The Truly Disadvantaged

1. The theme of William Julius Wilson's The Truly Disadvantaged is that the United States has undergone changes in the structure of its economics and social organization that have had a disproportionately negative impact on the inner cities and the largely black populations that inhabit them. He uses the term ghetto underclass to refer to the well-known fact of poverty in the inner cities, noting that experts have long disagreed on the substance of the idea but asserting that reasons for underclass deprivation are less important than understanding that the underclass experiences cycles of more or less deprivation in conjunction with macroeconomic cycles. The big cyclical picture as of 1988, when the book was written, was the shift of the US industrial base from relatively well-paid manufacturing to relatively poorly paid service jobs. Industrial-sector unemployment was especially destructive in dislocating family and employment structures in the inner cities, since young black men lost access to semiskilled jobs. That fostered social problems so often linked to inner-city life--teenage pregnancy, welfare households, family instability, female-headed families, youth gangs and crime (Wilson 3-4, 25). Additionally, working- and middle-class blacks fled the inner city for the suburbs, which robbed the inner city of models of family/social stability as well as of mainstream economic opportunities. That transformed the ghetto from a heterogeneous mixture of (so to speak) deserving

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point administrators into by-the-book operations. The effect is a bureaucracy defined by impersonal procedures that can nevertheless be circumvented, not least by the "guard culture" or by "cliques of guards [that] have special, somewhat devious 'agendas,'" such as brutality toward prisoners (Irwin, p. 63). In other words, modern prison administration seems to have changed one set of autocrats for another, and the effect is not confined to corrections staff but may be visited on inmates as well. The few guards whom some prisoners evidently view as "all right," or facilitative rather than brutal (pp.66ff), augur ill for the future of corrections management. 5. <> 6b. Beginning with the "sobering" statistic that overcrowding has forced officials to release prisoners to make room for new ones, Irwin describes the initial impact of reentry as the "disorganization they experience" when moving from prison to the new outside world. Former prisoners need a place to live, a job, and job training and placement, but legal restrictions may keep them from getting work or finding a home. Usually only low-paying jobs are available, but there is a 70% unemployment rate. Parolees are supervised

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