Down Out And Under Arrest

“A well-supported critique of therapeutic policing and, by extension, of similar paternalistic efforts to help the poor by hassling them into good behavior.” —Los Angeles Times In his first year working in Los Angeles’s Skid Row, Forrest Stuart was stopped on the street by police fourteen times. Usually for doing little more than standing there. Juliette, a woman he met during that time, has been stopped by police well over one hundred times, arrested upward of sixty times, and has given up more than a year of her life serving week-long jail sentences. Her most common crime? Simply sitting on the sidewalk—an arrestable offense in LA. Why? What purpose did those arrests serve, for society or for Juliette? How did we reach a point where we’ve cut support for our poorest citizens, yet are spending ever more on policing and prisons? That’s the complicated, maddening story that Stuart tells in Down, Out & Under Arrest, a close-up look at the hows and whys of policing poverty in the contemporary United States. What emerges from Stuart’s years of fieldwork—not only with Skid Row residents, but with the police charged with managing them—is a tragedy built on mistakes and misplaced priorities more than on heroes and villains. At a time when distrust between police and the residents of disadvantaged neighborhoods has never been higher, Stuart’s book helps us see where we’ve gone wrong, and what steps we could take to begin to change the lives of our poorest citizens—and ultimately our society itself—for the better.

Forrest Stuart gives us a new framework for understanding life in criminalized communities throughout America. The idea of community policing and of stop-and-frisk and broken windows is just part of the picture, which includes people on both sides of the issue of keeping order in Skid Row communities. Stuart s is a dramatic demonstration of how to understand the daily realities of America s most truly disadvantaged, an understanding that requires a sharp focus on the pervasive role and impact of the police. Policing zero tolerance models in particularis reshaping urban poverty and marginalization in 21st-century America. Stuart immersed himself for several years in the notorious homeless capital of America, which is to say, Skid Row in Los Angeles. It has the largest concentration of standing police forces anywhere in the United States. On their side, the police practice what Stuart calls therapeutic policing a form of virtual social work that is designed to cure the poor of individual pathologies. On the side of the homeless, Stuart finds a cunning set of techniques for evading police contact, which he dubs cop wisdom and which the poor use for intensifying resistance to roustings by the police. The police are tasked with day-to-day management of the growing numbers of citizens falling through the holes in the threadbare social safety net. We see daily patrol practices and routines that amount to hyper-policing in skid row districts. The continuous threat of punishment aims to steer homeless individuals away from self-destructive behaviors while providing incentives to drug recovery, employment, and life skills (in nearby meta-shelters). Minority upheavals now underway across America underscore the divide between cops and the urban poor (almost all of whom are black or Latino). Stuart joins Alice Goffman in revealing the underlying, and often tragic, dynamics."

A New York Times Notable Book of 2016 Winner of the Zócalo Public Square Book Prize On March 29, 1516, the city council of Venice issued a decree forcing Jews to live in il geto—a closed quarter named for the copper foundry that once occupied the area. The term stuck. In this sweeping and original account, Mitchell Duneier traces the idea of the ghetto from its beginnings in the sixteenth century and its revival by the Nazis to the present. As Duneier shows, we cannot comprehend the entanglements of race, poverty, and place in America today without recalling the ghettos of Europe, as well as earlier efforts to understand the problems of the American city. Ghetto is the story of the scholars and activists who tried to achieve that understanding. As Duneier shows, their efforts to wrestle with race and poverty cannot be divorced from their individual biographies, which often included direct encounters with prejudice and discrimination in the academy and elsewhere. Using new and forgotten sources, Duneier introduces us to Horace Cayton and St. Clair Drake, graduate students whose conception of the South Side of Chicago established a new paradigm for thinking about Northern racism and poverty in the 1940s. We learn how the psychologist Kenneth Clark subsequently linked Harlem’s slum conditions with the persistence of black powerlessness, and we follow the controversy over Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s report on the black family. We see how the sociologist William Julius Wilson redefined the debate about urban America as middle-class African Americans increasingly escaped the ghetto and the country retreated from racially specific remedies. And we trace the education reformer Geoffrey Canada’s efforts to transform the lives of inner-city children with ambitious interventions, even as other reformers sought to help families escape their neighborhoods altogether. Duneier offers a clear-eyed assessment of the thinkers and doers who have shaped American ideas about urban poverty—and the ghetto. The result is a valuable new estimation of an age-old concept.

In recent years, stories of reckless lawyers and greedy citizens have given the legal system, and victims in general, a bad name. Many Americans have come to believe that we live in the land of the litigious, where frivolous lawsuits and absurdly high settlements reign. Scholars have argued for years that this common view of the depraved ruin of our civil legal system is a myth, but their research and statistics rarely make the news. William Haltom and Michael McCann here persuasively show how popularized distorted understandings of tort litigation (or tort tales) have been perpetuated by the mass media and reform proponents. Distorting the Law lays bare how media coverage has sensationalized lawsuits and sympathetically portrayed corporate interests, supporting big business and reinforcing negative stereotypes of law practices. Based on extensive interviews, nearly two decades of newspaper coverage, and in-depth studies of the McDonald's coffee case and tobacco litigation, Distorting the Law offers a compelling analysis of the presumed litigation crisis, the campaign for tort law reform, and the crucial role the media play in this process.

“Moving . . . Readers will nod their heads in sympathy with this guy who breaks the rules for all of the right reasons.” —The Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books A Bank Street College of Education Best Book of the Year Indiana Too Good to Miss State Reading List 2018 Timothy is on probation. It’s a strange word—something that happens to other kids, to delinquents, not to kids like him. And yet, he is under house arrest for the next year. He must check in weekly with a probation officer and a therapist, and keep a journal for an entire year. And mostly, he has to stay out of trouble. But when he must take drastic measures to help his struggling family, staying out of trouble proves more difficult than Timothy ever thought it would be. By turns touching and funny, and always original, House Arrest is a middle grade novel in verse about one boy’s path to redemption as he navigates life with a sick brother, a grieving mother, and one tough probation officer. “This gripping novel in verse evokes a wide variety of emotional responses, as it is serious and funny, thrilling and touching, sweet and snarky.” —School Library Journal “Touches of humor lighten the mood, and Holt’s firsthand knowledge of the subject adds depth to this poignant drama without overwhelming it.” —Publishers Weekly “Readers . . . will appreciate Holt’s lessons of compassion and family above all.” —Booklist “House Arrest will hit home with young boys and girls, especially if they have ever dealt with an ill relative. The story is touching, warm, and impressive.” —Kid Lit Reviews

"Drawing on two years of ethnographic fieldwork and over 150 interviews with gang-affiliated youth in the "Taylor Park" neighborhood on Chicago's South Side, Ballad of the Bullet reveals that those coming of age in America's poorest neighborhoods are developing new, creative, and online strategies for making ends meet. Dislocated by the erosion of the crack economy and the splintering of corporatized gangs, these young people exploit the unique affordances of digital social media to capitalize on an emerging online market for urban violence (or, more accurately, a market for the representation of urban violence). In the past, violence functioned primarily as a means of social control, allowing urban youth to compete in illegal street markets and defend the social statuses otherwise denied to them by mainstream society. Today, with the rise of platforms like YouTube, Instagram, and Twitter, violence has become a premier cultural commodity in and of itself. By amassing millions of clicks, views, and followers, these young people convert their online displays of violence into vital offline resources, including cash, housing, drugs, sex, and, for a very select few, a ticket out of poverty" --

At once a financial caper, an international adventure, and a passionate plea for justice, Freezing Order is a stirring morality tale about how one man can take on one of the most dangerous and ruthless villains in the world.

Predict and Surveil offers an unprecedented, inside look at how police use big data and new surveillance technologies. Sarah Brayne conducted years of fieldwork with the LAPD--one of the largest and most technically advanced law enforcement agencies in the world-to reveal the unmet promises and very real perils of police use of data--driven surveillance and analytics.