9. Poor Old Camden

Morgan Quitno recently announced their annual rankings of the "safest" and "most dangerous" American cities.  Poor old Camden, New Jersey, won the title of most dangerous, while Newton, Massachusetts (namesake of the Fig Newton) was deemed the safest.    As Reuters pointed out, the average income in Newton is three times that of Camden, while the average house value in Newton is ten times greater.

Poverty doesn't cause people to become violent criminals.  But it does cause them to become victims. 

Fear of violent crime is the organizing principle of many people's lives.  It's a form of social control in America.  The best recent book about the American criminal justice system seems at first glance to be concerned with an entirely unrelated subject.  I mean Eric Klinenberg's Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago.  Over 700 Chicagoans died in the 1995 heat wave.  Klinenberg shows that the deaths were heavily concentrated in certain neighborhoods, specifically poor neighborhoods with dangerous streets.  Isolated elderly people stayed locked up in their apartments because they perceived a greater danger in venturing outside.  No other book has shown so vividly, even heartbreakingly, the isolating effect of violence. 

Four years after the heat wave, Chicago's own Justice John Paul Stevens wrote an opinion striking down Chicago's anti-gang-loitering law as an infringement of gang members' constitutional right to congregate on public property.   By ruling that the city, responding to the wishes of its citizens, could not exercise control over the sidewalks, Stevens effectively ruled that the gangs could. 

Rulings such as the Chicago gang ordinance case prohibit people living in places like Camden, or the rough neighborhoods of Chicago, from joining together in a democratic polity to rescue themselves from the arbitrary government of violence.  By ordering the withdrawal of the democratic state, the Court invites into society the competing micro-governments of bandit chieftains.