Interconnectivity of Social Problems Social Problems

Criminal sanctions and victimization work to form a system of disadvantage that perpetuates stratification and poverty. Punishment impacts individuals convicted of felonies, as well as their families, peer groups, neighborhoods, and racial group. After controlling for population differences, African-Americans are incarcerated approximately seven times as often as Whites. Variation in criminal punishment is linked to economic deprivation. As the number of felons and former felons rises, collateral sanctions play an ever-larger role in racial and ethnic stratification, operating as an interconnected system of disadvantage.

~Wheelock & Uggen, 2006

Crime, punishment, and poverty are related issues. There are many causes and reasons crime exists, which explains the field of criminology. Punishment, if referring to the formal kind, relates to topics such as law enforcement, public administration, health care, the legal system, and others. Poverty is definitely a social issue. In fact, all of these issues are social issues that exist in a network of human behaviors and social institutions.

While individuals make choices and there is great variation in personality, the social structures and various classes of strata that individual occupies (the ones that warrant the greatest attention) weigh heavily on the social and economic options available. In other words,...

Wheelock and Uggen contend that there is a system in place that perpetuates the unbalanced state and lifestyle, which lends itself to higher rates of crime, higher likelihood of stern punishment, and continued poverty.
Just as a death in the family or a lost job affects an entire family, as does incarceration and other forms of punishment disperse an intense affect upon the networks of people connected to convicts. The networks can be local, actual, and physical, or they can be imagined, hypothetical, yet the connections between the convict and other groups are evident. Wheelock and Uggen use the example of African-Americans convicts. Those people's punishments affected their families (if any), communities, associates, etc., as well as the entire African-American community in general.

Wheelock and Uggen further argue that African-Americans are several times more likely to be incarcerated by whites. For most of American history, the cultural stereotypes were that black people were more often to be in prison because inherently there is something evil or criminal about all black people. There are examples of good and bad within every single culture, country, and ethnicity on Earth; there always have been and there always will be.

What some white…