Urban Injustice: How Ghettos Happen Book Review

PAGES
5
WORDS
1573
Cite

Many of the busts in the ghetto are drug-related, and Hilfiker notes that our society punishes petty drug offences far more severely than crimes committed by people who are wealthy. Meantime, the mandatory minimum sentence takes away the possibility of any plea bargaining; it takes away the judge's previous alternative of giving probation for a petty crime and hands the power to the prosecutor, who runs for office on a "law and order" theme. "Deserving" poor vs. "Undeserving" poor:

It has been customary in America for society to attempt to separate the "undeserving" poor from the "deserving" poor. The deserving poor are those who have supposedly found themselves down on their luck through no fault of their own; while the undeserving are reportedly "lazy" and likely on some government assistance program (Hilfiker, pp. 69-71)....

...

As a token offer of help to the very poor the government makes "TANF" benefits available albeit they are "…so low that no one could survive on them," the author explains (p. 71).
Conclusion

Imagine a family of three, unemployed and eking out a living, trying to get by on $164 a month. That's the unfortunate, unfair reality for those trapped in abject poverty. They may have no choice but to apply for TANF help. They are locked into a system that is loaded with "social and historical structures." This paper agrees wholeheartedly with Hilfiker when he writes (p. 128) that "Justice demands that the conditions in our inner cities be changed." This paper also embraces Hilfiker's quote on page 24: "The poor get it coming and going."

Works Cited

Hilfiker, David. (2002). Urban Injustice:…

Sources Used in Documents:

Works Cited

Hilfiker, David. (2002). Urban Injustice: How Ghettos Happen. New York: Seven Stories Press.


Cite this Document:

"Urban Injustice How Ghettos Happen" (2011, February 20) Retrieved April 19, 2024, from
https://www.paperdue.com/essay/urban-injustice-how-ghettos-happen-11351

"Urban Injustice How Ghettos Happen" 20 February 2011. Web.19 April. 2024. <
https://www.paperdue.com/essay/urban-injustice-how-ghettos-happen-11351>

"Urban Injustice How Ghettos Happen", 20 February 2011, Accessed.19 April. 2024,
https://www.paperdue.com/essay/urban-injustice-how-ghettos-happen-11351

Related Documents

Hilfiker is particularly sensitive to the source of poverty in African-American inner-city ghettoes. His recommendation for ending poverty, was one new program: universal health coverage, to which he argued convincingly, would save all of us as a nation on current health costs and yet could include the 43 million presently uninsured (Seven Stories Press). He also suggested three other existing programs: 1) the earned income tax credit, shown by the economists as

Children There Written by Alex Kotlowitz, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, the book There Are No Children There follows two boys' activities around the Henry Horner Homes, a low-income public housing project in Chicago, Illinois. The book covers the time period from the summer of 1987 through September, 1989, and follows the protagonists, Lafeyette Rivers (nearly 12 years old) and Pharoah Rivers (nine years old). This is not

This is why people that had financial resources to move away from the agitated center often chose Harlem. At the same time however, On the periphery of these upper class enclaves, however, impoverished Italian immigrants huddled in vile tenements located from 110th to 125th Streets, east of Third Avenue to the Harlem River. To the north of Harlem's Italian community and to the west of Eighth Avenue, Irish toughs roamed

" In other words, that art springs from within, rather than must be supported from without. The author places the blame for female artists to be culturally central squarely upon culture itself, specifically Western culture's failure to create systems of educational nurturing for females. "The fault lies not in our stars, our hormones, our menstrual cycles, or our empty internal spaces, but in our institutions and our education -- education understood

Civil Rights and Racism
PAGES 25 WORDS 8232

Racism in America: Where do we stand? From the time of the New World's discovery in the year 1492, racism has remained at the forefront of U.S. history. Even in the present day, it is reported that in America, one Black man dies from police confrontations every 28 hours. A majority of these incidents even fail to show up in local newspapers and news channels. It is only occasionally that these

George Knox, director of the National Gang Crime Research Center, teaches law enforcement officers how to search WebPages to pick up on gang member's lingo, territories, and rivalries. He also asserts it is crucial for officers to learn how to "read between the lines" when searching gang members' WebPages. Time on the Web, similar to time on the streets, gives gang investigators the ability to read the hieroglyphics of wall