Code Of The Suburb

This ethnography of teenage suburban drug dealers “provides a fascinating and powerful counterpoint to the devastation of the drug war” (Alice Goffman, author of On the Run). When we think about young people dealing drugs, we tend to picture it happening in disadvantaged, crime-ridden, urban neighborhoods. But drugs are used everywhere. And teenage users in the suburbs tend to buy drugs from their peers, dealers who have their own culture and code, distinct from their urban counterparts. In Code of the Suburb, Scott Jacques and Richard Wright offer a fascinating ethnography of the culture of suburban drug dealers. Drawing on fieldwork among teens in a wealthy suburb of Atlanta, they carefully parse the complicated code that governs relationships among buyers, sellers, police, and other suburbanites. That code differs from the one followed by urban drug dealers in one crucial respect: whereas urban drug dealers see violent vengeance as crucial to status and security, the opposite is true for their suburban counterparts. As Jacques and Wright show, suburban drug dealers accord status to deliberate avoidance of conflict, which helps keep their drug markets more peaceful—and, consequently, less likely to be noticed by law enforcement.

Introduction to Criminal Justice: A Balanced Approach provides students with engaging, comprehensive, and up-to-date coverage of all aspects of the criminal justice system. Esteemed authors Brian K. Payne, Willard M. Oliver, and Nancy E. Marion explore criminal justice from a student-centered perspective by presenting research-driven material in an accessible, clear, and succinct writing style. Two unique chapters on Perspectives on Crime and Criminal Justice Research and Crime Typologies provide students with the foundational knowledge that they need to be critical thinkers and active participants within their chosen field. Students are encouraged to imagine themselves in specific criminal justice situations and decide how they would respond to the situation with a balanced and effective solution. By exploring criminal justice from a balanced perspective with an issues-oriented approach, students will understand how decision-making is critical to the criminal justice process. In particular, students will come to appreciate how their own future careers will be shaped by the decisions they make.

This handbook presents a series of essays that captures not the past of criminology, but where theoretical explanation is headed. The volume is replete with ideas, discussions of substantive topics with salient theoretical implications, and reviews of literatures that illuminate avenues along which theory and research evolve.

The American suburb is a space dominated by architectural mass production, sprawl, as well as a monotonous aesthetic eclecticism, and many critics argue that it has developed from a postwar utopia into a disorienting environment with which it is difficult to identify. The typical suburb has come to display characteristics of an atopia, that is, a space without borders or even a non-place, a generic space of transience. Dealing with the representation of architecture and the built environment in suburban literature and film from the 1920s until present, this study demonstrates that in its fictional representations, too, suburbia has largely turned into a place of non-architecture. A lack of architectural ethos and an abundance of "Junkspace" define suburban narratives, causing an increasing sense of disorientation and entropy in fictional characters.

This is the first comprehensive look at the role of North American suburbs in the last half century, departing from traditional and outdated notions of American suburbia.