We have hypothesized that, in impoverished areas that are also disorganized, there is no effective community of neighbors and relatives who look after the well-being of all the children and act as agents of social control for youth. In fact, quite the opposite occurs for children and adolescents in ghettos. They are, on average, less well educated, socialized, supervised, and protected according to mainstream norms than other children. This quadruple deficit results from several overlapping factors that are examined below where the meanings of these four risks are explained. Before proceeding, it should now be obvious that poor children in disadvantaged neighborhoods cannot be compared with poor children who live in areas that are either- mixed or more affluent. The latter children are at a far lower risk of negative life course outcomes than those who are the focus of this chapter. Moreover, we underscore the fact that more research is needed on neighborhood effects, how they operate, and on what aspects of life they are particularly effective. It is especially important to disentangle family effects from school effects, peer influences, and other adult effects (Jencks and Mayer, 1990), not to omit media influences. The latter have yet to be considered in the new research on neighborhoods.

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