razor, barbed wire

When we visited my family in the Central Valley this past holiday, Andy took a short run around the couple blocks or so in the neighborhood. While my adoptive kin own large, fancy, enviable houses, Andy noticed razor wire strung along the fence of a daycare center and the homeless people who were very friendly to him. My family joked during lunch that the place he found was a "preparatory" school for what life would be like in prison. Looking back it's not that funny. It's sad. Then, later that evening I listened to stories from cousins about their experiences of loud domestic fights they heard from neighbors, such that police evacuated them in the middle of the night at gunpoint. Homelessness, razor wire around daycares, gunpoint evacuations? This doesn't seem like the US, does it? Do we put up irritating fences to keep people in or to keep them out?

http://hwyfly.blogspot.com/2011/12/little-fence-for-big-horses.html
http://dawn-dancingintherain.blogspot.com/2011/11/on-vision-and-mind.html
http://themaxefiles.blogspot.com/2011/11/urban-prison-3-hemming-us-in.html

And as an extension of these thoughts...
http://66squarefeet.blogspot.com/2011/12/mimi-needs-little-help.html
http://talesfromthecoast.blogspot.com/2011/12/things-happen.html