those rare academic books which is hard to put down before reaching the end. Such literary quality is due to Simon Singer’s writing skills, proven in many publications throughout his career. Maybe it is also due to the fact that the content is close to his skin: He himself made a life’s journey, about which we learn in the introduction, from impoverished sections of the Bronx via a lower middle class neighborhood of Queens in New York City, to the suburbs of Buffalo. The specific suburb is Amherst, NY, and it so happened that a well-known magazine named it BAmerica’s Safest City.^ This decision fueled Singer’s sociological-criminological curiosity, and Amherst became the site of the study for the current book. Singer accordingly knows all these worlds well from personal experience, from the poor inner city neighborhood all the way to the affluent suburb. And, while Singer met the magazine’s classification with some skepticism and is far from idealizing suburbia, he learned to appreciate the suburb as a place to live, more—he tells us—than many of his academic colleagues at Buffalo and elsewhere (including this reviewer). I here comment first on the major strengths of the book, provide a brief overview of the chapters and follow up with a couple of points of critique and potential for further development. The first major strength is the new theoretical idea. Singer seeks to replace the old metaphor of Bstreet corner^ by a new one of Binterconnecting suburban roadways.^ He recognizes that the vast majority of today’s adolescents are no longer tied to a place, certainly not to a public place such as a street corner that defines identities and constrains lives. Instead, contemporary young people navigate a challenging world, characterized by complex configurations that Norbert Elias described for modern societies. The street corner as a place to Bhang out^ is now replaced by diverse places, including malls, parking lots, suburban wooded areas, and the families’ basement recreational rooms. Like the street corner, these roadways also entail risks, albeit of a different nature. There are bumps and potholes, Singer tells us. Some are clearly marked, others are not. Some open up to new avenues, others turn out to be dead ends. This world demands navigation skills. It requires autonomy. Youths are not firmly embedded in—and limited to— members of their household or family or group. Parents after all work long hours and they often do so a long commute away. Simultaneously and relatedly, identities are in a state of flux. There is a risk of isolation, of lack of trust. It is in this setting that a modern kind of relationality is essential. Young people need adults in their lives to whom they develop ties that involve instrumental and relational attachment. They need to identify with adults. They need to * Joachim J. Savelsberg savel001@umn.edu