Inner‐city concentrated poverty and neighborhood distress: 1970 to 1990

Abstract

Tract‐level data from the 1970, 1980, and 1990 censuses of population are used to identify poverty neighborhoods, extreme poverty neighborhoods, distressed neighborhoods, and severely distressed neighborhoods within the nation's 100 largest central cities. Changes in demographic and socioeconomic characteristics of these neighborhoods are documented, including racial/ethnic composition; poverty population concentration; school dropout rates; and rates of joblessness, single‐parent households, and welfare receipt.

Results show that despite some encouraging individual city turnarounds in the Northeast (especially in New York, Newark, and Philadelphia), urban poverty concentration and neighborhood distress worsened nationwide between 1980 and 1990. The greatest deterioration occurred in midwestern cities, particularly in Detroit. Southern cities, whose neighborhoods and cities typically improved during the 1970s, slipped during the 1980s; conditions in western cities also deteriorated. Blacks fared worse than whites and Hispanics during the 1980s in terms of increased concentration of poor in poverty tracts and distressed urban neighborhoods.     

Proportionality and Self-Defense

Proportionality is widely accepted as a necessary condition of justified self-defense. What gives rise to this particular condition and what role it plays in the justification of self-defense seldom receive focused critical attention. In this paper I address the standard of proportionality applicable to personal self-defense and the role that proportionality plays in justifying the use of harmful force in self-defense. I argue against an equivalent harm view of proportionality in self-defense, and in favor of a standard of proportionality in self-defense that requires comparable seriousness and takes into account the wrong, as opposed simply to the harm that the victim is fending off. I distinguish the standard of proportionality in self-defense from proportionality in circumstances of necessity, and I discuss whether proportionality is an internal or an external constraint on the right of self-defense.     

Rhetoric and the recovery of civil society

By privileging the search for an overall order, both in its theorizing and in its aim, modern social theory has paid insufficient attention to the ‘zones’ of activity in between established institutions-called here the realm of civil society. This is an important neglect. For although the activity in such zones appears essentially disorderly, it permits many local and momentary orderings. Indeed, if one can speak of the ‘common sense’ of a social group at all, then it consists not only: 1) in the argumentative contesting of a whole range of not-as-yet wholly formulated visions of future ways of ‘going on’, but also in: 2) the provision of the historically developed socio-ontological resources required for their realization. Civil society thus contains the ‘seeds’ of future possibilities. Taking activity in this realm seriously means that our current task in social studies, is not the scientific one of discoveringan already existing order, but that of enabling the reinstitution of what, traditionally, was the task of rhetoric: to explicate, in a non-eliminative form of competition involving rival formulations, the implications of different accounts of the nature of our social lives together.     

The Relationship Between School Engagement and Delinquency in Late Childhood and Early Adolescence

Engagement in school is crucial for academic success and school completion. Surprisingly little research has focused on the relationship between student engagement and delinquency. This study examines whether engagement predicts subsequent school and general misconduct among 4,890 inner-city Chicago elementary school students (mean age: 11 years and 4 months; 43.3% boys; 66.5% black; 28.8% Latino). To improve upon prior research in this area, we distinguish three types of engagement (emotional, behavioral, and cognitive), examine whether the relationship between engagement and misconduct is bidirectional (misconduct also impairs engagement), and control for possible common causes of low engagement and misconduct, including peer and family relationships and relatively stable indicators of risk-proneness. Emotional and behavioral engagement predict decreases in school and general delinquency. However, cognitive engagement is associated with increases in these outcomes. School and general delinquency predict decreased engagement only in the cognitive domain. Suggestions for future research and implications for policy are discussed.