This book is about the family lives of some 10,000 children and adults who live in an all-Negro public housing project in St Louis. The Pruitt-Igoe project is only one of the many environments in which urban Negro Americans lived in the 1960s, but the character of the family life there shares much with the family life of lower-class Negroes as it has been described by other investigators in other cities and at other times, in Harlem, Chicago, New Orleans, or Washington D.C. This book is primarily concerned with private life as it is lived from day to day in a federally built and supported...

Deviance is by definition a social problem. Since deviant behavior violates the normative expectations of a given group, deviance must be regarded as a problem for that group, since all groups of people want their norms to be enforced. Many modern societies place considerable value on personal liberty, so much so that interference with personal choices to deviate from group norms can be justified only in terms of the potential damage that particular kinds of behavior might do to the legitimate interests of others. Sociological research suggests that the social problem associated with deviance...