Wacquant Reading Response

ETHN 3102

Prof. Holmes

Katharine Martin

10/9/15

Reading Response: Wacquant

Upon watching the film, “The Myth of Pruitt-Igoe,” and learning about the demise of a monumental public housing project, the more I realized how similar this “ghetto” of St. Louis was in operation to that of a prison. Although the thought behind Pruitt-Igoe’s development was positive in its goal to house the city’s poor and working classes, the failure to plan for the financial burdens and maintenance of these eleven story apartment buildings, led to the eventual death of Pruitt-Igoe. Urban historians featured in the film discussed the 1949 Housing Act as one that “was used to reshape the city to best suit those in power” (T. M. O. P-I., 2011), as the city attempted to desegregate the projects after Brown vs. Board of Education. However, these attempts resulted in whites leaving the city and the ideal of urban renewal became that of ‘black removal’ from white neighborhoods, as segregation continued to persevere.

Wacquant’s essay, “When Ghetto and Prison Meet and Mash,” directly correlates with Pruitt-Igoe, as it discusses four critical elements of how the ghetto became more like a prison. Firstly, Wacquant discusses the ‘class segregation overlaying the racial segregation’, as low-income families are drawn to projects of public housing within close proximity to their occupations and unemployed welfare recipients are drawn to the opportunity to live nicely and raise their children with the help of federal aid; but what they failed to realize was the freedom they were also surrendering by agreeing to live under the constraints of public housing that coincidentally mirror those constraints of being incarcerated. Wacquant then talks about the ‘loss of positive economic function’ leading to the self-perpetuating cycle of poverty within the projects and Pruitt-Igoe serves as a perfect example of this, as the tenants were responsible for the upkeep of these buildings financially through their rent payments and the racism occurring left many African Americans without the funds to support maintenance of their buildings; thus, the quality of life and physical environment of Pruitt-Igoe began to fade. Violence and vandalism became common in Pruitt-Igoe, as the entirety of the nine building public housing units, gained its poor and dangerous reputations. The federal government’s failure to plan for multiple scenarios to occur as a result of building Pruitt-Igoe, left the government somewhat helpless in the matter; a notion relating to Wacquant’s third premise, ‘state institutions of social control replacing communal institutions.’ Many former residents of Pruitt-Igoe were interviewed in the documentary and one woman discussed how “the police, fire-fighters, and ambulances became the enemy and anything they could do to fight them off they would” (T. M. O. P-I., 2011). This woman’s recount reflects Wacquant’s point that “decrepit public housing that subjected its tenants and the surrounding population to extraordinary levels of criminal insecurity, infrastructural blight and official scorn” (107). Wacquant’s fourth point that the ‘loss of a buffering function and the depacification of everyday life’, perpetuates the ghetto and prison similarities, as the combination of the “wage-labor market and the welfare state (in the context of unflinching segregation)” (Wacquant, 2001: 107), has contributed to our society’s cycle of poverty. The welfare system was highly present in Pruitt-Igoe and it left many women and children without the resources to climb out of poverty; a cycle that convicts experience as well, in that removing one’s self from criminal activity isn’t as simple as it may seem to people who haven’t experienced living in places like Pruitt-Igoe.

References:

Wacquant, Loïc. 2001. “Deadly Symbiosis: When Ghetto and Prison Meet and Mesh.” Punishment and Society 95-121, Thousand Oakes, CA: Sage Publications.

Freidrichs, Chad. 2011. The Myth of Pruitt-Igoe (Documentary). First Run Features.