Dissecting the 'code of the street'

Is the title of an essay by Elijah Anderson, which appears on the Philadelphia Inquirer website. From the essay:

Of all the problems besetting the poor inner-city black community, none is more pressing than that of interpersonal violence and aggression. It wreaks havoc daily with the lives of community residents and increasingly spills over into downtown and residential middle-class areas.

Muggings, burglaries, carjackings, and drug-related shootings, all of which may leave their victims or innocent bystanders dead, are now common enough to concern all urban and many suburban residents. The inclination to violence springs from the circumstances of life among the ghetto poor - the lack of jobs that pay a living wage, the stigma of race, the fallout from rampant drug use and drug-trafficking, and the resulting alienation and lack of hope for the future.

As the Philadelphia region deindustrializes and globalizes, great numbers of inner city poor people fail to cope with these changes. The result is concentrated and racialized urban poverty with a structural cast. A certain lawlessness prevails in these neighborhoods, but when residents summon the police, they often arrive late or are felt to abuse the very people who called them.

The community feels unprotected and alienated from the police and the justice system, their faith in the civil law undermined by the lawlessness they witness in their communties daily. Out of self-defense, the community adopts the principles of "street justice" - "an eye for and eye, a tooth for a tooth" - and a retaliation dynamic becomes common. In these circumstances, reputation, or "street credibility," becomes ever more coveted - if not for deterrence, then for self-respect - and becomes a precious coin traded for a sense of security in the 'hood.

Simply living in such an environment places young people at special risk of falling victim to aggressive behavior....

Index Keywords: public-safety