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CSUDH Habermas UWP

California State University, Dominguez Hills
University of Wisconsin, Parkside
Created: April 30, 2001
Latest update: April 30, 2001
jeannecurran@habermas.org

On Monday, April 30, 2001, Tracy Stanford and Aaron Cope wrote:

Hey Jeanne, It's us again, Tracy Stanford and Aaron Cope from your Soc. 370 class. We sent you an e-mail on 4/17; and you asked us to let you know where to locate the reading, "On My Block". Well, anyway we sent you the location information before you went on your trip to Reno. So, now we are just tagging you to let us know if our comments were on the right track or way off base. "On My Block" is located in Week 12: Week of April 16, 2001. It is listed under "Shared Online Readings: English" for Tuesday's reading from "The other side of the wall: Prisons and Prison Law." Or you can type in http://www.prisonwall.org/ and link to On My Block under On Death Row in the right-most frame.

We feel that "On My Block" by Glenn Cornwell is a perfect example of how Structural Context inhibits your decision making ability (agency). As Emile Durkheim stated, Structural Context "exercises control over our behavior, as rules of conduct, as laws, as customs and as norms and values that we believe in and that shape our conscience and make us part of a collectivity." Thus, in our opinion, we feel the people who live on this block make up a collectivity of working class families living in poverty, with the belief that "there's not much they can say cause it's just the way life is, on the block." In addition, we feel that this view of structural context as it relates to "On My Block" is very similar to a concept we recently talked about in our Soc. 311 class. This concept is the Situational View of Poverty which states that "the poor may sometimes have different lifestyles and preferences because they are poor, lack secure jobs, or simply lack opportunities to live up to values held by most in the society." In other words, the people who make up the collectivity on this block may have different lifestyles and preferences because they are reacting to their situation by attempting to construct a social order that helps them to deal with or confront the external realities (Drug Kingpens, drug infestation, gang violence, etc.) that they face everyday. In short, we feel the people who make up this collectivity are dependent on many outside agencies that are controlling them, their behavior and their lives; and as a result, they have very little decision making power. Are we on the right track Jeanne?

Tracy Stanford & Aaron Cope
Soc. 370 (Moot Court)

On Monday, April 30, 2001, jeanne responded:

You betcha, you're on the right track. Of course you're taking the left perspective. I think the ultra conservative response to this position is that you had your choice --- you did the crime - - - now pay for it. Take a look at Trust in a Post-Scarcity World, for that is what you are describing "on the block," a post-scarcity world, a world in which the resources don't stretch to all who need them, so that some are indeed left out.

Yes, the situational view of poverty is another way to look at the colonization described here. That view is very much a part of constitutive criminology, in which we recognize the interdependence between agency and structural context.

love and peace, jeanne

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