Reddit reviews Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity

Please read Punishing the Poor, it goes into great detail to explain how these policies are enforced, how racism is systemic in the US and how it is probable that in the future prisons will represent a large chunk of the working and productive population. Here's the description:

>The punitive turn of penal policy in the United States after the acme of the Civil Rights movement responds not to rising criminal insecurity but to the social insecurity spawned by the fragmentation of wage labor and the shakeup of the ethnoracial hierarchy. It partakes of a broader reconstruction of the state wedding restrictive "workfare" and expansive "prisonfare" under a philosophy of moral behaviorism. This paternalist program of penalization of poverty aims to curb the urban disorders wrought by economic deregulation and to impose precarious employment on the postindustrial proletariat. It also erects a garish theater of civic morality on whose stage political elites can orchestrate the public vituperation of deviant figures--the teenage "welfare mother," the ghetto "street thug," and the roaming "sex predator"--and close the legitimacy deficit they suffer when they discard the established government mission of social and economic protection. By bringing developments in welfare and criminal justice into a single analytic framework attentive to both the instrumental and communicative moments of public policy, Punishing the Poor shows that the prison is not a mere technical implement for law enforcement but a core political institution. And it reveals that the capitalist revolution from above called neoliberalism entails not the advent of "small government" but the building of an overgrown and intrusive penal state deeply injurious to the ideals of democratic citizenship.

The model proposed by the Chicago school, generally, and Park and Burgess, specifically, was based on ethnographic fieldwork in Chicago in the 1920s. The Concentric Zone Model, while it still has some adherents and adaptations, has generally fallen out of favor, at least in the United States. It is overly ecological and premised on competition over resources, ignores culture, and is fairly reductionist in how it treats physical and social spaces in city. Empirically, the concentric zones do not really match up with how cities grow over time, which becomes especially problematic with the changing nature of American cities in the post-WW2 era, suburbanization, White Flight, and the rise of a globalized economy. The New Urban Sociology goes into much more depth on these critiques, and offers a compelling multidimensional model that accounts for the interactions between space, culture, economy and the usual sociological variables (i.e., race, gender, class, etc.) as well as migration patters.

To return to the OPs question, white flight (the mass migration of white people from city center to surrounding suburbs) is the widely accepted answer for the decrepit state of many American urban areas. This makes sense to an extent; whites left the city for the suburbs, commerce followed, and inner cities were left disproportionately populated by the poor, uneducated, and minorities. With declining tax bases and loss of manufacturing jobs, cities couldn't (and/or wouldn't) support the infrastructure necessary to break the cycle of poverty (e.g., adequately fund schools). The missing pieces to this puzzle, though, are neoliberal globalization and increased "crime control". Loïc Waquant goes over this in great detail in Prisons of Poverty and Punishing the Poor. In short, since the 1970s, the decline of the welfare state and diminishing social programs have been replaced by a neoliberal state that emphasizes commerce and "free markets" while simultaneously relying on police and crime control to fill the vacuum left by the absence of social support (See David Garland's largely Foucauldian The Culture of Control: Crime Control and Social Order in Contemporary Society for much more detail on how this functions).

In sum, suburbanization and globalization have changed the racial and class structure in the cities. The welfare state has retrenched and withdrawn support for already vulnerable populations, and replaced support with a highly punitive model of crime control that perpetuates the cycles of poverty and crime. Of course, this whole post is the tl;dr version, but there are enormous bodies of research on these processes.

It is racist when you don't consider why it occurs and, instead, associate it with blackness and black culture when, in fact, it has more to do with poverty, policing, and racialized, if not flat out racist, policy and policy enforcement.

I'd check out some books like The New Jim Crow, The Condemnation of Blackness, As Long as They Don't Move Next Door, Punishment and Inequality in America, Prisons of Poverty, and Punishing the Poor. I know of very few criminologists who would say that crime is a racial thing, instead, it is the enforcement of crime that is racial and it is the income disparity between blacks and whites that causes us to see higher rates of crime amongst blacks in America.