Word: underclasses
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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That trend, though, seems to have reversed itself: the crime rate rose again in 1985 and early 1986. Blumstein offers this explanation: while there are fewer young males generally, there has been a disproportionate increase of males in the underclass. This group, with all its attendant ills of poverty, alienation and broken homes, is particularly prone to criminal behavior. "What we're seeing," says Blumstein, "is a changing social-class composition, and crime correlates with social class...
...have only been getting worse. Poverty rates have generally risen since the late '70s, and the rise has been especially rapid among the children the system was designed to help. Welfare mothers who rear children who in turn go on relief are a core element of the so-called underclass. David Ellwood, a Harvard authority on welfare, figures that a quarter of all AFDC recipients have received benefits, off and on, for ten years or more; at any one time they constitute a startling 60% of all recipients. The rise of illegitimate births, especially among ghetto teenagers, has probably done...
...nation that would like to believe it can shun stereotypes, that cherishes the ideals of equality and brotherhood, continues to be haunted by the plight of a segment of its citizenry that remains mired in a seemingly intractable dilemma of race and poverty: the young, black males of its underclass...
...switching from smokestacks to services, from high wages to low, and eventually to chronic high rates of unemployment that penalized the young, the less educated and the latest arrivals. That is, it penalized blacks most of all." Says Wilson: "It's as though racism, having put the black underclass in its economic place, stepped aside to watch technological change finish...
...from upstate New York, is a leading advocate of urban enterprise zones, which would use tax incentives to encourage businesses to provide jobs in depressed urban areas. Others feel that it is necessary to create work programs that will draw young blacks away from the inner cities, where the underclass culture makes it extremely difficult to break out of the poverty cycle. Nicholas Lemann, a journalist with the Atlantic, describes the migration of unskilled Southern blacks into the inner cities followed by the subsequent migration out by those with steady jobs. He argues that the only path into the American...