Angry Writing on the American Ghetto
Some articles by the French leftist scholar Loic Wacquant:
Scrutinizing the Street: Poverty, Morality, and the Pitfalls of Urban Ethnography
Deadly symbiosis: When ghetto and prison meet and mesh The new 'peculiar institution': On the prison as surrogate ghetto
Urban Marginality in the Coming Millennium
The organic ethnologist of Algerian migration
His homepage also has links to other papers.