Word: scenarios
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...That's not how it works now. In the cities of Australia, a typical scenario sees a group of teenage boys approach a group of girls at the beach. After some desultory conversation, the boys suggest an exchange of mobile-phone numbers. It's rare for a girl to say no, even if she doesn't like a guy. Better to give a fake number than make a scene. "I just kind of give it to anybody. I don't really think about it," says 15-year-old Kathleen. The boy's first text message might arrive the same night...
...TIME: That sounds like a very dark scenario...
...things can happen when people are plucked out of lawless neighborhoods and put somewhere else, criminologists have found. In the more hopeful scenario, people who parachute into better neighborhoods commit less violent crime. That theory posits that places like New Orleans, where poverty is extreme, are inherently crimogenic--which is to say, they produce deviant behavior, just like alcohol. Gangs are also crimogenic. When people leave gangs, they are generally less violent than they were as gang members. In neighborhoods and gangs, in other words, violence--and peace--is contagious...
...there is another scenario that is less promising. That one predicts that when people lose connections to their old neighborhoods, they also lose something good. They lose reasons to do the right thing. "One of the things that keeps people straight is the fact that there are people who are important to them around. They don't want to embarrass themselves," says Alfred Blumstein, a criminologist at Carnegie Mellon. "As you disperse people into unfamiliar environments, without these people they care about, there is less control over them, and they could become more troublesome...
...days before Katrina struck, B-Stupid Harris was in the parish jail--again--accused of shooting a man to death in Central City, a neighborhood between the Superdome and the Garden District, three months before. It was a familiar scenario. As a juvenile, Harris was arrested more than a dozen times, according to the Houston Chronicle. When he was 16, he was charged with killing a 24-year-old in the courtyard of a housing project. A grand jury indicted Harris as an adult on first-degree murder charges, but then two years went by while the court considered...