Prison, Judicial Ghetto

Ghettos

Many studies have linked crime to poverty, drug use, and lack of opportunity for legitimate approaches to economic success. A common explanation of why African Americans are arrested at a higher rate than Whites is that crime is more common in neighborhoods where African Americans reside. Criminal justice efforts are more intense in urban areas with high crime rates and high drug use. Such locations are commonly labeled as the ghetto. The most common depiction of the ghetto is that it is a segregated district, an ethnic neighborhood, or area of extreme poverty where members of the “underclass” reside. Some depict the 20th-century U.S. ghetto as a sociospatial device that enables a dominant status group in an urban setting simultaneously to ostracize and exploit a subordinate group. These areas are an ethnoracial prison because ghettos encage a dishonored category and severely curtail the life chances of its members, including their chances to attain material goods or opportunities. This suppression is carried out by the dominant status group. Scholars have argued that ghettos were created to protect the city's residents from the pollution of an outcast group.

Judicial Ghetto

There is an overrepresentation of Blacks behind bars due to mass imprisonment in the United States. This is linked to the crime and punishment model practiced by the present criminal justice system. One popular criticism of prison is that it is one of the peculiar institutions that attempts to confine African Americans, along with other peculiar institutions throughout the history of the United States. Other similar institutions are slavery, the Jim Crow regime, and the ghetto. The [Page 650]term judicial ghetto describes what some believe to be our modern-day prison. Many comparisons have been made with prisons and ghettos.

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