Camden Chronicles Children In Urban Poverty Summary

Hassan Aslam

Sociology 101

11/01/14

Camden Chronicles: Children in Urban Poverty In the video, Camden Chronicles: Children in Urban Poverty, the sociological issue of struggles faces by people living in poverty is depicted very powerfully. The video focuses on the city of Camden, New Jersey. Camden is one of the poorest cities in the whole country and the people living there find themselves surrounded by crime and murder and drug wars. Innocent kids grow up not playing with toys or running around in parks but struggling to find meals and shelter. The video showed the lives of 3 kids living in the poverty-stricken region. It was extremely sad how these kids were forced to grow up in poverty while ten minutes away, there is kids living in nice

The video showed a lot of people getting arrested in the streets all over Camden and a lot of the people getting arrested were from the surrounding areas of Camden who had come to buy drugs. This, of course, has a lot of influence on the perception of the poor area. Families whose kids have been arrested in the area will look down upon the area as a bad influence and make judgments about the whole population there. This would probably make them fear the poor neighborhood rather than feeling bad and helping out. However, people who are not directly affected by the poor neighborhood do feel bad as it was shown by the interviews with the kids from the suburbs. They all said that they felt bad that the kids in the poor city had to grow up the way they do. I think that is a good thing because when these kids grow up, they’ll try to help the people in the poor city. More awareness like that is exactly what is needed to help tackle the poverty situation because even though some people from the suburbs have set up organizations to help the inner city kids, they all said they are trying to help but they’re not enough to help the 20,000 kids living in poverty. They need more help and when people in the suburbs start to be more aware, it will help make the situation

Conflict theory says that inequality exists because there are limited resources and the powerful control the resources. In this case, people who are stuck in poverty find it very difficult if not impossible to climb out of poverty. Most of the people in the area used to work in factories but all those factories moved overseas to save on labor costs leaving thousands behind unemployed and no where to go. People lost their homes and means of earning a living. Federal welfare programs provide for these people but those programs are simply not enough as it was shown in the video. The families still went hungry and had to starve themselves to save food to get by for a month. And, if the family income goes up a little bit, the benefits are reduced and the situation actually worsens for families instead of getting better. This cycle keeps poor families poor for the fear of losing benefits. The government is the powerful entity in this case that controls the limited resources and allocates them to the poor as much as it has decided is necessary. Poor families lack the access to good education for their kids and kids have a hard time in school with all the distractions and the crime that surrounds them. A lot of people who are critics of the welfare programs argue that people are poor because they are lazy and they live off government handouts but that is not the truth at all. As we can see from the video, most of the