The Ghetto Research Paper

America’s “fear of crime” has led to today’s warehouse prisons, entrusted to enclose underclass minority groups, caught in the symbiosis of the ghetto and prison. Both, spaces of isolation designed to neutralize the threat of destitute minorities they pose to the mainstream population (Wacquant, 2000: 378). This, then, has developed a state, whereas the symbiotic relationship between the ghetto and the criminal justice system is the instruments by which the elite control the poor. Largely, due to socioeconomic and institutional manipulation of powerful elites which augments the inmate disparity. Inevitably, maintains the marginalization of the poor, deprecating their life chances as a result. In this manner, spatial containment preserves the …show more content…
This device served the purpose to isolate the outcasts, so as to protect the interests of the elite from any association with the under-caste. Put simply, ghettoization, allowed the powerful to exploit and profiteer from the dispossessed, while excommunicating outsiders, “to avert the threat of symbolic corrosion and contagion they (Jews) carried” (Smelser et al., 2004: 2). Broadly construed, the ghetto severely curtails the life chances of those condemned to it, ensuring their social ostracism, their commodification and exclusion by those who fear are a threat to the fabric of …show more content…
And, despite past attempts to escape Jim Crow, racial isolation has since been sown into the fabric of American society. Notwithstanding, animosity toward blacks increasingly stereotyped “mentally unfit, entirely irresponsible, and therefore, undesirable as neighbors” (Wacquant, 2001: 102), perpetuate segregation rituals (e.g., in jobs & education). At this extreme, blacks have been forced into inner city slums. Scholars maintain, “urban density is robustly associated with crime and narco-trafficking, since greater concentrations of people inevitably trigger competition over limited resources, expanding stresses and social anomie” (Jutersonke et al., 2009: 3). In this view, the fragmented space of the urban ghetto, whose environment lacks social cohesion, results in the disruption of social norms and principles. To a great extent, as a result from the deprivation of resources, social disorganization and social destitution. In the words of sociologist and scholar Loic Wacquant, “the ghetto has become a hermetic city within a white society” (Wacquant, 2002: 102), efficient in trapping dishonored populations. By so doing, protects the whites from being tainted from destitute

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