Answer to Question 1
Feedback: Insitutional discrimination is when the customary ways of doing things, prevailing attitudes and expectations, and accepted structural arrangements work to the disadvantage of the poor. Two ways institutional discrimination trap the poor in a cycle of poverty are education and health. Poor children are not expected to do well in school, and so are not given the resources to succeed in school or to attend college. Poor people have less access to preventive and other health care, and frequently work in jobs without sick leave, so lose their jobs when they miss work due to illness, leaving them with less money to maintain their health.
Answer to Question 2
Feedback: Culture of poverty is the idea that the poor have a value system that keeps them and their children in poverty. Believing that those values are transmitted from generation to generation, culture of poverty theorists say that even if poverty were eliminated, the former poor would probably continue to prefer instant gratification, be immoral by middle-class standards, and so on. From this view, the poor have a subculture with values that differ radically from the values of the other social classes and this explains their poverty. Edward Banfield said the poor focused only on the present and not on the future. Critics of the culture of poverty hypothesis argue that the poor are an integral part of U.S. society; they do not abandon the dominant values of the society, but rather, retain them while simultaneously holding an alternative set of values. This alternative set is a result of adaptation to the conditions of poverty.