Prison Like Ghetto Environments example essay topic

Rob Hill Professor Terry ThuemlingWP 121 G 5 November 2004 Behind the Walls of the Ghetto Commenting on the famed Los Angeles ghetto in which he grew up, gangster rapper Ice Cube asserts, "If you ain't never been to the ghetto, don't ever come to the ghetto" (Cube, Ghetto Vet). But why are American ghettos filled with so much violence, drugs, and inopportunity? In John Singleton's powerful drama Boyz N the Hood the harsh reality of youths growing up in South Central Los Angeles, a place where drive-by shootings and unemployment are rampant, is brought to life. Shot entirely on location in South Central LA, Boyz N the Hood presents its story with maximum honesty and realism.

The movie is a prime example of how American ghettos are dead end environments with minute chances for survival. If we are to put an end to the destitute, prison-like ghetto environments, we first need to take a look at what goes on there. One can point to many initiating factors from racism to property owner's aspirations of gentrification that create ghettos. Furious Styles, the strong and intelligent father of the film's main character Tre, addresses the issue of why these areas are in such a dire state when he says: [... ] How do you think the crack rock gets into the country we [black people] don't own any planes, we don't own no ships... we are not the people who are fly in' and float in' that shit in here [... ] why is it that there a gun shop on almost every corner in this community? [...

] For the same reason that there's a liquor store on almost every corner in the Black community, [... ] they want us to kill ourselves. You go out to Beverly Hills you don't see that shit, the best way you can destroy a people is if you take away their ability reproduce themselves. (Singleton) In this passage, Furious presents ideas of white property holders looking for the best way to exterminate the Black and Hispanic communities in their area. The late rapper Tupac Shakur once declared, "We [Black people] ain't meant to survive cut it's a set up" (Shakur, Keep Ya Head Up). As far-fetched as these notions may seem, they may hold more truth than one thinks.

Questions arise as to the relation between the ghetto and the upper class areas. Oddly, these communities, though only miles apart, are completely detached. In a study on ghettos in America, Ed Glaeser writes that: These districts commonly called 'ghettos,' function culturally, intellectually, and economically apart from the busy downtown. The distance from Wall Street to the South Bronx, along these dimensions, is greater than that between New York and London or Tokyo. (Glaeser 1) The isolation of these areas seems to be the main element that is fueling the influx of violence, drugs, and unemployment. The area of Los Angeles in which Boyz N the Hood was filmed, deemed South Central, is a mere 12 miles from the downtown area.

It's hard to believe that only 12 miles from one of the cities that virtually defines American culture; gunfire, drugs, and retched living conditions, are commonplace. The upper class provinces of LA such as Beverly Hills and Bel Air, which are quite differently a prime area of opportunity and big business, are the first thought of when describing the cultural make-up of the Los Angeles area. The structural characteristics of the ghetto are a reflection of its situation. Fortification appears to epitomize the ghetto in America today, just as back alleys, crowded tenements, and lack of play areas defined the slum of the late nineteenth century. In an essay dealing with the fortification of ghettos, Camillo Jose Vergara points out: Even in areas where statistics show a decrease in major crime, fortification continues to escalate, and as it does, ghettos lose their coherence. Neighborhoods are replaced by a random assortment of isolated bunkers, structures that increasingly resemble jails or power stations, their interiors effectively separated from the outside".

(Vergara 1) Some hypotheses assert that people buy weapons and install security devices in response to growing fears of crime and a declining lack of faith in agencies, such as the police, to protect them (Hagan 2). Fortification is seen when looking at the South Central neighborhood that was filmed in Boyz N the Hood. Complete with bars and walls, this wasteland of a neighborhood gives the impression that the residents of the area are on their own when it comes to guarding against the unforgiving conditions they live in. Along these lines, a lack of municipal infrastructure is apparent in the film during such scenes as the one where a young Tre and his friends decide to go and look at a dead body that has been sitting long enough that it has begun to stink (Singleton).

The fact that nobody came to retrieve the body or even worry about how and why it got there in the first place, shows that the people of these neighborhoods are pretty much left to there own devices to deal with situations such as this. Vergara continues: In South Central Los Angeles a basic fortress is a bungalow with a small green lawn. The dwelling's first line of defense is an iron door, usually painted black. Metal bars on the windows add further protection, changing the once-friendly character of the wood and stucco houses. Less visible are the iron spikes to ward off trespassers. (Vergara 2) These types of precautionary structures say something about the virtual war zone that exists within ghettos.

These precautions seem necessary in a place where police are perceived as uncaring and distant, taking a long time to respond to calls if not refusing to come at all. Toward the beginning of the film, there is a scene where a burglar breaks into Furious and Tre's house narrowly missing two bullets from Furious' 357 Magnum in his escape. In response to the incident the police take over an hour to arrive. Casually stepping out of the squad car drinking coffee and eating a doughnut, one of the policeman remarks, "So nothing was stolen?

[... ] Good, then we don't need to make out a report. [... ] You know it's a shame you didn't get him, be one lest nigger out here on the streets we have worry about" (Singleton).

The police lose nearly all faith and credibility placed in them as they demonstrate an innate lack of concern for the people in these areas. For several reasons, procedures used by police to respond to disorder are often ineffective. According to one journalist reporting on crime and delinquency, one reason is the ambiguity of disorderly conduct rules, unintentionally reinforcing the very behavior those rules proscribe (Guarino-Ghezzi 2). Furthermore, a second problem of controlling disorder is that aggressive police tactics, such as saturation patrol and suspicion stops, may actually increase disorder (Guarino-Ghezzi 2). In her study, Susan Guarino-Ghezzi notes: Interviews with Boston youths suggested that "stop and frisk" policies used by police in high-crime neighborhoods to confiscate weapons did not produce organized rebellion, but did increase defiance and frustration, weakening police-youth relations. (Guarino-Ghezzi 2) At one point in the film, Tre and a friend are pulled over by two cops, supposedly due to suspicion of drug possession.

After the two boys are thoroughly frisked, manhandled, and pinned down on the hood of the police car, one of the cops pulls out his service revolver, points it at the tearing face of Tre and says: Oh so your scared now huh, I like that, that's why I took this job, I hate little mother fuckers like you, you little niggas ain't shit, think you tough huh, I could blow your head off with this Smith and Wesson and you couldn't do shit, so how you feel now". (Singleton) The ghetto has a detrimental effect on its inhabitants, especially its youth. In one of the closing scenes, Ricky, Tre's college bound best friend is gunned down over an insignificant altercation, by gang-bankers, who wish nothing more than to prove how hard they are. The opening graphic of the film emphasizes the statistic, "One out of every twenty-one Black American males will be murdered in their lifetime", and that "Most will die at the hands of another Black male" (Singleton). Growing up in a world that suffers from what is described by one journalist as, ". ... an extreme lack of autonomy... most vulnerable to massive increases and decreases in property investment: deprived by suburbanization, stigmatized by public housing construction, displaced by gentrification, and under the surveillance and control of the police, the state, and moral authorities", youths become products of the environment, prone to such things as drugs and violence (Zukin 6). Glaeser notes: ...

Blacks and Hispanics who live in ghettos are far more likely to be neither in school nor working than those from more integrated communities... results suggest the average of Black or Hispanic youths employed or in school would rise a dramatic 10 percentage points if he or she moved to the neighborhood where the average white youth lives. (Glaeser 4) In the film Ice Cube's character, Doughboy, along with his group friends, are perfect examples of youths that have embraced their ghetto environment. From the start of the film where all the main characters are portrayed as young kids, Doughboy and lie' Chris are shown as hardened kids, bragging about imprisoned relatives and the guns they " ve held (Singleton). Doughboy and Chris are later taken away by the police for stealing candy, segueing into seven years later where everyone is at a welcome home from prison party for a now teenage Doughboy.

As the levelheaded teenage Tre arrives at the party Doughboy's mother urges him to talk some sense into Doughboy to make that the last time he " ll be in and out of jail (Singleton). For the rest of the film Doughboy and the rest of his friends do nothing more but hang outside his house, drink 40's, and talk about their thug lifestyles (Singleton). The disturbing facts that surround these ghettos appear to be placed away from the eyes of the rest of the American public, though we may know to stay away from the ghettos of America, few look to put an end to the tragic state of this prison-like environment complete with bars, walls, and guards. Ghettos are looked upon as a disease with no apparent cure.

In one of the last lines in the film, Doughboy states in relation to his only brother's recent murder, ". ... either they don't know, don't show, or don't care about what's go in' on in the Hood... ". (Singleton). Though Ricky had found a way to escape the deplorable confines of his neighborhood prison before he was brutally murdered, the only course of his future he was concerned about was a career in football. During the scene in the movie when a recruiter from USC comes to visit Ricky, the man discovers that Ricky had not yet thought about what he was actually going to study if he was accepted, and was obviously counting on pursuing a career in the NFL (Singleton). The chances of being handed a career in professional football, or any other sport after college, is slim to none.

At the very least, more high profile avenues out of the ghetto such as science and the arts need to be instituted in order to provide better opportunity for the futures of ghetto youths.

Bibliography

Boyz N The Hood. Dir. John Singleton. Perf. Ice Cube, Cuba Gooding Jr., Morris Chestnut, and Larry Fishburne. Columbia Pictures, 1991.
Glaeser, Ed. "Ghettos". Regional Review 7 (1997): 1-7.
Guarino-Ghezzi, Susan. "Reintegrative Police Surveillance of Juvenile Offenders: Forging An Urban Model". Crime & Delinquency. 40 (1994): 1-16.
Hagan, John. "Class Fortification Against Crime In Canada". Canadian Review of Sociology & Anthropology. 29 (1992): 1-11.
Vergara, Camilo Jose. "A Guide to the Ghettos". Nation Company Inc. 256 (1993): 1-5.
Vergara, Camilo Jose. "Our Fortified Ghettos". Nation Company Inc. 258 (1994): 1-4.
Vergara, Camilo Jose. "Traces of Life: The Visual Language Of the Ghetto". RC Publications Inc. 47 (1993): 1-4.
Zukin, Sharon. "How 'Bad' Is It? : Institutions and Intentions in the Study Of the American Ghetto". International Journal of Urban & Regional Research 22 (1998): 1-11.