8.3.7: Crime and Criminal Justice

 8.3.7: Crime and Criminal Justice

 If justice is supposed to be blind, it certainly is not when it comes to our chances of being arrested (Henslin 2018). 

In Chapter 6, we discussed how the social classes commit different types of crime. 

The white-collar crimes of the more privileged classes are more likely to be dealt with outside the criminal justice system, while the police and courts deal with the street crimes of the lower classes. 

One consequence of this class standard is that members of the lower classes are more likely to be in prison, on probation, or on parole. In addition, since those who commit street crimes tend to do so in or near their own neighborhoods, the lower classes are more likely to be robbed, burglarized, raped, or murdered.

8.3.6: Politics

 8.3.6: Politics 

As I have stressed throughout this text, people perceive events from their own corner in life. 

Political views are no exception to this symbolic interactionist principle, and the rich and the poor walk different political paths. 

The higher that people are on the social class ladder, the more likely they are to vote for Republicans (Gelman 2014). 

In contrast, most members of the working class believe that the government should intervene in the economy to provide jobs and to make citizens financially secure.

 They are more likely to vote for Democrats. 

Although the working class is more liberal on economic issues (policies that increase government spending), it is more conservative on social issues, such as opposing abortion (Houtman 1995; Seib and O’Connor 2016).

 People toward the bottom of the class structure are also less likely to be politically active—to campaign for candidates or even to vote (Gilbert 2014; Statistical Abstract 2019:Table 438).

8.3.5: Religion

 8.3.5: Religion One area of social life that we might think would not be affected by social class is religion. (“People are just religious, or they are not. What does social class have to do with it?”) As we shall see in Chapter 13, however, the classes tend to cluster in different denominations. Episcopalians, for example, are more likely to attract the middle and upper classes, while Baptists draw heavily from the lower classes. Patterns of worship also follow class lines: The lower classes are attracted to more expressive worship services and louder music, while the middle and upper classes prefer more “subdued” worship.

8.3.4: Education

 8.3.4: Education In Figure 8.6, you saw how education increases as one goes up the social class ladder. It is not just the amount of education that changes but also the type of education. Children of the capitalist class bypass public schools. They attend exclusive private schools where they are trained to take a commanding role in society. These schools teach upper-class values and prepare their students for prestigious universities (Stevens 2009; Khan 2011). Hearing from Students Social Class and Education Play Hearing from StudentsSocial Class and Education 245 Keenly aware that private schools can be a key to upward social mobility, some upper-middle-class parents do their best to get their children into the prestigious preschools that feed into these exclusive prep schools. So popular are these schools that even those that charge $37,000 a year have waiting lists (Anderson 2011). Figuring that waiting until birth to enroll a child is too late, some parents-to-be enroll their child as soon as the wife knows she is pregnant (Ensign 2012). Other parents hire tutors to train their 4-year-olds in test-taking skills so they can get into public kindergartens for gifted students. Experts teach these preschoolers to look adults in the eye while they are being interviewed for these limited positions (Banjo 2010). You can see how such parental involvement and resources make it more likely that children from the more privileged classes go to college—and graduate. Gallery Consequences of Social Class Image Viewer Preview Hens14e Ch10 - Gallery: Consequences of Social Class View Gallery The disparities of social class in the United States are extreme. If you take the back roads in rural America, you will see thousands of trailers like this one in Davenport, Florida. In contrast is this luxury home in Sammamish, Washington. Credits: Tim Large - USA/Alamy Stock Photo; Jhorrocks/E+/Getty Images

8.3.3: Family Life

 8.3.3: Family Life 

Social class also makes a significant difference in our choice of spouse, our chances of getting divorced, and how we rear our children. 

Choice of Husband or Wife Members of the capitalist class place strong emphasis on family tradition. 

They stress the family’s history, even a sense of purpose or destiny in life (Baltzell 1979; Aldrich 1989).

 Children of this class learn that their choice of husband or wife affects not just them but the entire family, that it will have an impact on the “family line.” 

These background expectations shrink the field of “eligible” marriage partners, making it narrower than it is for the children of any other social class. 

As a result, parents in this class play a strong role in their children’s mate selection. 

Divorce 

The more difficult life of the lower social classes, especially the many tensions that come from insecure jobs and inadequate incomes, leads to higher marital friction and a greater likelihood of divorce.

 Consequently, children of the poor are more likely to grow up in broken homes.

 Child Rearing

 Lower-class parents focus more on getting their children to follow rules and obey authority, while middle-class parents focus more on developing their children’s creative and leadership skills (Lareau 2011). 

Sociologists have traced this difference to the parents’ occupations (Kohn 1977; Stephens et al. 2014). 

Lower-class parents are closely supervised at work, and they anticipate that their children will have similar jobs.

 Consequently, they try to teach their children to defer to authority.

 Middle-class parents, in contrast, enjoy greater independence at work. 

Anticipating similar jobs for their children, they encourage them to be more creative. 

Out of these contrasting orientations arise different ways of disciplining children: Lower-class parents are more likely to use physical punishment, while the middle classes rely more on verbal persuasion.

 Among the customs of the rich, sometimes called the monied class, is ostentatious philanthropy. 

Shown here are women at the Frederick Law Olmsted lunch, a charity event in New York City.

 The women try to outdo one another with hats created for this event. Credit: Andrew Lichtenstein/The Image Works

 8.3.2: Mental Health Back in the 1930s, sociologists found that the mental health of the lower classes was worse than that of the higher classes (Faris and Dunham 1939). From Figure 8.8, you can see that people with less income continue to have more problems of mental health. The symptoms in Figure 8.8 are indicators of depression. Figure 8.8 Mental Health by Income: Feelings of Sadness, Hopelessness, or Worthlessness

Why is mental health worse in the lower social classes? The basic reason is the greater stresses that I just mentioned, which also lead to a sense of failure. In addition to lower wages and less job insecurity, compared with middle- and upper-class Americans, the poor are also more likely to divorce, to be the victims of crime, and to have more physical illnesses. Couple these conditions with bill collectors and the threat of eviction and you can see how they deal severe blows to people’s emotional well-being (Aug-2018)

8.3.1: Physical Health

 8.3.1: Physical Health 

If you want to get a sense of how social class affects health, take a ride on Washington’s Metro system. Start in the blighted Southeast section of downtown D.C. For every mile you travel to where the wealthy live in Montgomery County in Maryland, life expectancy rises about a year and a half. By the time you get off, you will find a twenty-year gap in life expectancy between the poor blacks where you started your trip and the rich whites where you ended it. (Cohen 2004) As you can see this from Figure 8.7, the principle is simple: As you go up the social-class ladder, health improves. As you go down the ladder, health worsens (Hoffmann et al. 2019). Age makes no difference. Infants born to the poor are more likely to die before their first birthday, and a larger percentage of poor people in their old age—whether 75 or 95—die each year than do the elderly who are wealthy. Figure 8.7 Physical Health, by Income: People Who Have Difficulty with Everyday Physical Activities The following interactive is not accessible to keyboard and screen reader users. What follows is an explanation of what appears on the screen. A horizontal bar graph presents physical health, by income, based on the percentage of people who have difficulty with everyday physical activities.The top-horizontal axis of the graph ranges from 0 to 25 percent in increments of 5 percent, with details of the graph as follows:Over 100,000 Dollars: 7.6 percent75,000 to 100,000 Dollars: 10.9 percent50,000 to 75,000 Dollars: 14.0 percent35,000 to 50,000 Dollars: 15.7 percentLess than 35,000 Dollars: 23.6 percent. How can social class have such dramatic effects? Although there are many reasons, here are three. First, social class opens and closes doors to medical care. People with good incomes or with good medical insurance are able to choose their doctors and pay for whatever treatment and medications are prescribed. The poor, in contrast, don’t have the money or insurance to afford this type of medical care. A second reason is lifestyle, which is shaped by social class. People in the lower classes are more likely to smoke, eat a lot of fats, be overweight, abuse drugs and alcohol, get less exercise, and practice unsafe sex (Wiltshire et al. 2019). This, to understate the matter, does not improve people’s health. There is a third reason, too. Life is hard on the poor. The persistent stresses they face—uncertainty of housing, employment, even basic safety—weaken their immune systems, causing their bodies to wear out faster (Porter 2019; Tribble and Kim 2019). For the rich, life is so much better. They have fewer problems and vastly more resources to deal with the ones they have. This gives them a sense of control over their lives, a source of both physical and mental health.