It seems in recent years that the only time you should want to watch your local news is if you want to hear something tragic. When was the last time you seen a report with video footage of children happily playing basketball in an urban community park or a game of kickball in a field and the story end there? When was the last time you heard the same story end with "when a seven-year old was fatally shot by a stray bullet"? The latter seems to be the more common and unfortunate these days. Due to the increased level of poverty, crime and drugs in urban community's young males and violence seem to be the cause of almost every victim there is to report.
In the writing "Two Boys, A Debt, A Gun, A Victim" by Isabel Wilkerson; she writes on two boys who were convicted of murder at the ages of ten and fourteen. Wilkerson acknowledges in depth how they were both from homes where they were born to mothers who first gave birth at the age of fourteen and who were not financially stable to take care of their children without the assistance of welfare (326). One of the boys was also abandoned by his father and accused his mother of beating him, while the other boy lived in a crack house and his father beat his mother until he died violently himself.
Wilkerson also ties in statistical data from experts most common is the Federal Bureau of Investigation who reported that even though violent crime has tamed down since nineteen- ninety and the number of teenagers has decreased, the arrests of teenagers under eighteen rose forty seven percent from nineteen eighty-eight to nineteen ninety -two. .
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Another writing by Harvard University sociologist, William Julius Wilson, called "When Work Disappears" was researched in Chicago back in the seventy's and eighty's and then he reviewed the changes of cities over the last few decades and concludes that "the truly disadvantaged live in neighborhoods that middle-class jobholders have fled, where concentrated poverty is accompanied by social disorganization" (356).