Where Violence Dwells Summary

Philadelphia Inquirer staff writer David Zucchino's "Where Violence Dwells: The Place Factor In Philadelphia And Its Suburbs, The Homicide Rate Closely Parallels The Poverty Rate" argues that high rates of violence are not associated with race, but with the socio-economic conditions of a place.
Zucchion analyzes the data of the number of murders ''in 31 of 60 biggest Philadelphia suburbs in Pennsylvania," which all together do not have even a single murder, and "Philadelphia, a city of 1.5 million,'' with four hundred murders. Given this statistic, Zucchino notices that most of the crimes happened in the inner-city, where most of the population is black African-American. On the other hand, the suburbs are safer and they are populated by a white middle-class people.
Zucchino defends the arguments given by liberal sociologists, who believe that violence has nothing to do with intelligence or IQ (intelligence quotient) scores, but is about whether black African-Americans have easy
Nevertheless, with many manufacturing jobs available, they became less violent, built a neighborhood with a good behavior and values, and insured a better future for their children. Zucchino believes that immigrants can integrate in the new American life, and even be less violent than American-born residents. He explains the reason for the violent behavior of immigrants during the 1930s, which has to do with segregation and discrimination, as a major cause of pushing them to commit crimes. He also declares that the presidential crime commission's report ''The Problem of Crime and the Foreign Born'' came up with a perfect effect of isolating and limiting opportunity of success to the people ''the vast majority of those who come are honest and mean well, but economic pressure often drives them from a fair degree of comfort to beggary, and it is but a step from beggary to