I guess it is unfortunate that the suburbs are where the poor are these days [1]. I think your description is accurate although the motivations are not. Neighbourhoods were designed to be convenient to residents and inconvenient to non-residents. This does discourage crime as it makes non-residents more visible and that makes it more difficult to commit a crime and not be noticed.
Envision a tree, and consider who might be traveling the links near the leaves. It will be fewer people - and more predictably the same people - compared to a grid where anyone could reasonably take any path through the graph.
[1] http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Society/2013/0911/Face-of-US-po...