The unlikely success of newly released felons from prison is the result of failed city planners and policy makers. Specifically, developmental criminology and developmental sociology in keeping with the tradition of the Chicago ecological school of analysis and the early work of Clifford Shaw and Henry McKay, recently produced a more nuanced examination of neighborhood contexts demonstrating the effects of de-industrialization in American cities, increased joblessness, ineffectual primary and secondary education, and the abandonment of the inner city by policy makers and arguably police and social service agencies. Robert Sampson’s “The Great American City”, illustrates that city policy makers attempts to eliminate dilapidated housing projects and provide new residents for those city dwellers was unsuccessful as it ignored job formation, police re-training, and educational transformation. More recently, Kathryn Edin’s work in Philadelphia and New Jersey examining unwed fathers and unwed mothers among the very poor reveals similar dynamics of inner city abandonment by industry, racist police practices, and poor educational systems.

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