While I was researching for my topic, I stumbled into a bit of a road block.

When researching current crime rights in urban areas, I was greeted with next to no findings. But even more shocking, every piece of evidence contradicted my preconceived notion that crime rates were skyrocketing in cities. I fell down a rabbit hole of finding that I was wrong and my research wasn’t relevant. Crime rates in cities have actually dropped since 2019– drastically.

With this new knowledge, I had to change directions entirely. All of my plans for my project were completely silenced with this new-found information. But the good thing about rabbit holes is you often find things you weren’t trying to find.

The Gold Coast and the Slum

The Gold Coast and the Slum was written by Harvey Warren Zorbaugh in 1929. The book was originally written as a dissertation for Zorbaugh’s PhD. But, it eventually turned into a classic book about Urban segregation. The book’s setting is set in Chicago, specifically the North Side. The book paints a split scene or urban segregation in the city. The Gold Coast symbolized a wealthy, white neighborhood. But the Slum showed a darker side of Chicago, with poverty, gangs, and crime. The book does an incredible social analysis on individual behavior, and community behavior.

What stood out to me the most was the book’s analysis on the dichotomy of city life. Specifically how poverty separates communities, and how cyclical poverty can persist when we allow it to fly under the radar.

But another powerful resource I found was the book The Truly Disadvantaged by William Julius Wilson. This novel discusses the causes and potential solutions for inner city poverty. Most of all, I found his analysis on why impoverished people commit more crimes to be very insightful.

The Truly Disadvantaged: Impoverished

In The Truly Disadvantaged, Wilson describes a chain of events that I never once thought about. The novel saw that unemployment causes poverty, which leads to stress amongst people and their families. These are “cluster effects”, which pile on top of each other to create more stress. These cluster effects weaken family bonds, causing distance and tension. This overall leads to more stress. This undermines the need for formal and informal crime control, as families have more “pressing” matters to focus on. When a family is going through financial struggles, their first priority isn’t worrying about things that seem smaller to them.

Generational poverty is one of the easiest situations to find yourself in. This is often due to the hands-off approach we take to it.

The most hands-off approach we take is incarceration.

The Story of Incarceration

Imagine a 15 year old boy. Possibly even a boy in your own class at school. Or a boy you know who has been through this cycle. He runs in with the law for the first time when he steals $50.00 worth of clothes at a store, and he gets caught. He spends time in a juvenile detention center. He is later released on probation and is sent back to school. For the next 5 years, the boy commits other misdemeanor crimes, from stealing, disorderly conduct, and possession of substances. He receives minor sentences for these. But once you begin the cycle of crime and incarceration, it is hard to rehabilitate.

Once you’ve built your criminal record, places of work don’t want to accept criminals into their offices. Colleges cringe at the sight of juvenile detention. So you’re unemployed. And remember what we covered previously about poverty and crime and stress?

So the boy re-offends. He seeks drugs, he seeks dangerous activity to get drugs, and pursues weapons.

When the boy is 20 he commits his first felony. He commits an armed burglary where he steals $20,000.00 worth of goods. He was sentenced to 15 years in prison without parole.

But that’s exactly the problem.

Once you start the cycle of crime, you’re 95% more likely to re-offend as a man. 63% more likely as a woman.

This is due to the flawed institution of U.S law enforcement. We lack so many reform methods in our country, and we default to long prison sentences. Long prison sentences allow us to have ignorant bliss and wipe our hands clean of crimes committed.

The Impact of Ignorant Bliss

Instead of focusing on the reasons for crime, such as environment, influence, and nature, we stow prisoners away. We don’t rehabilitate people to be functioning members of society. We give them a more dangerous and worse environment, where they have to become more violent to defend themselves.

We create harmful stereotypes on poverty and young offenders. We disconnect ourselves from the problems at hand. Most of all, we are okay with paying our tax dollars to a system that creates more crime.

Reform

Reform is the only way to fix this. We need to reform our own brains- and rethink the way we stereotype others.

“Negative stereotypes are harmful to people of color because assumptions, rather than personalized information, can justify the denial of educational, employment, housing and other opportunities.” – The Momentous Institute, May 2023.

We also need reform in long prison sentences. Law enforcement needs to concoct a way for us to punish offenders, while also posturing them to return to society.

But most of all- there is change in small movement, especially when all of us move. We all posses the voices to create change. And we all can step up to stop the spread of negative stereotypes.

I encourage all of you reading this to take compassion out of this.

Finding compassion for those we don’t understand- is the way we close the gap between the Gold Coast and the Slums.