THE WHITE GHETTO
“In Appalachia the country is beautiful and the society is broken.” Williamson argues many aspects varying from misery to poverty to criminal activity to the “drawing” of welfare checks to survive. Although poverty doesn’t tie into the paper directly it’s the foundation to where the crime starts. Williamson is not from the Appalachia region, but he does a good job delivering the information in way that many can visual what he is talking without feeling he is trying to make you feel one way or another about Appalachian poverty and crime (Williamson, 2014).
According the National Criminal Justice Reference Service, the crime rate in Appalachia is about 2/3 of the national average and the rate of violent crime is half the national average. The article took place in Booneville, Kentucky, which claims the unfortunate title as the poorest county in the United States. Although there isn’t a great deal of violent crime the crimes that do occur include but not limited to drug use, petty crimes and welfare fraud (Williamson, 2014).
In Appalachia, a typical day include popping pills and doing dope, drinking morning beers, doing endless amounts of scratch-off lotto cards, attending healing meetings up on the hilltop, trading cases of food-stamp Pepsi for packs of Kentucky’s Best Cigarettes, occasionally doing meth and the recreationally making and surgically unmaking of teenaged mothers (Williamson, 2014).
What puzzles many researchers is that some families make nearly $3000 a month yet they choose to live off of “the draw.” The draw is the monthly welfare checks that supplement dependents earning in the black-market Pepsi economy. Which is where the welfare fraud comes into. Many families use the EBT they receive and buy rou...
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Addiction is one of the hardest problems to overcome, yet people often find some reward in abusing drugs. We all ask the question to what makes a person an addict, or why is it so hard for drug addicts to kick a drug problem. However, can we say that getting a hold of drugs is much easier in today’s society, or is it made available to easy. In this day and age, heroine seems to be a major epidemic; furthermore, opiates have been around for centuries. Therefore, people have been battling addiction for as long as opiates have been around. In Drugstore Cowboy, the film takes a look in to the life of four people who rob drugstores in order to support their habit; however, this lifestyle
A Ghetto Takes Shape: Black Cleveland, 1870-1930 explains in detail how the author deciphers the ghettoization process in Cleveland during the time period. Kusmer also tries to include studies that mainly pertained to specific black communities such as Harlem, Chicago, and Detroit, which strongly emphasized the institutional ghetto and dwelled on white hostility as the main reasons as to why the black ghetto was
Chasing Heroin is a two-hour documentary that investigates America’s heroin crisis. The documentary details the opioid epidemic and how police offers, social workers, and public defenders are working to save the lives of addicts. The documentary explores the origins and continuing causes behind the heroin epidemic such as; massive increases in opioid painkillers starting at the turn of the century, Mexican drug cartels who are now rooted in upper-middle-class neighborhoods, and the cheap price of heroin when compared to prescription pain killers. A program in Seattle called LEAD is explored. This program channels addicts into a system that points them toward help (rehab, temporary housing, counseling, methadone treatment) instead of prison
Educational absence has proved to be a burden for families in the Appalachian region. Appalachian families suffer intellectually, along with financially. Reports display that the median household income in Appalachia was unluckily around $42,500, which is roughly only $21,000 per adult in each house. An additional 56 counties in Appalachia, unfortunately, had household incomes of under $30,000. In contrast, 19 counties in the region, most of which were in the metropolitan area, had household incomes at or above the national average. Almost all of the counties in the group were outside metropolitan areas and even more of them were in central Appalachia (Pollard, Jacobson 38). This report shows that income levels for the Appalachian region are significantly lower than the rest of the nation, which indirectly illustrates how hard it could be to live on such a low income.
Wise, T. (2012). Dear white America: Letter to a new minority. San Francisco, CA: City
Billings, Dwight B. "The Road to Poverty: The Making of Wealth and Hardship in Appalachia." Booklist 36 (1999): 38.
Connecting Sociology to situations that arise in everyday life has become easier and easier as i have progressed through Intro to Sociology this semester. When choosing what book I was going to analyze for my report, I chose Methland by Nick Reding. It details the quote “death and life of an american small town” through the perspective of those involved in the epidemic of the production of methamphetamine’s in the rural town of Oelwein Iowa. Despite the odds of a poor, small, and rural town in Middle America, Oelwein climbed to the top of the economic ladder with a multi million dollar drug franchise spread throughout the 1990’s. The midwest suffered greatly in the 1980’s with the downfall of the agricultural business in the United States. Soon drug dealers started flocking to these seemingly desolate towns in rural America to safely distribute their product. With the loss of jobs due to the farming downfall, many residents of Oelwein were seeking work and pay in anyway they could find. This is what started the official meth epidemic. Reding spent 4 years in his hometown of Oelwein Iowa to gain insight on the production and consumption of methamphetamine’s in this small town and also shines a spotlight on the problems of meth in this country today. But ironically, the comparison in this story of how the production and consumption of meth seemed to be driving this small town further into extinction, it also brought it back to life. Despite the destruction methamphetamines caused in Oelwein Iowa, the epidemic also brought the town back to life in a way that is irreversible. The highlight of the division of social class and who is able to climb up the social ladder is themed throughout the entire novel.
These crime-ridden communities (or ghettos) are springing up all through the country, mainly in and around major metropolitan areas. These areas are the most populated, so that means that within these areas are the most people there to be influenced by the crimes committed by fellow people. In Male's reading he shows statistics that prove the fact that once the poverty factor is taken away then teen violence disappears. He later adds, “That if America wants to rid of juvenile violence than serious consideration needs to be given to the societally inflicted violence of raising three to 10 times more youth in poverty than other Western nations.” (Males p386)
Dennis Prager makes an interesting claim in which he states that poverty does not cause crime, and uses his personal experience as an example. He goes on to explain how his grandparents made little to no money as the Great Depression emerged. The data Prager presents tell us how about 99 percent of people who live in an apartment or residency have refrigerator, television, and a
It is no secret that, within the last decade, America has faced an economic crisis of historic proportions. Though the nation appears to be in a state of recovery from the greatest recession since the Great Depression, there are still major issues to address; namely poverty. Poverty today has hit more homes than ever, especially in places such as Eastern North Carolina. According to the 2010 Bureau of Economic Analysis, North Carolina ranked as the ninth wealthiest state with gross domestic production worth $424.9 billion.[2] North Carolina is among the top states for agricultural output, which consists of poultry, tobacco, hogs, cattle, sweet potatoes, and soybeans. A U.S. Census Bureau’s Survey, however, states that North Carolina’s poverty rate spiked to 18 percent, surpassing the official national poverty level of 15.2 percent (1). While those percentages may seem considerably small, it equates to 1.7 million people without adequate housing, health care, education or employment. This ranks North Carolina as the 12th highest poverty state in the nation. Moreover, the federal government reports that at least 20 percent of the residents of 10 Eastern North Carolina counties have consistently reported living in poverty for the past 30 years. These counties of “persistent poverty” include Bertie, Bladen, Columbus, Halifax, Martin, Northampton, Pitt, Robeson, Tyrell and Washington County.
In Brent Staples’ "Just Walk on By: Black Men and Public Space," Staples describes the issues, stereotypes, and criticisms he faces being a black man in public surroundings. Staples initiates his perspective by introducing the audience in to thinking he is committing a crime, but eventually reveals how the actions taken towards him are because of the fear linked to his labelled stereotypes of being rapists, gangsters and muggers. Staples continues to unfold the audience from a 20 year old experience and sheds light onto how regardless of proving his survival compared to the other stereotypical blacks with his education levels and work ethics being in the modern era, he is still in the same plight. Although Staples relates such burdens through his personal experiences rather than directly revealing the psychological impacts such actions have upon African Americans with research, he effectively uses emotion to explain the social effects and challenges they have faced to avoid causing a ruckus with the “white American” world while keeping his reference up to date and accordingly to his history.
“In 2014, there were an estimated 1.5 million current (past-month) cocaine users aged 12 or older (0.6 percent of the US population)” (www.drugabuse.gov). Due to El Paso’s proximity to the border, a major percentage of cocaine users lie within this city; however, it is a hidden conflict many people in our population are unaware about. We want to know the manner cocaine use affects the social and economic aspects of the addicted individual’s lives, to get a better understanding of this ongoing issue and bring this subject matter to the people’s attention, and perhaps come up with some solutions to relieve this situation. Our question of research is, how does cocaine use effect socioeconomic factors for addicts?
You can’t turn on the television, or read the paper without hearing about violence in our cities and world. In a report from “Stand Up for Kids” in Chicago, they analyze the relationship between low wages, income inequality, and the epidemic of violence in Chicago’s low income neighborhoods. This report found that in 2012 there were nearly 7,700 gun-related crimes reported in the city. The city of Chicago has the third highest overall metropolitan poverty rate in the nation. Nearly one quarter of all Chicago residents live below the federal poverty threshold according to this report. ("Chicago Not Only Leads the Nation in Gun Violence Rates, but Also in Measures of Urban Poverty." Stand Up Chicago, 1 Feb. 2013. Web. 7 Oct. 2014.) Decades of research have demonstrated that there is a statistically significant link between low wages, income inequality and crime. The analysis presented in this report shows that when a city’s economic conditions improve, the violent crime rates go down.( "Chicago Not Only Leads the Nation in Gun Violence Rates, but Also in Measures of Urban Poverty." Stand Up Chicago, 1 Feb. 2013. Web. 7 Oct. 2014.) Parents and children are turning to violent acts to provide for their family needs. Policy makers and the government need to address the issues of persistent poverty and income inequality such as raising the minimum wage to a living wage and create satisfying jobs for the