The purpose of this chapter is to consider the complex relationship between the American Dream and immigration, and the implications of that relationship for crime in the United States. We elaborate a distinction between the "dark side" and the "bright side" of the American Dream, arguing that immigration has the potential to replenish the Dream's bright side and thus limit the criminogenic consequences of the dark side. At the same time, immigration activates a nativist response by those who believe that the new arrivals threaten their own pursuit of the American Dream. The nativist backlash, in turn, jeopardizes the bright side of the Dream, strengthens the dark side, and generates crime. We conclude by highlighting the social conditions under which immigration is most likely to replenish the bright side of the American Dream.
A decade ago, people published the first edition of Crime and the American Dream. At the time, "institutional-anomie theory" did not exist. The central idea underlying institutional-anomie theory is that a society's level and types of crime are tied to how it is organized. All societies, no matter how small and simple or large and complex, can be characterized by a more or less distinctive culture and social structure. Adaptation to the environment to meet the physical and material needs of a population is the chief function of the economy. Political institutions, or the "polity," enable a population to attain collective goals. Responsibility for social integration and the maintenance of cultural patterns falls to religion, education, and the family system. Although criminality increases when the economy dominates other institutions, alternative institutional configurations also can generate criminality, but of a different sort than that found in market societies.
Several alternative indicators are currently available to researchers, policy makers, and practitioners for gauging levels and patterns of illicit drug use within and across communities. Yet there exists little information that allows reliable comparisons across indicators to determine whether they tell essentially the same story about variation in the prevalence of drug use. In particular, it remains unclear how closely arrest statistics, the leading law enforcement indicator of illicit drug use, correspond to other law enforcement indicators, such as urine tests of jail inmates, or to public health measures, such as emergency departments' and medical examiners' reports. In this paper we assess the relationships between alternative law enforcement and public health indicators of cocaine, heroin, and marijuana use for a sample of large U.S. cities. We find pronounced convergence across measurement systems in cocaine and heroin use, but little convergence for marijuana use. In addition to other research and policy implications, these results increase confidence in the use of arrest data to assess variation across urban areas in cocaine and heroin use.
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