The Poverty of Criminology

Background and Purpose: Recent years have seen major investments in community gun violence interventions from all levels of government and philanthropic foundations. These interventions have been shaped by the latest evidence-based practices from criminology, public health, social work, and allied fields. This paper appraises recent major works in this evidence-based literature.

Methods: This paper explores the assumptions and ideologies that have shaped the discourse and practice of evidence-based intervention in distinct ways. Using content analysis methods, three field-shaping interventions in the community gun violence prevention literature in recent years are critically assessed: Thomas Abt, Bleeding Out (2019); Jens Ludwig, Unforgiving Places (2025); and Patrick Sharkey, Uneasy Peace (2018). These books have been widely and positively reviewed in both academic and popular outlets and widely cited in the scholarly literature. All three books explore the parameters of gun violence in impoverished African American urban communities and offer comprehensive frameworks for dramatically reducing elevated levels of violence.

Results: Data analysis reveals that these works offer complementary, and often overlapping, diagnoses of urban gun violence and recommendations for reducing violence. All three books acknowledge that the violence with which they are concerned exists almost solely among the most dispossessed segments of the African American urban populace and, more crucially, is driven by that dispossession. At the same time, all three books argue, more or less explicitly, that the solution to this violence begins not by addressing the deprivation at the root of the violence and meaningfully integrating these communities into the economic, political, and social fabric of society, but with relatively narrow interventions targeting violence itself. This approach is justified by its ostensible combination of political practicality and evidence-based effectiveness. Yet the evidentiary basis for these proposals is overstated and reflects several problematic assumptions of recent “evidence-based” violence-prevention discourse, including (1) that violence is concentrated among a tiny segment of the urban population, (2) that focused deterrence and violence interruption are capable of dramatically reducing levels of violence, (3) that targeted interventions can be effectively scaled, and (4) that even remarkable reductions in killings and shootings in our most violent urban communities would make these communities safe. The insistence of leading scholars that the only interventions that are politically practical are relatively narrow efforts that leave intact the regime of inequality at the root of urban gun violence inadvertently reinforces the narrowness of the gun violence prevention horizon.

Conclusions and Implications: Taken together, Bleeding Out, Unforgiving Places, and Uneasy Peace offer an upside-down picture of gun violence prevention vis-à-vis urban poverty. In this regard, they constitute a criminology of poverty that is itself impoverished—a poverty of criminology. Future research should probe the political economy of violence prevention practice and research, from foundations and nonprofits to government and think tanks, to shed light on the narrowness of “evidence-based practice” discourse and its role in reifying the structures that create the conditions fueling urban gun violence.