What term describes labeling a neighborhood as bad or dangerous, which can create more problems and disorder?

• A. Social marginality
• B. Ecological contamination
• C. Prosecutorial discretion
• D. Race-of-victim effect

Answer: (B)

Labeling a neighborhood as bad or dangerous can create a self-fulfilling prophecy that worsens the very problems it’s meant to describe. The idea here is ecological contamination: negative stigma attaches to the place and seeps into how institutions, businesses, and residents respond. When a place is branded as dangerous, investors pull back, property values drop, services are reduced, and residents may relocate or withdraw from community life. This degradation of the neighborhood’s social and physical environment feeds more disorder and crime, which then reinforces the initial label. So the term captures how stigma spreads through the neighborhood’s ecosystem and produces additional problems.

The other options don’t fit this place-level, stigma-driven contagion idea: social marginality speaks to individuals’ exclusion rather than how labeling a place itself can contaminate its environment; prosecutorial discretion is about charging decisions; the race-of-victim effect concerns bias related to the victim’s race. Ecological contamination best describes how labeling a neighborhood can generate more disorder through systemic, place-based effects.