Concentrated Poverty

more effective in raising the achievement of children of poverty. Located in South
Carolina, the Center provides direct teacher training as well as facilitates research in the
area of poverty and scholastic achievement.
Oftentimes the communities in which impoverished children grow up in are crime ridden
areas, examples of these areas are Harlem and the Bronx. These areas have effects on
children as they are often exposed to crime and maltreatment at a young age, which is
proven to reduce a child's ability to learn by up to 5% Oftentimes these youth get caught
up in the crime that goes on all around them, this involvement only worsens the effects
of the cycle as they are often incarcerated or killed in many types of gang violence.
The Culture of Poverty
The culture of poverty is a concept in social theory that expands on the idea of a cycle
of poverty. It attracted academic and policy attention in the 1970s, survived harsh
academic criticism (Goode & Eames 1996; Bourgois 2001; Small, Harding & Lamont
2010), and made a comeback at the beginning of the 21st century. It offers one way to
explain why poverty exists despite anti-poverty programs. Critics of the early culture of
poverty arguments insist that explanations of poverty must analyze how structural
factors interact with and condition individual characteristics (Goode & Eames
1996; Bourgois 2001; Small, Harding & Lamont 2010). As put by Small, Harding &
Lamont (2010), "since human action is both constrained and enabled by the meaning
people give to their actions, these dynamics should become central to our
understanding of the production and reproduction of poverty and social inequality."
Early Formulations
Early proponents of the theory argued that the poor are not only lacking resources but
also acquire a poverty-perpetuating value system. According to anthropologist Oscar
Lewis, "The subculture [of the poor] develops mechanisms that tend to perpetuate it,
especially because of what happens to the worldview, aspirations, and character of the
children who grow up in it" (Lewis 1969, p. 199)
Some later scholars (Young 2004; Newman 1999; Edin & Kefalas 2005; Dohan
2003; Hayes 2003; Carter 2005; Waller 2002; Duneier 1992) contend that the poor do
not have different values.
The term "subculture of poverty" (later shortened to "culture of poverty") made its first
appearance in Lewis's ethnography Five Families: Mexican Case Studies in the Culture
of Poverty (1959). Lewis struggled to render "the poor" as legitimate subjects whose
lives were transformed by poverty. He argued that although the burdens of poverty were
systemic and so imposed upon these members of society, they led to the formation of
an autonomous subculture as children were socialized into behaviors and attitudes that
perpetuated their inability to escape the underclass.
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