Race, social systems, and the creation of poverty

In our discussion today of the role of social systems in creating / limiting opportunities, I was terribly remiss in not  sharply naming race and racism as a motivating factor in the reduction of social policies and public supports to urban communities from the 1970s.  Yes, the retirement of social supports affected poor whites (in far higher numbers than we recognize) but from the 1970s social services and poverty were largely coded in reference to African Americans.  Race was critical in the shift in these policies and in the subsequent growth in income inequality.

And here's another article on the same subject from today's New York Times that I found fascinating.  It argues that long prison terms serve to assure that families and communities remain in poverty.

Prison and the Poverty Trap (excerpted here)

“Prison has become the new poverty trap,” said Bruce Western, a Harvard sociologist. “It has become a routine event for poor African-American men and their families, creating an enduring disadvantage at the very bottom of American society.”

Among African-Americans who have grown up during the era of mass incarceration, one in four has had a parent locked up at some point during childhood. For black men in their 20s and early 30s without a high school diploma, the incarceration rate is so high — nearly 40 percent nationwide — that they’re more likely to be behind bars than to have a job.
 When sociologists look for causes of child poverty and juvenile delinquency, they link these problems to the incarceration of parents and the resulting economic and emotional strains on families.
 

Before the era of mass incarceration, there was already evidence linking problems in poor neighborhoods to the high number of single-parent households and also to the high rate of mobility: the continual turnover on many blocks as transients moved in and out.

Now those trends have been amplified by the prison boom’s “coercive mobility,” as it is termed by Todd R. Clear, the dean of the School of Criminal Justice at Rutgers University. In some low-income neighborhoods, he notes, virtually everyone has at least one relative currently or recently behind bars, so families and communities are continually disrupted by people going in and out of prison.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/19/science/long-prison-terms-eyed-as-contributing-to-poverty.html?pagewanted=2&hpw