The United States witnesses a significant growth in the size of its urban underclass each year. A number of sources explain that the percentage of the population persistently poor is large and rapidly increasing, that more and more teenage males are joining gangs, and that the need for welfare is exploding in cities (Jandowski 275). The federal government classifies people as poor if their reported family income for the previous calendar year was less than the official poverty line (Tucker 339). The poverty line, which varies with family size and the age of family members, was created in 1965 and supposedly tied the cost to a nutritionally adequate diet. It is also frequently alleged by Pamela Irving Jackson that crime is on the increase, young people are dropping out of school in record numbers, and higher percentages of the population are withdrawing from the labor force. The poor are also increasingly isolated in ghettos at the cores of our metropolitan areas. The question we will look to answer becomes, is there a link among crime, joblessness and the urban underclass? If so, what can the government do to take control of the number of people who are living in poverty? By viewing urban neighborhoods all over the country its evident crime along with joblessness creates an underclass that lives in urban cities today. This essay will strictly focus on jobless males and their relationship in gangs and the world of crime in urban cities, and how the combination of joblessness and crime within our neighborhoods creates a poor society.

Many early discussions of the underclass treated the term as a synonym for the persistently poor. By the late 1980's, however, a consensus had developed that the underclass was a subset of the poor and that it included only those families and individuals whose poverty was somehow attributable to their behavior (Hunzeker 14). The underclass had, in other words, became a synonym for the undeserving poor. To see whether the impoverished underclass is growing, Tucker proceeds in three steps. First, look at changes in the prevalence of short-term poverty. Second, look at changes in the proportion of the short-term poor who are likely to be poor for a long period of time. Third, look at changes in the proportion of the poor who behave in ways that most Americans consider blameworthy (Tucker 338). These steps appear important to describe how and if the underclass is growing. It's also interesting to observe what conditions constitute a growing underclass.

A considerable number of books have appeared on poverty in the United States, and especially on poverty in our inner cities. (Those included are listed on the works cited page). They are linked by a common subject matter and by a shared feeling that the situation of the poor in bitter time is desperate, but they reflect a wide variety of visions, preoccupations and approaches. Herbert J. Gans describes his standpoint on poverty. Gans writes about urban poverty with dedication for a number of years. He calls his new book The War Against the Poor, but, as he is quick to point out, his real topic is "the war of words" against the poor (Erikson 615). Gans wants his readers to think carefully about the "pejorative labels" we often use when talking about poor people because those expressions act to "stereotype, stigmatize, and harass the poor" by implying that they are "moral inferiors" and thus responsible for their own fate (Watts 82). The two principal offenders, says Gans, are "culture of poverty," introduced into everyday conversation by Oscar Lewis thirty years ago, and "under-class" introduced by Gunnar Myrdal at about the same time and gaining in conversation ever since (Erikson 617). Gans is particularly concerned that these terms and others like them seem to suggest that poor people are characterized by defective moral writing of some kind and thus belong to what an older generation called "the undeserving poor" (Pinderhoughes 26). The danger from such labels, Gans warns, is that "they focus on behavior that hides the poverty causing it, and subsides as its cause moral or cultural or genetic failure" (Nation 145). Gans ideas are logical in determining why those people not on welfare view the poor as lower society. It appears easy to get mixed up in the language of our culture rather than doing something to make the situation more favorable. Who's to say that the poor are undeserving, it's possible the people on welfare at one time had jobs and lost them for extenuating circumstances such as being laid-off.

Men without regular jobs populate every journalistic and scholarly description of lower-class life. American sociologists have traditionally seen chronic male joblessness as a defining characteristic of the lower class and many writers now define the underclass in the same way (Erikson 616). Yet, while many writers see chronic joblessness as a necessary condition for membership in the underclass, few see it as sufficient. For example, a computer engineer who makes a fortune, sells his company, and never works again is not a member of the underclass, even if he spends most of his time in an alcoholic stupor (Jackson 79). Nor is a disabled construction worker with good disability benefits and a working wife part of the underclass. It is the combination of chronic joblessness and inadequate income that makes a man part of the underclass. The best way to measure chronic joblessness would probably be to ask working-age adults how many months they had worked in the past five years. This figure should give a respectable number of those people who can be categorized as the jobless. These people in turn are the cause and effect of many other situations in the inner cities today, the most important result of joblessness being crime (Jackson 63).

Almost everyone agrees that joblessness alone is not sufficient to make a man a member of the underclass. It is the combination of joblessness and poverty that defines the jobless underclass (Hunzeker 28). And it does not necessarily mean that we should exclude from the underclass every chronically jobless man whose family has an income above the poverty line. If a permanently jobless man has no income of his own, lives with his parents or siblings, and escapes poverty only because their income is above the poverty line, we might want to include him in the jobless underclass. Likewise, if a man lives alone, works diligently, and earns just enough to stay above the official poverty line ($6,155 for a single man in 1988), we might want to include him in the underclass (Watts 45). As a first approximation, however, excluding those who are not poor from the underclass surely makes more sense than including them. Thus joblessness and poverty come in consequence with one another. It would seem logical that if there were a large concentration of jobless individuals in a specific concentration it would be very poor... right?

On the contrary, there are arguments that specify no relationship between joblessness and poverty exists. If we set aside inmates of institutions whose families income is unknown, more than half of all prime-age jobless men now live in families with incomes above the poverty line. The big increase in joblessness has been among men whose families are not poor. By some measures discussed by Tucker, the jobless underclass did not grow at all between 1959 and 1979. It did grow between 1979 and 1986, but that may have been partly because some parts of the country had not fully recovered from the 1980-83 recession (Tucker 338).

When the economic cost of joblessness declines, we expect some chronically jobless men to leave the labor force. The puzzle is not why such men stop working but why everyone else gets so upset when this happens. Judging by what the men were paid, employers never thought their services worth much. The men's departure from the labor force cannot, therefore, have reduced the nation's economic output significantly. Nonetheless, the idleness of those who aren't working makes almost everyone who works angry (Hunzeker 14). Indeed the spread of idleness among prime-age men is one of the main reasons why the affluent now feel less moral obligation to the poor than they felt in the 1960's or early 1970's. Most theories about the underclass assume that chronic joblessness has increased more in poor inner-city neighborhoods than elsewhere. Published evidence on the relationship between poor and jobless in the cities is surprisingly difficult to find, but an unpublished paper by Mark Hughes suggests that geographic differences followed much the same pattern as racial differences, at least during the 1970's (Erikson 616). The proportional increase in joblessness was roughly the same in good and bad neighborhoods. However the absolute increase was much greater in bad neighborhoods. Bad neighborhoods meaning those with a high crime rate which ultimately contained the highest increase in joblessness.

How is crime related so closely to joblessness? Ever since the days of immigration dating back to the 1840's it is clear that the urban underclass defines a direct affect of both crime and joblessness. The neighborhoods of New York City for example were being filled everyday with newcomers from Ireland and Germany (Pinderhughes 29). The rush of poor people coming to start a new life in American cities had caused a chain reaction that each individual neighborhood is unable to escape. There were only so many jobs that could be consumed and there weren't possibly enough for everyone to fill. The consequences are obvious, that many new immigrants were left jobless and poor just as they had come. Personally I don't think much could have been done to stop this sudden flow of immigrants and the future of poor urban cities was inevitable. The same pattern was repeated by successive waves of immigrants and many neighborhoods remain today just how they had over one hundred years ago. The city of Brooklyn had its population of African Americans more that quadruple between 1900 and 1930 (Pinderhughes 31). As African Americans moved into jobs became scarce and other businesses moved to the suburbs which weren't as overcrowded. Here only those middle class blacks with enough money could move out to reestablish themselves (Hunzeker 16). Moving out only left a poorer concentration in Brooklyn for example that was unable to rid itself of the urban underclass. Thus people became desperate and resorted to crime to solve their problems and try to salvage anything for their families, some even joined gangs. Even today Brooklyn has thousands of homeless people, a large African American population and a high crime rate (Godfrey 62).

Journalists, politicians, cab drivers, and graduate students are all convinced that violent crime has increased over the past generation, especially in poor black areas of urban cities. One reason the underclass hypothesis appeals to many Americans is that it seems to explain the breakdown of law and order in urban areas (Jankowski 141). The federal Government collects three kinds of statistics on the level of violence in the United States. The National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) uses statistics provided by state and local health departments to estimate the proportion of people murdered each year. The Bureau of Justice Statistics uses the Census Bureau's ongoing victimization survey to estimate the number who were raped, robbed, or assaulted in a given year. And the Federal Bureau of Investigation uses data provided by state and local police departments to estimate the number of violent crimes "known to the police" (Hunzeker 28). In the cases of homicide, robbery and aggravated assault all have shown the same trend in maintaining the highest crime statistics in our urban cities such as New York and Los Angeles (Rex 59). These statistics are important in displaying a picture of what crimes are being committed by jobless individuals in the popular inner cities of the United States.

While violence was almost certainly less common in America in the late 1980's than it had been in 1980 or even 1970, the figures might not mean that the underclass has become less violent. Violence could have increased among members of the underclass while declining among more advantaged groups (Rex 73). Unfortunately, there are no reliable data on changes in the economic background of violent criminals. Violence could also have increased in poor inner-city neighborhoods while decreasing elsewhere. It should be possible to test this hypothesis using data from victimization surveys, but the Bureau of Justice Statistics does not report victimization rates for census tracts with different characteristics (Jackson 53). Most big-city police departments report homicides by geographic area, but so far from my research; no one I have studied has used these data to see whether homicide rose faster in poor neighborhoods than in rich ones after 1970. It could be assumed that the numbers had risen faster in poor societies because of the violence that explodes everyday, whether it includes gangs or other individual infractions. I will argue that gangs are most influential in a circumstance such as the urban underclass because most males lead gangs and through gangs one can see a group of people rather than a single individual.

"Gang members overwhelmingly belong to an urban minority underclass" (Hunzeker 29). Research suggests that gangs and gang crime increase as economic opportunities decline. Ronald Huff, who directs the Criminal justice Research Center at Ohio State University, has documented the fact that as manufacturing jobs were lost and unemployment rose in "rust belt" cities, low-income areas became fertile ground for juvenile gangs (Watts 49). Watts' findings again portray a direct correlation between crime, joblessness and the poor. The correlation appears so inconsequential however the relationship needs to be addressed if anything is going to be done to fix the growing problem of crime in inner cities. Most people in the low-income inner cities of America face a situation in which a gang already exists in their area. Therefore the most salient question facing them is not whether to start a gang or not, but rather whether to join an existing one.

Many of the reasons for starting a new gang are related to issues having to do with organizational development and decline-that is, with the existing gang's ability to provide the expected services, which include those that individuals considered in deciding to join. Services that include support, protection and a family that may not otherwise be existent. Those who had joined a gang most often gave as their reason, the belief that it would provide them with an environment that would increase their chances of securing money. "Defiant individuals constantly calculate the costs and benefits associated with their efforts to improve their financial well-being" (Jankowski 126). Therefore, on the one hand, some of these people believe that if they engage in economic ventures on their own, they will, if successful, earn more per venture than if they acted as part of a gang. However, there is also the belief that if one participates in economic ventures with a gang, it is likely that the amount earned will be more regular, although perhaps less per venture. Some of these ventures include robbery such as car stealing or any other money making criminal event (Jankowski 105). Gangs directly contribute to our nations criminal statistics that stem from joblessness and result to the stigma of an urban underclass.

"Others decided to join the gangs for financial security" (Erikson 618). They viewed the gang as an organization that could provide them or their families with money in times of emergency. Gangs represented the combination of a bank and a social security system. In this case concerning gangs it shows how valuable money is to someone and what a person will do to maintain financial security. Here's a relative scenario told by a young man in a poor Manhattan neighborhood.

His ideas are alike to so many young adults who are jobless in today's urban centers. Gangs provide a way out of poverty for particular poor people, however in the mix they are brought into a world of crime (Erikson 616). Gangs are assumed to be associated with crime in our culture and through the quote above it's in part possible that ultimately joblessness may lead to crime. There is no definitive way to control people from resorting to crime as a way to get out of poverty. I believe all the government can do for the inner cities is offer appealing welfare programs that not only give money to the needy but also add incentives and motivation for the poor to obtain jobs in our work force.

Ultimately neighborhoods are a vast collection of people and cultures mixed together trying to accomplish the common goal of staying above the poverty line. I think the goal is to maintain security for oneself and if there is a family involved also one's family. Through the journey of continuing financial security there are obstacles that hamper the flow of daily life, and these range anywhere from being fired on the job to never having a job at all. The evidence I have observed in this essay seems to put fourth the same idea that joblessness may come at any point in time. And also that the condition of joblessness for men often leads to a life of crime, most commonly in gangs. No matter what the condition may be each individual must work to stay out of the urban underclass which is filled with crime and poverty. Otherwise the statistics are not favorable that an individual will come out of poverty once already their (Tucker 338). So one final projection would suggest to do all that one can to help the jobless not giving them a chance to join gangs and add to the statistics of the urban underclass.

Erikson, Kai. "Improving Poor People: The welfare state, the "underclass." And Urban Schools as History." Nation, Nov.1995, 616.

Godfrey, A.W. "The way we really were." Commonwealth, v22, Feb.24, 1995, 338.

Hunzelar, Donna. "Ganging up against violence. (U.S. criminal street gangs)." State Legislatures, May, 1993, 28.

Hunzelar, Donna. "Combating a Culture of Violence." State Legislatures, March, 1994, 14.

Jackson, Pamela I. Minority Group Threat, Crime, and Policing. New York:

Praeger Publishers, 1989.

Jandowski, Martfn S. Islands in the Street. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991.

Pinderhoughes, Howard. Race In The Hood. Minneapolis: Minnesota Press, 1997.

Rex, John. The Ghetto and the Urban Underclass. New York: New York, 1998.

Tucker, Bruce. "Improving Poor People: The Welfare State, the "Underclass." And Urban Schools as History." Canadian Journal of History, 1996, 338.

Watts, Harold W. "The Urban Underclass." Industrial and Labor Relations Review, July 1992, 819-820.