Serving America's Underserved Youth: Reflections on Sport and Recreation in an Emerging Social Problems Industry

Abstract

Urban communities have recently had a significant growth in the number of public and privately sponsored initiatives that endorse and promote providing sport and recreation activities for underserved youth as a means to alleviate urban distress. This paper draws from the authors' experiences of and their reflections on this emerging “social problems industry,” in which programs are addressing crime prevention, juvenile delinquency, and other social ills through the provision of sport and recreation programs. Theoretical discourses from political economy, critical theory, and urban sociology are used to explore the growth and proliferation of this industry. These discourses also are used to set out an agenda for further research and discuss the overall impact and future of these initiatives. The paper focuses explicitly on investigating relationships among patterns of sport consumption and provision, popular conceptions of race and class, urban decline, and the dynamics of sport programs within the social problems industry.