Reddit reviews The Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order in Contemporary Society

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 In short, since the 1970s, the decline of the welfare state and diminishing social programs have been replaced by a neoliberal state that emphasizes commerce and "free markets" while simultaneously relying on police and crime control to fill the vacuum left by the absence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 The welfare state has retrenched and withdrawn support for already vulnerable populations, and replaced support with a highly punitive model of crime control that perpetuates the cycles of poverty and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.

Some (like CCA and GEO) are public companies. You can research their cash monies and numbers here or here. There are also all kinds of scholarly readings on the subject (like The Culture of Control)...or pretty much anything by David Garland really...

I will begrudgingly take this bait and respond. Better late than never I suppose. Your argument, as I understand it, is that a political system is strengthened when it rebuffs attempts by outsiders to come into it, and that most importantly, that system should not allow these outsiders to bring their influence to bear, so as to avoid distraction from what you call the "actual political issues."

However, there seem to be two flawed premises in your argument. The first involves the reality and desirability of an isolated nation-state. In today's global economy, strict isolationism will only lead to death of the nation-state. Even isolationism limited to immigration bans would be devastating to a national economy. Just last fall, Alabama farmers faced significant crop spoilage when the state passed a very harsh immigration bill (mirrored on SB 1070 but reaching even farther). On the desirability front, you say that our acquiescence to assimilation is based on the "modern religion of equality and tolerance" which leads me to believe that you reject both. The problem with cultures that similarly reject these notions is that historically, this had led to violent conflict and war (i.e., WWII or Rwanda) that inevitably destabilizes the nation-state far more than the disruption caused by a struggle for tolerance through equality. Indeed, this often causes the end of that manifestation of the nation-state.

Your second premise involves what you call "actual political issues." The problem is that what constitutes an "actual political issue" very much depends on whom you ask. I consider a state's treatment of its prisoners and the rights restored to them upon release to be an incredibly important political issue, but others may say that this is not something politicians should debate while our national economy is in the midst of a recession. You state that one such issue is, "Why is there a class of people who, generally speaking, is likely to remain impoverished in our current system, even with such social milestones as affirmative action..." But, in proposing this as an actual issue, you've already answered both of the questions you think are superfluous--"The white man holding the black man down" and "The black man taking welfare handouts from the white man." These three questions cannot be separated so simply. For example, Michelle Alexander recently wrote a book, The New Jim Crow, in which she argues that the nation's drug laws were instituted as a way to replace Jim Crow. She explores all three questions through her book, including offering thoughts about how to solve our current prison population crisis and its effects on largely inner-city minority groups.

The real reason that American politics exist the way they do is a multi-faceted answer with several components (many of which I don't even understand). One component involves the state of lobbying in Washington (Jack Abramoff, one of Washington's most famous lobbyist, just wrote a book about it); another component involves the 24-hour news cycle that give politicians an outlet to quibble things that would not be given space in a daily/weekly periodical. Yet another component has very much to do with the focus of modern American politics on ruling through fear (see David Garland's book, The Culture of Control). There is no single factor that leads to modern American politics, and no single step that will magically transform our democracy toward something resembling Spartan government.