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10. Cities and Social Movements

Kaspar Metzkow will be in touch to arrange the further details.

With kind regards,
Department of Regional and Urban Sociology and the Georg Simmel Zentrum.
Special thanks to Talja Blokland and Kaspar Metzkow
1

Book Review

Capital City

What does Stein mean by the real estate state? Is the real estate state neoliberal? Support your answer.
Interconnection between developers and government (council, planning commission, planners) (Stein)

Neoliberalism encourages cities to embrace policies that favor investors (Hackworth
They do so because of
Declining federal revenue increases dependence on locally generated taxes
Inter-urban competition for investors lock cities into such policies
Bond markets further lock
What are the principal causes of gentrification?
Consumer led: Global cities have a growing number of middle-class people with lots of income. They want to be close to their jobs, they find cultural value in inner city, and they postpone childrearing.
Production led: Rent gap results in lowering actual value of land that is potentially highly desirable. This creates extraordinary opportunities for developers and city officials to develop properties
Other gaps – function gap, value gap

Capital City
According to Stein, what are the specific things that planners do to support gentrification?
Tax breaks (TIF, Tax Abatement, etc.) attract investors to specific places in the city.
Infrastructure and service development (parks, transportation, schools, etc.) attract investors and buyers to specific areas.
Zoning (Upzoning + downzoning) – Upzoning increases building and density, Downzoning traps in existing values
What are important consequences from gentrification?
Direct displacement: evicted and mass removal through eminent domain
Indirect displacement: Can no longer afford to live in a place
Increase tax revenue for city

Final Exam

Directions: Students are required to answer the questions below. Answers should be two to three pages long (double space, 12-point font, 1-inch margins). We are assessing your knowledge of course materials (lectures and readings). . MLA or APA formats are acceptable. Submit in Word or PDF format only. Do not submit in Pages format.
Due Wednesday, March 18 at 12:30 p.m. through Canvas.

The final is worth 100 points. 10 points will be deducted for papers turned in within 24 hours after the deadline. Essays will not be accepted more than 24 hours after the deadline. Submit your papers at least two hours before the official deadline. This will help prevent last minute glitches.

Your answers must be written in a standard essay format consisting of a short introduction (with a thesis statement), supporting paragraphs, and a short conclusion. The essay must address all four questions.

Cities and Social Movements
This quarter has focused on the qualities that make cities unique environments. While these environments are riven with inequalities and problems, they also facilitate the formation of contentious political groups.

Drawing on the two books, lectures, and readings, what are the specific economic and political conditions that have worsened conditions for low-income immigrants in US cities?
Drawing on the book (Cities and Social Movements), lectures, and readings, what were the specific factors that sparked mobilizations by undocumented immigrants in the United States and France.
Describe the specific process through which immigrants developed into a political group with high mobilization capacities in Los Angeles and Paris.
According to the book Cities and Social Movements, immigrant mobilizations in Los Angeles and Paris had similar origins, but they developed very different trajectories. What are the specific factors that explain for the different trajectories?

1. Local Movements

Insurgent Planning
A Six Step Process of Insurgency
Step 1: Excluding Marginalized People
Step 2: Spaces of Empowerment
Step 3: Backlash from Adversaries
Step 4: Bridging to New Allies
Step 5: Communication
Step 6: Pushing City Officials

Step 1: Excluding Marginalized People

Excluding Marginalized People
Marginalized People:
Increased immigration following 1965
Immigration Reform and Control Act 1986: Employers Sanctions
Increased demand for casual and inexpensive labor in suburban America
Immigrant day laborers looking for work

Dirty, Scary, Bellicose Barbarians
“They’re just terrible, filthy people. I don’t want them in Chamblee” (Atlanta Constitution 1992).

Symbolic Exclusion
Excluding Marginalized People

Symbolic Exclusion
2. The Right to the (white American) City
“The rights of foreign nationals are taking precedence over the rights of citizens. We came to understand that we were actually the underdogs; we were actually the victims” (NY Times, 1999).

Excluding Marginalized People

Symbolic Exclusion
3. Illegality
“They violate our laws and demand we feed them, clothe them and educate them in their own language. They are taking jobs away from American citizens” (San Jose Mercury, 1992).

Excluding Marginalized People

Real Exclusion
Employers
Wage theft of immigrant workers

Excluding Marginalized People
“Why should I pay him? He’s illegal.” Employer, Montgomery County, 1995

Real Exclusion

2. Police
Illegal search and seizure
Illegal racial profiling
Illegal partnerships with Immigration Naturalization Service

Excluding Marginalized People
“The police chief had labeled all the members of the labor pool as ‘illegals’ and added that he didn’t know whether undocumented aliens had any rights under U.S. law,” Reporter, Palisades Park ,New York 1995.

Real Exclusion

3. Urban Plans and Policies
Unconstitutional restrictions on the public solicitation of work

Excluding Marginalized People
“The town was selectively enforcing the code and violating Hispanic residents’ constitutional right to free speech, free assembly and due process,” American Civil Liberties Union, Mount Kisco, New York, 1996

Step 2: Spaces of Empowerment
Unfolding Struggles in Pasadena, California and Other Cities

“Where there is Power, there is Resistance” Michel Foucault

Space of Empowerment: Locations where marginalized groups can connect to one another, draw in resources, and gain the confidence to express their voice and interests to political and planning leaders

Recognizing a Wrong: Day Laborers

“We come here to work. We’re human beings, too. We work the heaviest and cheapest jobs.” Immigrant worker, Pasadena, CA, 1994

Step 2: Spaces of Empowerment

Supportive Organizations
La Escuela de la Comunidad,
Project of Institute of Popular Education of Southern California
Villa Park Center

Pablo Alvarado
Step 2: Spaces of Empowerment

The Importance of Supportive Organizations in Empowerment
Creating a Safe Space: Coming Out and Coming to Terms with Stigma:
“We were providing them with the means to express what they already knew to be very wrong” (Marlom Portillo, Executive Director, IDEPSCA)
Constructing Bonds and Identity among Day Laborers

Step 2: Spaces of Empowerment

The Importance of Supportive Organizations in Empowerment

Discovering Rights and Equality through Group Interaction
“I fell for that bullshit that we didn’t have rights because of our status. Through the Association, I learned that we had rights and that the police, city, and employers were violating them on a daily basis.” (José, former member, Pasadena Day Labor Association).
Step 2: Spaces of Empowerment

Solidary from Other Community Members
Latino residents (legal permanent residents, citizens)
Local Latino and Immigrant Advocacy Organizations
Social Service Organizations
Religious Organizations
Liberal Residents

“We are not all illegal. I’m not illegal. My daughters are not illegal. You can’t say that about all of us!” Latino resident, 2004
“These are truly some of the neediest people in our community. Whether they are legal or illegal is not the question. They still have the right to work”, Director of one welfare organization, 2003
Step 2: Spaces of Empowerment

Summary of Key Points
Exclusion Creates Grievances
Targeted Group (Day Laborers)

Supportive Organizations Play Crucial Roles
Safe Space to Meet
Construct Bonds and Identity among Excluded
Introduce Excluded to Constitutionally-Protected Rights
Solidarity Groups
Latinas/os, Service Organizations, Churches, etc.
Creates political support
Provide resources for emerging insurgents

Step 2: Spaces of Empowerment

Step 3: Backlash from Adversaries

The Pasadena Day Labor Association Project: Creating the Jobs Center
Unions Respond to Day Labor Efforts to Create a Job Center

“As an organization whose contractual agreements require at least the minimum protection of the law for its members, we would consider the existence of such an operation, in the very shadow of our headquarters, intolerable to say the least… We question the wisdom of the City of Pasadena in considering such an arrangement, which creates a sort of Third-World hiring bazaar…”(IBEW, letter to Pasadena Day Labor Association, emphasis added).
Step 3: Backlash from Adversaries

Unions Respond to Day Labor Efforts to Create a Job Center

“We will pursue this activity in the same manner and with the same zeal with which we defend the rights of our members … We envision, and invite you to imagine a scenario in which prospective employers, many of them local homeowners and small business owners, could expect to be investigated through their license plate numbers and perhaps turned over to a government agency for violating the law” (emphasis added).”
Step 3: Backlash from Adversaries

Redoubling the Fight for Recognition and Equality

“This threat has thrown the Association into an unexpected level of struggle, mainly because it seems a contradiction for a union to be in opposition to our struggle (Pablo Alvarado, Letter to Margarita Ramirez, Program Officer of Liberty Hill Foundation, May 20, 1995).
Step 3: Backlash from Adversaries

Step 4: Bridging to New Allies

Connecting to Supportive Organizations in Pasadena: More resources, connections, power

“We strongly believed that to achieve change depended on our abilities to build alliances with other groups… The question was: what kind of power do we workers have and how can we build on that power through these relations?” (Pablo Alvarado, Executive Director, NDLON).

Step 4: Bridging to New Allies

Pablo Alvarado and MALDEF
Pablo Alvarado and AFL-CIO

Step 5: Communication – Changing Boundaries of Inclusion and Exclusion

Re-Imagining the Community as Liberal and Multicultural

Representing Marginalized Population as Good, Contributing, Deserving

Conceiving Policies as a Pragmatic Solution to Intractable Problems

Step 5: Communication and Changing Boundaries
Three Prong Communication Strategy

Step 6: Pushing City Officials

Using Mobilization as Leverage
Disruptive Protests
Disruptive Lawsuits
Disruptive Press

“I’m angry. In fact, I’m livid. We have been painted as a whipping boy of the press, . . . a city of racist bigots. The problem is that people are performing illegal acts on private property,” Councilmember, Chamblee, 1992.
“Agoura Hills spent $100,000 defending the law in court against challenges by the American Civil Liberties Union and other civil rights group. An appellate court upheld the law, but the local sheriff has had trouble enforcing it,” Agoura Hills CA, 1995
Step 6. Pushing Elected Officials
“Officers were wrong to hand out citations to day laborers. Crackdowns can backfire and engender ill will, particularly among minority groups traditionally wary of police” (Police Chief, Roswell, Georgia, 1999)

Raising the Cost on Existing Policy – Rendering it Ineffective Method
“We say we observed solicitation activity, but the D.A. says, ‘How do you know he wasn’t asking the guy to play golf?’ The only way we could really prove it is to go undercover, and our department is not going to do that. We don’t need that kind of press, that our officers are going undercover to arrest people looking for work” (Sheriffs Deputy, Agoura Hills, 1995).
“It’s just a waste of paper. The law has been in effect now 30 days, and there’s been no change. The most it’s been able to do is polarize our community. It’s done nothing to improve the lives of the residents or the workers. It is a lot of trouble for very little result. It seemed somewhat drastic. And I’m not sure we’re getting the results we expected to get” (City Councilmember, Chamblee, Georgia, 1997).
Step 6. Pushing Elected Officials

Presenting Preferred Policy as Pragmatic
“The town has stated that it will support a consensus of reasonable people. It looks like the Sachem Quality of Life Organization [anti-immigrant group] wants to do the impossible” (City councilmember, Farmingville, New York, 1999).
Step 6. Pushing Elected Officials

II. Scaling Up to a Metropolitan Movement

New Innovative Organizations Flourish, 1980s
Radical Immigrant Organizers: El Salvador, Korea, Mexico, Philippines
Innovative Union Organizers – Mobilize Immigrants
Innovative Intellectuals (UCLA, USC)

Pablo Alvarado
Intellectuals
New Immigrant Radicals
Innovative Unions
Ed Soja
Gilda Haas
Los Angeles: Movement Cohesion
Maria Elena Durazo

Diversity of Specialized Insurgent Clusters:
Weak Ties between Activist Clusters: Contact Points and Brokers:
Thickening Ties: Reciprocal Obligations and Collective Know-How
Consolidating Ties through Culture: Emotional Interdependencies, Trust, Discursive Frames

Immigrant Rights
Labor
Intellectuals
Religious
Contact Point
Contact Point
J
UST
I
CE!
EMOTIONS
Los Angeles: Movement Cohesion

The Cases: Los Angeles, Paris, Amsterdam
Organizational Interdependencies
Ideological and Goal Overlap: Strong Left & Rights of Immigrant Workers
Little Resource Overlap: Different members, financial supports, sources of legitimacy
Limited Resources for Individual Organizations to Achieve Ambitious Goals Individually
Conditions Encouraged Cooperation and Growing Interdependencies

Los Angeles: Movement Cohesion

The Cases: Los Angeles, Paris, Amsterdam
Weakening State Capacity: Neoliberalism
Declining revenue from property taxes (Proposition 13) and federal government subsidies

Limited resources and capacities to co-opt fast growing immigrant organizations

Programs 1981 1993 % Cut
Community Development Block Grant $6.3 billion $4 billion -36.5%
Urban Development Action Grant .6 0 -100%
General Revenue Sharing 8 0 -100%
Mass Transit (rail, buses) 6.9 3.5 -49.3%
Assisted Housing 26.8 8.9 -66.8%
Clean Water Construction 6.0 2.6 -56.7%

Eisenger 1997, 17
Los Angeles: Movement Cohesion

Connecting and Thickening Ties between New Activist Clusters
Catalyzing Events Accelerate Alliances: Riots and Anti-Immigrant Politics (early 1990s)
Thickening Ties through Key Campaigns (Justice for Janitors, Living Wage, Figueroa Corridor, Immigration Reform, etc.)
Bottom Up Power: Insurgents Exert Influence Over Politicians

Miguel Contreras
Antonio Villaraigos
Mark Ridley Thomas
Los Angeles: Movement Cohesion

Robust Infrastructure and High Mobilization Capacities

Consolidation in Los Angeles, 1990s & 2000s

Immigrant rights protest 2006, 500,000 participants

Part 3
Nationalizing Urban Activist Hubs in the United States

1. Introduction

How did the shift from a local, poor, and fairly radical social movement to a national, professional, and moderate social movement happen?
What were the consequences of this shift for how the movement represented the rights of undocumented immigrants?

3. Methods

Interviews with Key Informants
42 semi-structured interviews with executive executive directors and activists
Open Society Foundation (OSF) documents
82 documents concerning immigration rights funding (2007-2016)
Established journalist rules concerning the use of leaked documents
Financial Resources: Funding Dataset
Nonrandom sample consists of 49 immigrant advocacy organization
Tax forms (IRS 990) on ‘grants and contributions’ received by the 49 organizations from the early 2000 to early 2013.
Foundation Center database provides information on foundations and organizations.

Methods

Political Access: White House Dataset
49 organizations (2009-2014)
White House visitor webpage.
whitehouse.gov/engage/office
Identified organizations by the names of important employees.
Cleaned dataset by removing visits that were not directly related to immigration issues. We removed more than 100 such visits.
Media Presence: Newspaper Dataset
Koopmans, Ruud and Paul Statham (1999) “Political Claims Analysis: Integrating Protest Event and Political Discourse Approaches”, Mobilization 4 (1): 203-221
2000-2014
New York Times; LexisNexis searches to reduce regional biases.
Keywords: “immigration reform” and “immigration protest”.
Editorials and opinion articles excluded.
1254 newspaper articles included, from which 5422 claims extracted.
Coded: claimant, mode of claims made (protest, press release, etc.), scale (federal or local), affiliation and role of claimant, type of claim
Methods

3. Findings

Part I. Local Mobilizations in the 1990s and early 2000s

Local Anti- and Pro-Immigrant Conflicts in the 1990s:
Municipalities Pass Restrictive Ordinances
Pro-immigrant resistance
Localities become frontline of immigration conflict
Regional Immigrant Rights Organizations
Metropolitan-wide Campaigns
Headquartered in central cities (e.g. Los Angeles, New York, Baltimore, Chicago, etc.)
Local Mobilizations in the 1990s/ early 2000s

Regional Organizations and Grassroots Organizing
Organize Immigrant Workers (Day Laborers, Domestic Workers, Vendors)
Base Community Model:
Popular Education
Leadership Development of Workers
Musical Band
Soccer / Football Clubs
Newsletter

Musical Band
Soccer Team
Weekly Newsletter

Local Mobilizations in the 1990s/ early 2000s

Local Mobilizations in the 1990s/ early 2000s
”Free speech is a right, we speak with our voices but also with our hands and the many gestures we use to communicate, when you are on the sidewalk you are expressing yourself or communicating an idea, basically practicing free speech. No law can prohibit someone from standing on a public sidewalk, talking about religion for example. So how can one prohibit someone from talking about work?”
Association of Day Laborers (1997) “Letter to Executive Director of Liberty Hill Foundation”
Framing Rights Claims: Immigrants have Constitutionally Protected Rights Irrespective of Legal Status, Cultural Assimilation, or Economic Contributions

Part II. Shifting Scale: Threat and Opportune Relations

Threats to Immigrants from Federal Government

Federal Immigration Restrictions
1990 Immigration Act
Operation Blockade, Operation Gatekeeper, 1993
Illegal Immigration Reform and Responsibility Act, 1996
Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDP), 1996
Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) , 1996
2001 USA Patriot Act Created Department of Homeland Security:
2004 National Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Protection Act:
2006 Secure Fence Act:

Meissner, Doris, Donald Kerwin, Muzaffar Chishti, and Claire Bergeron. 2013. Immigration enforcement in the United States. The rise of formidable machinery. Washington, DC: Migration Policy Institute.

Federal Threat – But, Regional Organizations Lack Resources to Mount National Campaign
Regional Organizations Form New Relations to Large National Organizations
Center for Community Change (CCC) in Washington D.C.
National Campaign for Jobs and Income Support (1997-2001)
Immigrant Organizing Committee
Broker Relations to National Organizations and Funders
National Council of La Raza, National Immigration Forum, Center for American Progress
Ford Foundation, Soros Foundation…

Opportune Relations at the Federal Level

Federal Threat

+
Opportune Relations with National Organizations

Movement
Shifts from Local to National Politics

Part III. Institutionalizing Scale Shift: A National Social Movement Infrastructure

Fair Immigration Reform Movement (FIRM) Established in 2003

A national coalition of regional immigrant rights organizations
Funded and directed by Center for Community Change (DC-based)

CHIRLA
CASA M.
ICIRR
….
“With FIRM, we have had weekly conference calls for the last 15 years. That is how we connect with the Center for Community Change, which created and still plays a major role to bring us together. Right now, I am the co-chair of FIRM and every Thursday at 11:00” (Gustavo Torres, CASA Maryland)
CCC
Institutionalizing Shift: Movement Infrastructure

The Coalition for Comprehensive Immigration Reform (2006, 2007)
Reform Immigration for America (RIFA) (2009,2010)
Alliance for Citizenship (A4C) (2013,2014)

Three National Campaigns for
Comprehensive Immigration Reform
Institutionalizing Shift: Movement Infrastructure

Division of Labor of Three Campaigns (2006-2014)
1. National Organizations Lead (design campaign strategy, lobby, design policy, communication)
Center for Community Change (CCC), National Immigration Forum,
National Council of la Raza, etc.
2. Regional Immigrant Organizations Mobilize Migrant Communities
Fair Immigration Reform Movement (FIRM)

Affiliation Name Affiliations Title in A4C
Center for Community Change Susan Chinn Center for Community Change Campaign Manager
Aimee Nichols Center for Community Change Campaign Coordinator
Ruth Lopez Previous Background: RIFA, FIRM, CCC employee Legislative Manager
Jorge Neri Center for Community Change, Former White House Official Campaign Manager for Field

Alliance for Citizenship, Managing Directorship in 2013, 2014
Institutionalizing Shift: Movement Infrastructure

Part III: Accumulating Resources: Money, Political Access, Media

More Financial Resources
Contributions and Grants to 43 organizations, IRS tax forms
2000 – 2014:
43 organizations raised almost $1.7 billion

Contributions and grants (IRS forms) 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 3502222 56159351 73005795 71308391 63465857 85380259 93462206 88323050 128475844 136759994 143119879 137973992 131408272 174543212

More Political Access

Number of meetings with one or more organizations with White House Officials
2009 34
2010 80
2011 95
2012 82
2013 107
2014 105
Total 503

White House Meetings with 49 Immigrant Advocacy Organizations
Janet Murguía, executive director of
National Council of La Raza, with President Obama

Pro- and Anti-Immigrant Rights Claims (%) by Nonbusiness Organizations
Movement Consolidation
More Media Coverage

Anti 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 0.44186046511627902 0.26530612244898 0.371428571428571 0.1 0.282608695652174 0.42028985507246402 0.24611398963730599 0.26351351351351299 0.3125 0.15942028985507201 0.17647058823529399 0.1 0.157407407407407 9.6551724137931005E-2 0.19496855345911901 Pro 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 0.418604651162791 0.65306122448979698 0.628571428571428 0.8 0.63043478260869601 0.47826086956521702 0.54663212435233199 0.58783783783783805 0.546875 0.65217391304347905 0.80392156862745101 0.72857142857142798 0.77777777777777801 0.76551724137930999 0.71698113207547298

Part IV. Resource Inequalities & Oligarchy

Unequal Distribution of Money

Share of grants given by top 20 and top 10 foundations (%)
Top 4 Funders:
Ford Foundation
Atlantic Philanthropies
Open Society
Carnegie Foundation
Unequal Distribution of Money
Several Foundations Take a Leading Role in Funding Organizations

Top 10 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 0.73087557977348205 0.42299552381960298 0.34520584903052698 0.346132260 549607 0.41159081859982 0.46799661314436303 0.55949502744272706 0.53961878039587796 0.55979184447590402 0.55720772299063803 Top 20 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 0.82821413959135903 0.60739015549060904 0.63998170330675297 0.61246090562284705 0.59641491109129996 0.62646178095287897 0.71150641727698805 0.69955637223080902 0.706392962137247 0.70409009190766403
Leading Foundations Coordinate with One Another

”Funders are coming together again to ensure that the investments made last year as the foundation to build upon for the long haul until reform is achieved” (Open society report, 2008)
On December 20, U.S. Programs [Open Society] and Ford will co-sponsor a briefing for funders to learn more about the plans of leading immigrant rights advocates to help create a pathway to citizenship (Open society report, 2013a)
In early April, OSF, Ford, and the Carnegie Corporation coordinated a panel at the Council of Foundations annual meeting featuring A4C leadership (Open society report, 2013b)
Unequal Distribution of Money

Leading Foundations Coordinate with Leading National Organizations
Frequent Meetings between Executive Directors and Foundations

Executive Director of Center for Community Change, Open Society Board Member
“We ended up in a place where we would be communicating quite a bit with the funders and either answering their questions, where dollars needed to go, and other times re-granting or contracting dollars out that foundations would, for campaign related purposes” (Ali Noorani, National Immigration Forum)
“His [Deepak Bhagava, CCC executive director] multifaceted role provided unique and thoughtful insights that enabled us to quickly understand complex dynamics and marshal resources, beyond what other funders could or would do, in support of immigrant rights (Open society report, 2014).
Unequal Distribution of Money

Unequal Distribution of Money

Unequal Political Access

NAME OF ORGANIZATION Number of White House Meetings Most Visited Official
National Council of La Raza (NCLR) 115 Barack Obama
National Immigration Forum (NIF) 96 Julie Rodriguez
Center for American Progress (CAP) 85 Obama/Rodriguez
Center for Community Change (CCC) 70 Julie Rodriguez
Service Employee International Union (SEIU) 68 Julie Rodriguez
National Immigration Law Center (NILC) 45 Valencia/Rodriguez
American Immigration Council (AIC) 44 Felicia Escobar
America’s Voice 36 Barack Obama
American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA) 33 Julie Rodriguez
United Farm Workers (UFW) 31 Cecilia Muñoz

Top 10 Organizations Meeting with White House Officials
Unequal Political Access

Location and Average Number of White House Visits Per Organization
Unequal Political Access

National in D.C. 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 4.75 7.8333333333333401 10.3 8.9090909090909207 11.25 12.181818181818169 National outside D.C. 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 1.25 4 4.2 4.166666666666667 5.8 6.2 Regional/Local 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2 1.7142857142857151 2.8 1.7142857142857151 2.4 2.9

Name Position in Government Organization Affiliation
Cecilia Muñoz Director of the Domestic Policy Council National Council of La Raza, Former Senior Vice President for the Office of Research, Advocacy, and Legislation
Julie Rodriquez Office of Public Engagement Granddaughter of United Farm Workers founder, Cesar Chavez; Director of Programs at the Cesar E. Chavez Foundation
Jorge Neri Nevada State Field Director (Obama Campaign); Office of Public Engagement; Nevada State Field Director (Hilary Clinton Campaign); Center for Community Change (2008-2011); Deputy Campaign Manager for, Alliance for Citizenship.
Felicia Escobar Office of Public Engagement National Council of La Raza
Janet Murguía deputy assistant in the Clinton White House; campaign manager and director of constituency outreach for Al Gore’s presidential campaign in 2000. National Council of La Raza (director)

The Revolving Door between Movement and White House:
Unequal Political Access

Unequal Access to Media

Media Influence (%) of Organizations By Geographical Location
Movement Consolidation
Unequal Access to Media

National outside DC 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 6.9767441860465101E-2 0.20408163265306101 0.2 0.3 0.173913043478261 0.231884057971014 0.10103626943005201 9.4594594594594697E-2 0.171875 0.202898550724638 0.21568627450980399 0.34285714285714303 0.22222222222222199 0.13103448275862101 0.16352201257861601 Regional/Local 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 0.13953488372093001 0.122448979591837 0.25714285714285701 0.3 0.217391304347826 0.15942028985507201 0.32124352331606199 0.33108108108108097 0.25 0.26086956521739102 0.42156862745098 0.14285714285714299 0.22222222222222199 0.22068965517241401 0.16352201257861601 National in DC 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 0.162790697674419 0.26530612244898 0.17142857142857101 0.2 0.23913043478260901 7.2463768115942004E-2 0.119170984455959 0.162162162162162 7.8125E-2 0.173913043478261 0.16666666666666699 0.185714285714286 0.27777777777777801 0.37931034482758602 0.35849056603773599

Part V. Framing Rights Claims through Nationalism

Communication Leadership
National Immigration Forum (Frank Sharry)
America’s Voice (Frank Sharry)
Method for Producing Frames
Test messaging with surveys and focus groups with “normal Americans”

Framing Rights Claims through Nationalism
“In the mid-2000’s, the National Immigration Forum probably had done most of the messaging,” Rich Stolz, then-director of RIFA.
“America’s Voice will coordinate the communications efforts, including the work being done by the Four Freedoms Fund’s Communications Initiative, the Opportunity Agenda, Media Matters, and others” (Open Society, 2009).

There are five key themes that are emerging as priorities for the campaign:
Who are we as a country? Will we be defined by our ideals and the promise of the American Dream for all, or by the fear, intolerance, and the extremism of those pushing mass deportation?;
Who are immigrants? Immigrants are workers, families, taxpayers, citizens, soldiers, people of faith, Americans in all but paperwork;
What policies work? Mass deportation won’t work, practical solutions including smart enforcement and earned citizenship will;
What are the politics? Anti-immigrant forces make noise but don’t turn elections; immigrants vote on this issue and do influence elections;
Who and what will be helped by broad immigration reform? American workers, local communities, immigrant families, local economies, and the rule of law.
Reform Immigration for America (RIFA) Policy Memo, 2009

Framing Rights Claims through Nationalism

Downward Diffusion of Nationalist Language
D.C.-based Leadership Develops Communication Strategy (Frank Sharry, America’s Voice)
Regional Immigrant Rights Organizations Provide Local Activist Training
Each Local Activist is Trained to Train Other Activists to Use Message

Snowflake Approach Diagrams from Training Manual
“An organizer’s job is to reach out and find leaders in your community who can help you recruit and coordinate others. These leaders will be the backbone of your local campaign. You must be able to trust them to delegate responsibility to other dedicated, reliable people, and to follow through on commitments. You may be the leader in the middle, or part of a leadership team in the middle, guiding volunteer efforts and being held accountable for outcomes, but you will be deeply reliant on your relationships with others for success” (Marshall Ganz, New Organizing Institute).
Framing Rights Claims through Nationalism

Part VI. Consequences of Scale Shift

1. Elite Dominance of an Undocumented Immigrant Movement

Consequences
D.C. Organizations as Leaders and Gatekeepers
Funders
Political Elites
Media

Regional Organizations
Serve as Relays to Grassroots

2. Continued Political Access to White House Depended on Not Criticizing Obama Administration
Consequences
“People trade their currency on access and information. D.C. folks were squeamish about criticizing Obama. They didn’t want to lose their access. And, they didn’t want to have to answer for one of the local organizations taking a more critical message” (Laurence Benito, co-director of ICIRR – Chicago).
Interviewer: Did the White House signal that?
Torres: Oh, yeah. Of course!
Interviewer: They signaled that if you push on them, then you’ll lose access?
Torres: They don’t say exactly that but we know when the next meeting, they don’t invite me, or the next meeting, they move to a different strategy. We know that. They don’t need to say it (Gustavo Torres, Executive Director, CASA Maryland).

3. Reinforcing Nationalism as a Condition of Deservingness
Consequences
“The goal of the new campaign is to turn the tide of public debate and to develop policy solutions for broad immigration reform rooted in the American values of earned citizenship, the rule of law, and the promise of the American Dream” (Open Society, 2009).

“That is something we all agree on. You can never have a Mexican flag waving at your rally. One time we said, ‘Hey, wouldn’t it be cool to have a rally showing our different flags, you know, flags from Mexico, Korea, Honduras, etc… We thought it would be nice to celebrate the fact that we are from all over the world but we didn’t want to risk it” (Jesus, California Dream Network, personal interview).

Conclusion

The Consequences of Becoming a National Social Movement

Shifted power away from working class immigrant communities to professional social movement elite in Washington D.C.
Movement’s leaders were beholden to the Obama Administration at a period of mass deportations.
The leadership embraced nationalism as a condition for migrant deservingness.

A movement originally for the equal rights of undocumented working class immigrants was transformed into a movement for the legalization of “deserving immigrants” (e.g. most economic contributions + most assimilated) within a well-bordered nation-state.

Migrant City

1. Global Migration
2. The Geography of Immigrant Communities
3. Immigrant Communities

4. Hostility in Receiving Cities
5. From Words to Laws

1. Global Migration

1. Global Migration
Markets and States: Laying the Foundations

Permitting and Stimulating Migrant Flows

Governments Encourage Global Trade / Restrict Immigration

1. Global Migration
Source: Slate http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/05/10/historical_data_on_foreign_born_population_percentage.html

2. Geography of Immigrant Communities

Occupational Structure Before Globalization
Earnings and Job Growth in the Middle
Occupational Structure
After Globalization
TOP: Growth in Earnings and Jobs
MIDDLE: Decline in Earnings and Jobs
BOTTOM: Growth Jobs, Decline Earnings
Hour Glass Economy
2. Geography: Global-Gateway Cities

Demand for Low Wage Workers

Source: Monthly Review:http://monthlyreview.org/2006/07/01/harder-times-undocumented-workers-and-the-u-s-informal-economy/
2. Geography: Global-Gateway Cities

Atlantic City Lab: http://www.citylab.com/politics/2014/04/2-very-different-migrations-driving-growth-us-cities/8873/
2. Geography: New Immigrant Communities
Gateway Cities
New Destinations
Gateway Cities
New Destinations

Portes and Rumbaut 2010: 15
Gateway Cities
New Destinations

3. The Structure of the Immigrant Community

Immigrant Enclaves

3. Structure of Immigrant Communities

Based on what you know of group and community formation in large cities, describe the different steps that might be involved in the formation of new migrant communities.

3. Structure of Immigrant Communities

Immigrant Enclaves
Immigrant Community Formation
Absorbing Immigrants into Urban Economies

3. Structure of Immigrant Communities

3. Structure of Immigrant Communities
Contexts of Reception: Upward and Downward Assimilation
Politics and Policies of Host Country and Community
Values and Prejudices of Receiving Society
Opportunities: Presence or Absence of Mobility Ladders
Size and Density of Immigrant Community

3. Structure of Immigrant Communities
Example of Upward Mobility: Cubans in the 1960s and 1970s
Political Context: Receptive Government Policies: Automatic Residency
Prejudices: White Cubans
Opportunities: Strong with Many Mobility Ladders
Community: Large, Rich, and Strong Institutions

3. Structure of Immigrant Communities
Example of Troubled Mobility: Central Americans in the 1990s and 2000s
Political Context: Unreceptive Government : Denial of Refugee Status / Undocumented
Prejudices: Dark Phenotype
Opportunities: Hourglass Economy with Weak Mobility Ladders
Community: Fracture, Poor, and Weak Institutions

3. Structure of Immigrant Communities
Troubled Mobility: Central Americans in the 1990s and 2000s
Political Context: Unreceptive Government : Denial of Refugee Status / Undocumented
Prejudices: Dark Phenotype
Opportunities: Hourglass Economy with Weak Mobility Ladders
Community: Fracture, Poor, and Weak Institutions

Upward Mobility: Cubans in the 1960s and 1970s
Political Context: Receptive Government Policies: Automatic Residency
Prejudices: White Cubans
Opportunities: Strong with Many Mobility Ladders
Community: Large, Rich, and Strong Institutions

4. Hostility

From Local to National: Anti-Immigrant Hostility
Fast Demographic Change
Conservative Community and Republican Primaries
Local and State Political Entrepreneurs
National Organizations and Intellectuals
National Politicians
National Media

4. Hostility in Receiving Cities

4. Hostility in Receiving Cities
1. Fast Demographic Change
Gateway Cities
New Destinations

4. Hostility in Receiving Cities
2. Conservative Community and Republican Primaries

4. Hostility in Receiving Cities
3. Local Political Entrepreneurs – Transform Troubles into Existential Threat

4. Hostility in Receiving Cities

4. National Organizations and Intellectuals

National Organizations and Intellectuals

“In this new era, the single most immediate and most serious challenge to America’s traditional identity comes from the immense and continuing immigration from Latin America, especially from Mexico ….[T]hey [Americans] have overlooked the unique characteristics and problems posed by contemporary Hispanic immigration. The extent and nature of this immigration differ fundamentally from those of previous immigration, and the assimilation successes of the past are unlikely to be duplicated with the contemporary flood of immigrants from Latin America. This reality poses a fundamental question: Will the United States remain a country with a single national language and a core Anglo-Protestant culture? By ignoring this question, Americans acquiesce to their eventual transformation into two peoples with two cultures (Anglo and Hispanic) and two languages (English and Spanish).”
Samuel Huntington, Professor of Government, Harvard University, Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
4. Hostility in Receiving Cities

5. National Politicians

4. Hostility in Receiving Cities

5. National Politicians

4. Hostility in Receiving Cities
“After the Crime Bill passed in 1994, we build a stronger record on crime. The illegal immigration legislation provides that same opportunity; now that the legislation is passed, we can build up a strong administration record on immigration. If we want continued public support for trade and friendly relations with Mexico, we must be vigilant in our effort to curb illegal trade (e.g. narcotic and immigrants).”
Emanuel, Rahm. 1996. “Memorandum to President Clinton: Domestic Policy.” November 12.

6. National Media

4. Hostility in Receiving Cities
Massey, D. and K. Pren (2012) “Unintended Consequences of US Immigration Policy: Explaining the Post-1965 Surge from Latin America,” Population and Development Review, p. 7

From Local to National: The Process of Nativism
Fast Demographic Change
Conservative Community and Republican Primaries
Local and State Political Entrepreneurs
National Organizations and Intellectuals
National Politicians
National Media

4. Hostility in Receiving Cities

5. From Words to Laws: Centralizing and Localizing Immigration Policy

Centralizing Government Policy

History: Braceros (end in 1964)
Government Migration Restrictions:
Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965
Immigration Reform and Control Act, 1986
1990 Immigration Act
Operation Blockade, Operation Gatekeeper, 1993
Illegal Immigration Reform and Responsibility Act, 1996
Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDP), 1996
Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) , 1996

5. From Words to Laws: Centralizing Power

Massey, D. and K. Pren (2012) “Unintended Consequences of US Immigration Policy: Explaining the Post-1965 Surge from Latin America,” Population and Development Review, p. 7
5. From Words to Laws: Centralizing Power

9/11 Terrorism and Tightening the Screws
“The nation’s defense against terrorism has been seriously eroded by the efforts of open-border advocates, and the innocent victims of today’s terrorist attacks have paid the price” (Dan Stein, Federation of American Immigration Reform, NY Times, September 24, 2001)
“I note worries that terrorists would use the Mexico border as a back door to the United States, and there is the need to stop illegal crossings” (Condoleezza Rice, NY Times, March 11, 2005).
Grover Norquist (Americans for Tax Reform, “Immigration reform and border security are not competitors; they are the same thing” (Grover Norquist, NY Times, April 13, 2005).
5. From Words to Laws: Centralizing Power

2001 USA Patriot Act Created Department of Homeland Security: increased funding for surveillance and deportation of foreigners, and authorized deportation of noncitizens without due process
2004 National Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Protection Act: Funded new equipment, aircraft, Border Patrol agents, immigration investigators, and detention centers for border enforcement
2005 Real ID Act: Sharply increased the data requirements, documentation, and verification procedures for state issuance of drivers licenses
2006 Secure Fence Act: Authorized construction of additional fencing, vehicle barriers, checkpoints, lighting and funding for new cameras, satellites, and unmanned drones for border enforcement
2010 Border Security Act: Funded hiring 3,000 more Border Patrol agents and increased BP budget by $244 million
5. From Words to Laws: Centralizing Power

Spending Increases
Meissner, D., Kerwin, D.M., Chishti, M., and C. Bergeron, 2013: 12
5. From Words to Laws: Centralizing Power

Unintended Consequences:
Hostile Words
More Borders
Reduces Circular Temporary Migration
Increases Settlement of Unauthorized Migrants
Increases Family Migration
Increases Mixed Family Status

5. From Words to Laws: More Laws, More Undocumented Immigration

Localizing Government Policy

Federal Partnerships
287 (g)
Secure Communities

Restrictive Local / State Laws

5. From Words to Laws: Localizing Policy

287g Partnerships: By Region
5. From Words to Laws: Localizing Policy

40
Northeast 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2014 2016 0 0 0 0 0 0.11764705882352899 7.4626865671641798E-2 7.1428571428571397E-2 7.0422535211267595E-2 5.8823529411764698E-2 7.69230769230769E-2 8.5714285714285701E-2 9.375E-2 Midwest 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2014 2016 0 0 0 0 0 0 4.47761194029851E-2 4.2857142857142899E-2 4.2253521126760597E-2 4.4117647058823602E-2 2.5641025641025699E-2 2.8571428571428598E-2 3.125E-2 South 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2014 2016 1 1 1 0.4 0.375 0.58823529411764697 0.62686567164179097 0.61428571428571399 0.61971830985915499 0.63235294117647101 0.58974358974358998 0.628571428571429 0.6875 West 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2014 2016 0 0 0 0.6 0.625 0.29411764705882398 0.25373134328358199 0.27142857142857202 0.26760563380281699 0.26470588235294101 0.30769230769230799 0.25714285714285701 0.1875

Source: http://trac.syr.edu/immigration/reports/349/
Secure Communities
5. From Words to Laws: Localizing Policy

Local Anti-Immigrant Measures “Spreading like Wildfire”
The Role of the Federation of American Immigration Reform and Kris Kobach

Source: http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/03/anti-immigration-law-database

5. From Words to Laws: Localizing Policy

Centralizing and Localizing Immigration Policy =

Deportations

“None of the terrorist attacks involved Mexicans, and none of the terrorists entered through Mexico. Indeed, all came to the United States on legal visas…Mexicans nonetheless bore the brunt of the deportation campaign launched in the name of the war on terrorism, comprising 72% of those removed in 2009” (Massey and Pren 2012: 16, emphasis added).

Massey, D. and K. Pren (2012) “Unintended Consequences of US Immigration Policy: Explaining the Post-1965 Surge from Latin America,” Population and Development Review, p. 7

5. From Words to Laws: Localizing Policy

5. From Words to Laws: Localizing Policy
Local and County Policies: Sanctuary
Los Angeles: Special Order 40 (1979) – Forbids Police to Inquire about Immigration Status
Maricopa County Arizona: Strong Cooperation in 287(g) and Secure Communities

5. From Words to Laws: Localizing Policy
State Sanctuary Policies
California: Trust Act AB4 (2013); Values Act, SB54 (2017)
Arizona: Anti-Immigrant Laws: “Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act” SB1070 (2010)

1. Global Migration
2. The Geography of Immigrant Communities
3. Immigrant Communities

4. Hostility in Receiving Cities
5. From Words to Laws

State-Level Comprehensive Anti-Immigration Laws

State

Passed

Arizona

April 2010

Utah

March 2011

Georgia

April 2011

Indiana

May 2011

Alabama

June 2011

South Carolina

June 2011

9. Urban Rebellions – Punk and Riots Winter 2020.pptx

Migrant City

4. Hostility

From Local to National: Anti-Immigrant Hostility

Fast Demographic Change

Conservative Community and Republican Primaries

Local and State Political Entrepreneurs

National Organizations and Intellectuals

National Politicians

National Media

4. Hostility in Receiving Cities

4. Hostility in Receiving Cities
1. Fast Demographic Change

Gateway Cities
New Destinations

4. Hostility in Receiving Cities
2. Conservative Community and Republican Primaries

4. Hostility in Receiving Cities
3. Local Political Entrepreneurs – Transform Troubles into Existential Threat

4. Hostility in Receiving Cities

4. National Organizations and Intellectuals

National Organizations and Intellectuals

Samuel Huntington, Professor of Government, Harvard University, Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
4. Hostility in Receiving Cities

5. National Politicians

4. Hostility in Receiving Cities

5. National Politicians

6. National Media

4. Hostility in Receiving Cities

Massey, D. and K. Pren (2012) “Unintended Consequences of US Immigration Policy: Explaining the Post-1965 Surge from Latin America,” Population and Development Review, p. 7

From Local to National: The Process of Nativism

Fast Demographic Change

Conservative Community and Republican Primaries

Local and State Political Entrepreneurs

National Organizations and Intellectuals

National Politicians

National Media

4. Hostility in Receiving Cities

5. From Words to Laws: Centralizing and Localizing Immigration Policy

Centralizing Government Policy

5. From Words to Laws: Centralizing Power

9/11 Terrorism and Tightening the Screws

“The nation’s defense against terrorism has been seriously eroded by the efforts of open-border advocates, and the innocent victims of today’s terrorist attacks have paid the price” (Dan Stein, Federation of American Immigration Reform, NY Times, September 24, 2001)

“I note worries that terrorists would use the Mexico border as a back door to the United States, and there is the need to stop illegal crossings” (Condoleezza Rice, NY Times, March 11, 2005).

Grover Norquist (Americans for Tax Reform, “Immigration reform and border security are not competitors; they are the same thing” (Grover Norquist, NY Times, April 13, 2005).

5. From Words to Laws: Centralizing Power

2001 USA Patriot Act Created Department of Homeland Security: increased funding for surveillance and deportation of foreigners, and authorized deportation of noncitizens without due process

2004 National Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Protection Act: Funded new equipment, aircraft, Border Patrol agents, immigration investigators, and detention centers for border enforcement

2005 Real ID Act: Sharply increased the data requirements, documentation, and verification procedures for state issuance of drivers licenses

2006 Secure Fence Act: Authorized construction of additional fencing, vehicle barriers, checkpoints, lighting and funding for new cameras, satellites, and unmanned drones for border enforcement

2010 Border Security Act: Funded hiring 3,000 more Border Patrol agents and increased BP budget by $244 million

5. From Words to Laws: Centralizing Power

Spending Increases

Meissner, D., Kerwin, D.M., Chishti, M., and C. Bergeron, 2013: 12
5. From Words to Laws: Centralizing Power

Localizing Government Policy

Federal Partnerships
287 (g)

Secure Communities

Restrictive Local / State Laws

5. From Words to Laws: Localizing Policy

287g Partnerships: By Region
5. From Words to Laws: Localizing Policy

Northeast 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2014 2016 0 0 0 0 0 0.11764705882352899 7.4626865671641798E-2 7.1428571428571397E-2 7.0422535211267595E-2 5.8823529411764698E-2 7.69230769230769E-2 8.5714285714285701E-2 9.375E-2 Midwest 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2014 2016 0 0 0 0 0 0 4.47761194029851E-2 4.2857142857142899E-2 4.2253521126760597E-2 4.4117647058823602E-2 2.5641025641025699E-2 2.8571428571428598E-2 3.125E-2 South 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2014 2016 1 1 1 0.4 0.375 0.58823529411764697 0.62686567164179097 0.61428571428571399 0.61971830985915499 0.63235294117647101 0.58974358974358998 0.628571428571429 0.6875 West 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2014 2016 0 0 0 0.6 0.625 0.29411764705882398 0.25373134328358199 0.27142857142857202 0.26760563380281699 0.26470588235294101 0.30769230769230799 0.25714285714285701 0.1875

Source: http://trac.syr.edu/immigration/reports/349/
Secure Communities
5. From Words to Laws: Localizing Policy

Local Anti-Immigrant Measures “Spreading like Wildfire”
The Role of the Federation of American Immigration Reform and Kris Kobach

Source: http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/03/anti-immigration-law-database

5. From Words to Laws: Localizing Policy

Centralizing and Localizing Immigration Policy =

Deportations

Massey, D. and K. Pren (2012) “Unintended Consequences of US Immigration Policy: Explaining the Post-1965 Surge from Latin America,” Population and Development Review, p. 7

5. From Words to Laws: Localizing Policy

5. From Words to Laws: Localizing Policy
Local and County Policies: Sanctuary
Los Angeles: Special Order 40 (1979) – Forbids Police to Inquire about Immigration Status

Maricopa County Arizona: Strong Cooperation in 287(g) and Secure Communities

5. From Words to Laws: Localizing Policy

State Sanctuary Policies
California: Trust Act AB4 (2013); Values Act, SB54 (2017)

Arizona: Anti-Immigrant Laws: “Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act” SB1070 (2010)

Unintended Consequences of Restrictions

More Undocumented Migrants

Unintended Consequences:
Hostile Words

More Borders

Reduces Circular Temporary Migration

Increases Settlement of Unauthorized Migrants

Increases Family Migration

Increases Mixed Family Status

5. From Words to Laws: More Laws, More Undocumented Immigration

1. Global Migration
2. The Geography of Immigrant Communities
3. Immigrant Communities

4. Hostility in Receiving Cities
5. From Words to Laws

Urban Rebellions

Part 1: Subversive Culture

Part 2: Urban Rage

Subversive Culture

Part I. Punks in the City

Disgruntled Youth in the City
Economic Recession

Cultural Dismay

Political Disillusionment

Subversive Youths Across Cities
New York and London: Centers of Punk

Connecting to Los Angeles

Increasing Numbers in L.A.

Subversive Youths Across Cities

Sid Vicious and Johnny Ramone

Consolidating a Core Group of Subversives

Growing Numbers

Institutionalization – Do It Yourself (DIY)
Connecting Places (venues, Canterbury apts)
Literature (fanzines, Slash)
Distribution (Bomp records)

The Masque

Consolidating a Core Group of Subversives

Social Networks:
Appropriating Abandoned Urban Spaces

Proximity

Multiplex Networking

Fast Growth and Group Complexity

Group Complexity:
Early Group: Strong Solidarity – Amorphous

More People – More Distinctions: True Punks vs. Poseurs

RODNEY ON KROQ
Fast Growth:
More Bands (X, Go Go’s, …)

More Media (Rodney on the Rock)

More Venues (Elk Lodge, Al’s Bar, Hollywood Clubs)

Hollywood: The Core Geographical Cluster

Part II. The Revenge of the
Suburbs: Punk Goes to the Burbs

Spreading: From City Core to Suburban Periphery
Black Flag
Suicidal Tendencies
Minutemen
TSOL
Social Distortion
Red Kross
Circle Jerks
Descendents
Adolescents
Vandals
Agent Orange
Flipside Fanzine
KSPC
KXLU

Think Pair Share
Develop a step by step theory for the suburbanization of punk.

Identify the specific steps in the process.

Punk and Post Metropolitan Landscapes
Diffusing out from the Center

Suburban Spinoffs

Blocked from the Center

Subversive Nodes Connecting across the Region
New Institutions

Connections across Suburbs

KSPC

Taking Aim: Family Man and Consumer Culture
Classical Punk Message

Taking Aim at the Backbone of Suburban Life

Punk Challenging Middle Class, Suburban Culture

Part III. Punk in the Barrio

Placing Barrio Punk in Context
The Roaring 1980s: Growing Opportunities for Some, But Not for Others

Police Repression

Barrio Punk: Critique of Economic and Racialized System

New Group Formation – New Cultural Project
Emergence: Friends at School

Innovations: Mixing Different Styles – Creating New Culture

Rejected by All Sides
Rejected by Minority Community

Rejected by Some in White Punk Community

Sharpening Boundaries

Safe Space Enables Cultural Support and Identity
Constructing Identity
Constructing Message
Constructing Bonds

Sharpening Cultural Boundaries
Strong Group Identifiers
Distinction Between Insider and Outsider
Attributing Value: Authentic versus Poser

Connecting to Other Struggles

Connecting to Social Justice Movements in Los Angeles

Connecting to Political Struggles in Latin America

Space of Empowerment

Institutionalizing Subversive Culture

Strengthening Commitment to Transgressive and Subversive Cultural Politics

Part IV. Punk Now?

Spatial Diffusion and Mainstreaming: Punk is Dead
Major Diffusion

Larger Audience

Great Commercial Value

More Difficult to Maintain Subversion

But…Still Inspiring Aggrieved Youths

Backyard Punk: Boyle Heights

Extra Credit – 5 points
What are the economic and social conditions that shaped the lives of these youths?

How do these youths form groups with one another?

How do they form a common culture?

How do they exchange information?

Part 2

Conditions of Urban Rage: United States and France

1. Systemic Territorial Inequalities

2. Systemic Stigma

3. Systemic Police Repression

4. Contradictory Ideologies: equality and repression

5. Weak Advocacy Organizations

6. Killings and Police Brutality as Triggers

1. Systemic Territorial Inequalities

Territorial Marginalization

Commonalities with France:
Economic Decline following 1980s

Homogenous Class Structure

Predominance of Minorities

Racism

Differences with the United States:
Suburban Poverty:

Ethnic Heterogeneity:

Strong Presence of Government: School, Transit, Social Programs Keep Connections Alive

Territorial Inequalities

http://www.metropolitiques.eu/Are-socio-spatial-inequalities.html

https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Europe/2012/0501/In-France-s-suburban-ghettos-a-struggle-to-be-heard-amid-election-noise

2. Systemic Stigma

Territorial Stigmatization

Stigmatizing People in Places

I don’t know how you would characterize the gang leaders who got 13-year-old kids hopped up on crack and sent them out into the street to murder other African American children — maybe you thought they were good citizens. President Bill Clinton 1996

Territorial Stigmatization

Stigmatizing People in Places

President Sarkozy
President Chirac

3. Systemic Police Repression

Systematic Police Repression

Crime down, Imprisonment soaring

Systematic Police Repression

Expanding the Punitive Net

Systematic Police Repression

Non-Violent, Drug Offenses

Heavily Biased against Black population

Systematic Police Repression

Police shootings racially biased

Profiting from the Poor: Ferguson
Offset loss in tax shortfall through increasing funds

Number of citations became indicators of activity

City’s second largest source of revenue

Ferguson: Municipal court gross revenue for calendar year 2012 passed the $2 million mark

21,000 warrants warrants for 33,000 offenses in 2013 alone.

Department of Justice Report: ‘Ferguson law enforcement practices are shaped by the city focus on revenue rather than by public safety needs.”

Systematic Police Repression

Repression increasing in France, but the United States is still in front

Police Abuse in France

High Racial Profiling

High Rates of Police Brutality

Higher Incarceration

Systematic Police Repression

http://www.prisonstudies.org/highest-to-lowest/prison_population_rate?field_region_taxonomy_tid=All

Point: Systematic police repression increasing in France, but the United States is still far more repressive

4. Contradictory Ideologies: Equality and Discrimination

Ideal of Equality
United States: Liberty and Justice for All
France: Republicanism

Discriminatory Norms and Practices
United States: White Supremacy and Police Repression
France: Colonialism and Police Repression

Contradictory Ideologies

5. Weak Advocacy Organizations

Role of Advocacy Organizations in Poor Neighborhoods

Transforming Activists into Service Providers

United States: Professionalization (Community Development Corporations)

France: Service Associations

From Protest Function to Pacification Function

Weak Advocacy Organizations

6. Triggers

Unjust Act: Representative of Other Unjust Acts (not isolated events)

Outcomes:
France: Death of Three Teenagers in Clichy-sous-Bois

United States: Michael Brown in Ferguson, Freddie Grey in Baltimore, Rodney King in Los Angeles, so on, and so forth…

Triggers

Freddie Grey

State-Level Comprehensive Anti-Immigration Laws

State

Passed

Arizona

April 2010

Utah

March 2011

Georgia

April 2011

Indiana

May 2011

Alabama

June 2011

South Carolina

June 2011

__MACOSX/._9. Urban Rebellions – Punk and Riots Winter 2020.pptx

6. Gentrification – Housing.ppt

Revised Syllabus due to President’s Day

Announcements

Revised Syllabus due to President’s Day
Meeting 7 – No Class
Meeting 8: Migrant City
Meeting 9: Riotous Cities and Rebellious Culture
Meeting 10: Subversive Politics

Announcements

2. Book Review
Handout on February 11
Due: February 24

Announcements

THINK PAIR SHARE

What is gentrification?
Is it a good or bad thing? Take a position and support your answer either way

Gentrification

Weighing the Evidence of Gentrification: Statistic Evidence

Average City and Suburb Population Change by US Region, 1990-2000

REGION NUMBER % CHANGE CITY % CHANGE SUBURB SUBURBAN ADVANTAGE

Northeast 10 -2.1 8.0 10.1

South Atlantic 16 9.4 22.9 13.5

Mountain 8 33.2 46.8 13.6

Pacific 22 13.5 17.0 3.6

All METROS 99 9.8 20.8 11.0

The Center of the Action: Survey of 24 Downtowns
Downtown Population Up, City Population Up – 12/24

AREA % CHANGE DOWNTOWN % CHANGE
CITY

Houston 69 19.8

Seattle 67.4 9.1

Chicago 51.4 4.0

Denver 51.4 18.6

Portland 35.4 21.0

Atlanta 25.1 5.7

Memphis 18.2 6.5

San Diego 16.1 10.2

Colorado Springs 7.2 28.4

Los Angeles 5.7 6.0

Boston 4.5 2.6

The Center of the Action: Survey of 24 Downtowns
2) Downtown Population Up, City Population Down – 6/24

AREA % CHANGE DOWNTOWN % CHANGE
CITY

Cleveland 32.2 – 5.4

Norfolk 20.5 – 10.3

Baltimore 5.1 -11.5

Philadelphia 4.9 -4.3

Detroit 2.9 -7.5

Milwaukee 2.5 -5.0

The Center of the Action: Survey of 24 Downtowns

Downtown Population Down, City Population Up – 4/24

AREA % CHANGE DOWNTOWN % CHANGE
CITY

Charlotte -.7 36.6

San Antonio -5.9 22.3

Lexington -6.1 15.6

Phoenix -9.1 34.4

The Center of the Action: Downtowns

4) Downtown Population Down, City Population Down – 2/24

AREA % CHANGE DOWNTOWN % CHANGE
CITY

Cincinnati -16.9 -9

St. Louis -17.5 -12.2

Racial Compositions of Downtowns:

AREA % CHANGE DOWNTOWN % CHANGE
CITY

White 7.5 -10.5

Latino 4 43

African American 6 3

Summary of Trends:
Suburbs have maintained a strong advantage over cities

Nevertheless, strong positive growth for most cities
For many cities, the 1990s was the strongest period of growth in 50 years
Downtowns seem to be a contributing factor to city revitalization

All METROS 99 9.8 20.8 11.0

# CITIES CITY SUBURB SUB. ADV.

Source: Governing: States and Localities – http://www.governing.com/gov-data/gentrification-in-cities-governing-report.html
Gentrification Prevalent but different speeds

City

Share of Eligible Tracts Gentrifying

Gentrified Tracts

Not Gentified

Not Eligible to Gentfify

Total Tracts

Fast Gentrification

Portland, OR

58.10%

142

Washington, DC

51.90%

179

Minneapolis, MN

50.60%

116

Seattle, WA

50%

118

132

Atlanta, GA

46.20%

127

Virginia Beach, VA

46.20%

Denver, CO

42.10%

144

Austin, TX

39.70%

119

182

Sacramento, CA

30%

104

New York, NY

29.80%

128

301

1723

2152

Source: Governing: States and Localities – http://www.governing.com/gov-data/gentrification-in-cities-governing-report.html
Gentrification Prevalent but different speeds

City

Share of Eligible Tracts Gentrifying

Gentrified Tracts

Not Gentified

Not Eligible to Gentfify

Total Tracts

Oakland, CA

29.30%

113

Philadelphia, PA

28.70%

209

383

Albuquerque, NM

28.10%

127

San Diego, CA

27.50%

202

282

Baltimore, MD

23.20%

129

200

Long Beach, CA

22.40%

111

Fort Worth, TX

21.50%

150

Omaha, NE

21.40%

131

Nashville, TN

21.10%

153

Boston, MA

21.10%

122

179

Source: Governing: States and Localities – http://www.governing.com/gov-data/gentrification-in-cities-governing-report.html
Gentrification Prevalent but different speeds

City

Share of Eligible Tracts Gentrifying

Gentrified Tracts

Not Gentified

Not Eligible to Gentfify

Total Tracts

Moderate Gentrification

San Francisco, CA

18.80%

180

196

Houston, TX

18.40%

155

271

461

Colorado Springs, CO

17.60%

Chicago, IL

16.80%

268

473

795

Jacksonville, FL

16.20%

163

Charlotte, NC

15.80%

137

194

Los Angeles, CA

15.10%

287

661

999

Phoenix, AZ

14.20%

121

214

355

Oklahoma City, OK

13.20%

128

196

Raleigh, NC

13%

Who Cares?
People

Academics
Turning Over Traditional View: “The wealthy seldom reverse their steps and move backwards into the obsolete housing which they are giving up” (Hoyt 1939:114).

Policy Makers

Gentrification – the Debate

The Debate: Demand-Side versus Supply-Side

Gentrification – the Debate

Three Key Propositions: David Ley (U. of British Columbia)
Change in the Structure of the Economic Change:
Culture:
Demographics
Strengths and Weaknesses
“To explain gentrification according to the gentrifiers’ actions alone, while ignoring the role of builders, developers, landlords, mortgage lenders, government agencies, real estate agents and tenants is excessively narrow (Smith 1996: 23)”

DEMAND SIDE ARGUMENT

Profits Matter More than Consumer Preference
“It appears that the needs of production – in particular the need to earn profit – are a more decisive initiative behind gentrification than consumer preference” (Smith 1996: 24).

SUPPLY SIDE ARGUMENT

The Theory: RENT GAP (low value, high potential profit)
The Role of Mortgage Capital and Collective Actors (investors, realtors, developers)

“All the consumer preference in the world will come to naught unless this long absent source of funding reappears” (Smith 1989: 253).

SUPPLY SIDE ARGUMENT
$$$$$$$ (High Value)
$ (Low Actual Value,
High Potential)

The Theory: Factors In Order

Structural Change: A New Economy and Occupational Structure

Some Areas and Not Others: Rent Gap

Demand for Inner City Property: Cultural Dispositions of New Middle Class

COMING TOGETHER DEMAND & SUPPLY ARGUMENTS

What is the government’s role in supporting gentrification? And, Why?

What are the specific things that urban planners do to support gentrification?

Sam Stein, Capital City

California Association of Realtors, 2016

Southern California

Los Angeles 22 28 26 $595,110 $3,000 $120,060

Orange 21 21 23 $790,000 $3,980 $159,370

Riverside 38 39 42 $387,000 $1,950 $78,070

San Bernardino 51 51 55 $270,000 $1,360 $54,470

San Diego 26 26 28 R $607,000 $3,060 $122,460

Ventura 27 27 34 R $634,000 $3,200 $127,900

STATE/REGION/COUNTY Q3-2017 Q2-2017 Q3-2016 Median Home
Price Monthly Payment Including Taxes & Insurance Minimum
Qualifying Income

Roy, R., Ong, P., and S. Jimenez “Impacts of the Widening Divide: Los Angeles at the Forefront fo the Rent Burden Crisis” Center for the Study of Inequality, UCLA, 2014

Evictions

https://evictionlab.org/national-estimates/

Desmond, Matthew. 2012. “Eviction and the Reproduction of Urban Poverty.” American Journal of Sociology 118 (1): 88–133.
Evictions

Homeless Trends

Policing the Poor in the Gentrifying City: Skid Row Los Angeles
Past Strategy (1960s – 2000): Containment
Internal Policing: Toleration
External Regulation: Cordoning off the Poor
Governing Homelessness

Homelessness as an Impediment of Gentrification

Governing Homelessness

Homelessness as an Impediment of Gentrification
Internal Regulation: ”Safe Cities” Initiative – Criminalizing the Homeless

“Some of these people do need help, but the majority of these people do not need help. They just need the push to get out. (LAPD Officer Mike Fernandez, LA Times, 9/9/2007).
Governing Homelessness

Regionalizing Homelessness

__MACOSX/._6. Gentrification – Housing.ppt

CHAPTER 3

Moving

Patterns of Immigrant Settlement and Spatial
Mobility

In the aftermath of World War I the National Research Council initiated a
series of “scientific studies of the causes and effects of migration.” One of
these investigations, published in 1926 as Migration and Business Cycles,
focused on “the shortage and surplus of labor in the United States in its
relation to immigration and emigration.” Its author, the economist Harry
Jerome, concluded that the inflow of population was “on the whole
dominated by conditions in the United States. The ‘pull’ is stronger than
the ‘push’.”1 By that time, the gradual integration of the world economy
had advanced sufficiently to make many Europeans aware of economic
opportunities on the other side of the Atlantic, so deliberate recruitment
became unnecessary. The question remains, however, about the
destination of these flows.
Labor economists frequently write as if immigrants have perfect

information about labor-market conditions in the receiving country and
adjust their locational decisions accordingly. The reality is very different
because a number of factors other than wage differentials impinge on the
actual destination of migrant flows. This chapter examines the locational
distribution of immigrant groups with an emphasis both on diversity among

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nationalities and types of migration and on the unequal distribution of the
foreign-born population in space. Although our main interest is on
contemporary trends, we must go back in time, because the roots of the
locational patterns of immigrants arriving today are often found in events
that took place earlier in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

THE PIONEERS

The settlement decisions of contemporary immigrants are decisively
affected by the ethnic concentrations established by their compatriots in
the past. Because earlier flows consisted overwhelmingly of physical
laborers, it is important to examine first how these foreign working-class
communities came to settle where they did. A first significant factor was
geographical propinquity. It is not by chance that the bulk of European
immigrants at the turn of the twentieth century settled along the mid- and
north-Atlantic seaboard while their Asian counterparts settled in California
and other Pacific states. It is also not surprising that the bulk of early
Mexican immigration concentrated in the Southwest, especially along the
border. For immigrant workers, proximity to the homeland has two
important economic consequences: first, for those who come on their own,
it reduces the costs of the journey; second, for everyone, it reduces the
costs of return, which most labor migrants plan to undertake at some
point. In those cases where migration occurs along a land border, as with
Mexicans, proximity to the sending area also provides a familiar physical
and climatic environment.
The impact of propinquity is most vividly reflected in those immigrant

communities established right by the waterside, at points of debarkation in
port cities of both coasts. The Little Italys huddled close to the water in
Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, and the Chinatowns of San
Francisco, Los Angeles, and other cities offer living testimony of a type of
immigration that, having reached U.S. shores, would go no farther.2

Portes, Alejandro, and Ruben G. Rumbaut. Immigrant America : A Portrait, University of California Press, 2014. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uci/detail.action?docID=1711065.
Created from uci on 2018-03-28 11:30:30.
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This is not the whole story, however, because many other groups pushed
inland. For foreign laborers, the decisive factor for the latter type of
settlement was recruitment either in the home country or at ports of entry.
The concentration of some central and eastern European peoples in the
Midwest reflects the development of heavy industry in this area more than
a century ago—first steel and later auto making. This concentration was
coupled with the minimal skills required for most new industrial jobs, which
made recruiting cheap immigrant labor attractive to employers.
Consequences of this recruitment pattern have long endured. While only 4
percent of the foreign-born population of the United States in 2000 lived in
Ohio, it was the home state of 15 percent of the nation’s Croatians, 14
percent of the Hungarians, 15 percent of the Serbs, 22 percent of the
Slovaks, and 45 percent of the Slovenians, whose ancestors had come a
century earlier.3

Similarly, during the nineteenth century, labor recruitment by the
Hudson and other canal companies moved contingents of Irish and Italian
workers inland along the routes followed by canal construction. In the
West, Chinese coolie workers also moved inland after mass recruitment by
the railway companies.4 The Union Pacific and the Central Pacific also
recruited Mexicans, trainloads of whom were dispatched from El Paso and
other border cities. At about the same time, Finnish workers made their
appearance in northern Wisconsin, Minnesota, and the Michigan Peninsula
—hired by the copper mine and timber companies.5

Not every group arriving during the nineteenth century consisted
exclusively of wageworkers, however. Those coming before the Civil War
in particular were often able to take advantage of cheap land in the West
to go into business for themselves. This was especially the case for
German settlers, who had been arriving since before the Revolutionary
War. Germans were able to push inland toward the sparsely settled lands
of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, and beyond. In their wake the
landscape of the Midwest became dotted with rural farm enclaves in which
the settlers’ language and customs dominated.6

The influence of what were, in fact, the entrepreneurial migrations of its
day have also lasted to the present. Descendants of the original settlers
and those coming later in the nineteenth century represent today the
paramount ethnic concentrations throughout the Midwest. In 2009, of the
sixty-six million people who resided in the Midwest (one in five Americans),
twenty million reported a primary German ancestry (two of every five
German Americans in the country). In the states of Wisconsin, North and
South Dakota, Nebraska, Minnesota, and Iowa, between 35 and 45
percent of the population reported German ancestry in 2009, figures that
quintuple those corresponding to the English.7 German Americans have
been by far the dominant ethnic group in cities like Milwaukee (45
percent), Cincinnati (39 percent), St. Louis (36 percent), and Indianapolis
(27 percent).8

Early Scandinavian and Czech immigrants followed a similar pattern of
independent Midwest farm settlement. Scandinavian enclaves in the
northern midwestern region, especially in Minnesota and the Dakotas,
attracted immigrants from the same nationalities throughout the twentieth
century. The 2000 census found that the descendants of Norwegian
immigrants represented the second-largest ancestry group in North
Dakota (where more than 30 percent of the population was of Norwegian
ancestry), Minnesota (more than 17 percent), and South Dakota (more
than 15 percent). Of the approximately nine million persons of Norwegian
and Swedish ancestry in the United States in 2009, 45 percent resided in
midwestern states—as did a similar proportion of those of Finnish ancestry
and a third of Danish Americans.9 Czech farming made its appearance in
Wisconsin around the mid-1800s; from Racine and earlier farming enclaves
Czechs pushed inland toward the Nebraska frontier and then to Oklahoma
and Texas. As late as 1990, Czech ancestry still accounted for about 25
percent of the populations of several rural counties in these states.10

Remarkably, of the 1.6 million persons who reported a primary Czech
ancestry in 2009, 45 percent remained concentrated in the Midwest.11

In the Far West, Japanese immigrants attempted to follow the same path
by buying land and engaging in independent farming during the early
1900s. In their case, however, land was neither plentiful nor empty. As we
saw in chapter 1, Japanese farmers faced the united opposition of domestic
growers, who had welcomed their arrival as laborers but resisted violently
their shift into self-employment.12 As a consequence of these restrictions,
and of a low level of immigration after the liberalization of U.S. laws in
1965, Japanese Americans, although a highly successful group, have
declined from a high of 850,000 in 1990 to slightly more than 750,000 in
2010 (another half a million, however, report mixed Japanese ethnicity,
reflecting high levels of intermarriage). With the notable exception of
Hawaii, the Japanese today represent a minuscule proportion of the
population of the states where they concentrate.13

Pioneer migrants—whether settling close to places of arrival, following
labor recruiters inland, or charting an independent course through farming
and urban trade in different locations—had a decisive influence on later
migrants. Once a group settled in a certain place, the destination of later
cohorts from the same country often became a foregone conclusion.
Migration is a network-driven process, and the operation of kin and
friendship ties is nowhere more effective than in guiding new arrivals
toward preexisting ethnic communities. This process may continue
indefinitely and accounts for the high concentration of most foreign groups
in certain regions of the country and their near absence from others.

FOLLOWING IN THE FOOTSTEPS

At the time of the Mexican Revolution, in the early 1900s, large
contingents of Mexican refugees migrated northward to find employment
in the slaughterhouses of Chicago, the breweries of Milwaukee, and the
steel mills of Gary, Indiana. Communities established then continue to
serve as magnets for Mexican migrants today. Despite the distance and the
different climatic conditions, remote villages in the interior of Mexico

continued sending their sons, year after year, for a stint of work in the
cities of the Midwest.14

The same pattern is found in the East, where small Jamaican, Dominican,
and Haitian colonies in New York City provided the nucleus for mass labor
migration in recent decades. Again, distance and a colder climate were no
obstacle for these Caribbean migrants to follow their predecessors. Out
West, most contemporary Asian and Pacific Islander migrations, such as
the Japanese and the Filipinos, continue to be overwhelmingly
concentrated in their areas of traditional settlement.15

The influence of preexisting networks on locational patterns is decisive
among contemporary labor migrants because they are not guided by
recruiting agents but by spontaneous individual and family decisions, which
are usually based on the presence in certain places of kin or friends who
can provide shelter and assistance. Exceptions to this pattern are found
most often among other types of immigrants. Professionals, such as
physicians, engineers, and scientists, tend to rely less on the assistance of
preexisting ethnic communities than on their own skills and qualifications.
They often come only after securing job offers from U.S. employers and
tend to be more dispersed throughout the country than physical-labor
migrants. Although no foreign group is formed exclusively by professionals
and their families, a few—such as recent Indian immigrants—approximate
this pattern and provide examples of its characteristic dispersion.16

Entrepreneurial minorities tend to settle in large urban areas that
provide proximity to markets and sources of labor. Like working-class
migrants, foreign entrepreneurs are often found in the areas of principal
ethnic concentration because of the cheap labor, protected markets, and
access to credit that they make available. This is the case, for example, of
Koreans, concentrated in Los Angeles; Chinese entrepreneurs in Los
Angeles, San Francisco, and New York; and Cubans in Miami. However,
other business-minded immigrants choose to move away from areas of
ethnic concentration to pursue economic opportunity. The latter are
commonly found in the role of intermediary merchants and lenders to

domestic minorities. Koreans and Chinese in several East Coast cities and
Cubans in Puerto Rico provide contemporary examples.17

Finally, the early locational patterns of political refugees and seekers of
political asylum are often decided for them by government authorities and
private resettlement agencies. In the past the goal of official resettlement
programs was to disperse refugee groups away from their points of arrival
to facilitate their cultural assimilation and attenuate the economic burden
they are supposed to represent for receiving areas. This official decision
accounts for the multiplicity of locations in which groups such as the
Cubans and the Vietnamese are found today, as well as more recent
arrivals from Somalia, Iraq, and Burma. Gradually, however, refugees tend
to trek back toward areas that are closer to their homeland and more
compatible in terms of climate and culture. The presence of ethnic
communities of the same nationality or a related one has frequently played
a decisive role in promoting these secondary migrations.
The rapid growth of the Cuban population in Miami-Dade County,

Florida, and of the Vietnamese population in Orange County and San Jose,
California, can be traced directly to this process. By 1979, on the eve of
the Mariel boat lift, half of the Cuban-origin population of the United
States was found in the Miami metropolitan area, a result primarily of
return migration by refugees originally resettled elsewhere; by 2000 the
national share of Cuban Americans in the Miami area had grown to 60
percent, before declining proportionately in 2010 to about half of their
growing national total of 1.8 million. Similarly, by 1990 Orange County
alone had more Vietnamese refugees than any state except California
itself, with its hub in the communities of Santa Ana and Westminster
(“Little Saigon”), where the Nguyens outnumbered the Smiths two to one
among Orange County home buyers; this locale was followed by San Jose in
Northern California. By 2000 Orange County and San Jose accounted for
one-fifth of all Vietnamese in the country; by 2010, of the 1,550,000
Vietnamese counted by the census, their proportion in the Orange County
and San Jose areas remained unchanged, at 20 percent. Calle Ocho (S.W.

8th Street) in Miami is the heart of Little Havana; Bolsa Avenue in
Westminster has been called the Vietnamese capital of America.18

These various causal processes have led to a settlement pattern among
recent immigrants to the United States that combines two apparently
contradictory outcomes: concentration, because a few states and
metropolitan areas receive a disproportionate number of the newcomers,
and diffusion, because immigrants are found in every state of the Union
and because different immigrant types vary significantly in their locational
decisions.

CHANGING CONTEMPORARY SETTLEMENT PATTERNS: A
MAP OF IMMIGRANT AMERICA

In 1910, at the peak of the era of mass European migration, the census
counted a foreign-born population of 10.6 million, or 14.7 percent of the
national total. At that time the bulk of the immigrant population (62
percent) was concentrated in seven northern states, though only 39
percent of the U.S. population lived there: New York (21 percent),
Pennsylvania (10 percent), Illinois (9 percent), Massachusetts (8 percent),
New Jersey (5 percent), and Ohio and Michigan (4 percent each). In 2010,
a century later, 67 percent of the foreign-born population of forty million
was concentrated in just six states, though again only 39 percent of the
U.S. population lived in those states: California (25 percent), New York (11
percent), Texas (10 percent), Florida (9 percent), New Jersey (5 percent),
and Illinois (4 percent). Of those, three states remained from a century
earlier as main areas of immigrant concentration, but their combined
share of immigrants had decreased from 35 percent to 20 percent: New
York, New Jersey, and Illinois. The rapid growth of southern and western
states as new immigrant destinations, notably California—which by 1990
accounted by itself for one-third of the foreign-born total but only for 10
percent of the native-born population—Texas, and Florida, reflects the
postwar economic and demographic shifts to the country’s Sun Belt. This

changing geography of immigrant settlement has accompanied, in turn, the
change in the national origins of U.S.-bound immigration in recent decades.
Figures 4 and 5 provide a pair of maps of immigrant settlement by

county in the contiguous forty-eight states at the beginning of the twenty-
first century (based on the last decennial census that collected data on the
foreign-born population for each county). The first map shows the absolute
number of the foreign-born population residing in each county; the second
shows the relative proportion of the foreign-born as a percentage of each
county’s total population. While vast expanses of the country, particularly
in the heartland, contained relatively few immigrants in absolute or
relative terms as of 2000, other regions exhibited extraordinary
concentrations, especially along the coasts. Large concentrations were
apparent throughout much of the entire state of California, most notably
along its southern corridor from Los Angeles to San Diego, as well as in
South Florida, the northeast coastal corridor extending from Washington,
D.C., through Philadelphia, New York City, and Boston, and the greater
metropolitan areas of Chicago, Detroit, Houston, Dallas–Fort Worth,
Phoenix, Atlanta, Minneapolis–St. Paul, and Seattle.
High relative proportions were especially evident in less-populated

counties along the Mexican border from Texas to California and, more
recently, in some nontraditional areas of immigrant settlement, notably in
North Carolina and Georgia in the Southeast, and in Colorado and Nevada
in the Southwest. This evolving map of immigrant America is updated in
figure 6, which displays the proportion of the foreign-born in the fifty states
as of 2010 and their number in principal metropolitan areas of immigrant
concentration.
The twin processes of continuing concentration and diversification in

immigrant settlement patterns in recent decades are detailed in table 9. It
documents the growing size of the immigrant population in the top six
states from 1990 to 2010 but also the top ten states ranked by the rate of
growth in their foreign-born populations. Despite continuing immigrant
population growth in the former, it is the extraordinarily rapid growth of
the latter that has called attention to the emergence of “new destinations”

in immigrant settlement.19 During these twenty years the U.S. immigrant
population doubled from 19.8 million in 1990 to 40 million in 2010. In the
top six states the foreign-born population increased from 14.4 million to
25.9 million—in California alone it grew from 6.5 million in 1990 to 10.2
million in 2010—but only Texas and Florida exceeded the national growth
rate; California and New York grew by slightly more than 50 percent.
By contrast, as shown in figure 7, ten states—all located in the South or

in the mountain West—grew by 280 to 525 percent, led by North Carolina
and Georgia, followed by Arkansas, Tennessee, Nevada, South Carolina,
Kentucky, Nebraska, Alabama, and Utah. The areas experiencing the
fastest growth rates were places that had relatively small immigrant
populations prior to the 1990s. While the net increase in the number of
immigrants in California during this period (nearly four million) was larger
than the total foreign-born population in those ten fast-growth states
combined, the impact of foreigners in regions unused to the incorporation
of immigrants produced political reactions by natives at the state and local
levels that have shaped the national policy debate, as we will see in
chapter 5.
To be sure, different nationalities settle in different places. Table 10

documents the concentrations at the state level of the ten largest
immigrant groups in 2010. California alone was home to greater than 25
percent of all U.S. immigrants—a decrease from its 33 percent share in
1990 but still making it the principal state of settlement for eight of the ten
largest immigrant nationalities. The state of New York absorbed another
10.8 percent of the nation’s foreign-born, while being home to only 5.6
percent of the native-born. Texas followed, with 10.4 percent of the
foreign-born total, compared to 7.8 percent of the native-born. These
three states combined to account for nearly half of all immigrants in the
country. Another 18 percent of the foreign-born were found in Florida,
Illinois, and New Jersey, so 66 percent of all immigrants nationally still
resided in the same six states in 2010 (but their overall percentage was
down from their 73 percent share in 1990).

FIGURE 4. The foreign-born population in the United States by county,
2000. Source: 2000 U.S. census.

FIGURE 5. The foreign-born in the United States as a percentage of total
county population, 2000. Source: 2000 U.S. census.

FIGURE 6. States and metropolitan areas of immigrant concentration,
2010: Percentage of the foreign-born population in the fifty states and
number of foreign-born in principal metropolitan areas. Sources: U.S.
Census Bureau, American Community Survey, 2010; and Jeanne Batalova,
Migration Policy Institute, Washington, D.C.

FIGURE 7. Concentration and diversification, 2010: The six largest states
of immigrant concentration and the ten states with the fastest-growing
immigrant populations. Sources: American Community Survey, 2010; and
Jeanne Batalova, Migration Policy Institute, Washington, D.C.

TABLE 9 TOP SIX STATES BY SIZE OF FOREIGN-BORN POPULATION, 1990,
2000, AND 2010; TOP TEN STATES BY PERCENT GROWTH OF THE
FOREIGN-BORN, 1990 TO 2010

SOURCES: U.S. Census Bureau, The Foreign-Born Population; U.S. Census Bureau,
“Ancestry: 2000”; U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey.

aStates listed by 1990 ranks.

TABLE 10 STATES OF PRINCIPAL SETTLEMENT OF THE TEN LARGEST
FOREIGN-BORN GROUPS, 2010

SOURCE: U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey, 2010.

aImmigrants from mainland China only.

Within this general picture some immigrant nationalities are far more
concentrated than others. Of the ten largest groups in 2010, three-fourths
of all Cubans were in Florida; half of all Dominicans were in New York,
with another 15 percent next door in New Jersey; three-fifths of the nearly
twelve million Mexican immigrants remained in California and Texas,
despite growing geographic diversification since the mid-1990s; and
between 30 and 50 percent of Filipinos, Vietnamese, Koreans,
Salvadorans, and Guatemalans were also in California. By comparison, and
for reasons noted earlier, Indian immigrants were the most dispersed, with
18 percent found in California, 12 percent in New Jersey, and 9 percent in
Texas.
The top six states have been the primary destination states for legal

immigrants in every year since 1971. In fiscal 2011, two-thirds of the
1,062,040 foreign-born persons admitted for legal permanent residency
went to the same half a dozen states in approximately the same
proportions: California (20 percent), New York (14 percent), Florida (10

percent), Texas (9 percent), New Jersey (5 percent), and Illinois (4
percent). At the other extreme no state received fewer than four hundred
immigrants, the least favored being Montana (511) and Wyoming (420).20

LOCATIONAL DECISIONS OF IMMIGRANT GROUPS

An alternative portrait of the settlement process emerges when we
examine locational decisions of the major immigrant groups themselves
rather than major areas of destination. Although there is overlap between
both methods of arranging the data, the two vary because national
contingents differ in their levels of concentration and their propensity to
locate in metropolitan areas. Table 11 presents the relevant information
for 2011. Six of the ten largest immigrant groups obtaining their legal
permanent resident status in that year—Mexicans, Filipinos, Vietnamese,
Koreans, Salvadorans, and Guatemalans—shared a preferred place of
destination: Los Angeles. New York was the first choice of three other
groups: immigrants from mainland China, India, and the Dominican
Republic. More than two-thirds of the last group—the Cubans—
overwhelmingly preferred Miami.

TABLE 11 METROPOLITAN DESTINATIONS OF THE TEN LARGEST NEW
LEGAL IMMIGRANT GROUPS, 2011 (Persons admitted to legal permanent
residency status in fiscal year 2011)

SOURCE: U.S. Office of Immigration Statistics, Yearbook of Immigration Statistics,
2011, supplemental table 2.

aImmigrants from China, excluding Hong Kong and Taiwan.

bLos Angeles metropolitan (core-based statistical) area includes Orange County.

The locational decisions of all major contemporary inflows reflect both
historical patterns of settlement and types of contemporary immigrants.
The most concentrated and least rural are Cubans, 69 percent of whom
settled in Miami. In 2011, as in prior years, recorded immigration from
Cuba did not correspond to actual arrivals but was formed instead by
former political refugees who adjusted their legal status. As refugees,
Cubans were far more dispersed following the deliberate resettlement
policy of government agencies. The high concentration of Cubans as
“immigrants” thus reflects voluntary individual decisions to migrate back to
South Florida. As a result the majority of the city of Miami’s population is
today of Cuban origin, and about two-thirds of the metropolitan population
of Miami-Dade County is now classified as Hispanic or Latino.
Undoubtedly, geography and climate have played a role in the process, but

more important seems to have been the business and employment
opportunities made available by the emergence of an ethnic-enclave
economy in the area.21

Next in concentration are Dominicans, a group whose rapid growth has
taken place during the last four decades and is composed primarily of
industrial workers and urban laborers. Employer recruitment and the
existence of an older Dominican colony in New York City appear to have
been the decisive factors channeling Dominican migration toward the
Northeast.22 After New York City, Boston and Miami came in a distant
second and third as preferred places among new Dominican immigrants.
As we have already noted, one of the most spatially dispersed is Indian

immigrants—the group with the highest proportion of university graduates
and professionals, whose numbers in the United States have more than
tripled since the 1990s. The Indian pattern of settlement corresponds to
that expected from professional immigrants. In 2002 less than 10 percent
had settled in their preferred destination (San Jose), reflecting the
occupational composition of Indian immigration since it is tied to
employment in the high-tech industries of Silicon Valley; by 2011 the top
choice for Indians was New York City (preferred by 16 percent of those
receiving their green cards that year), followed by Chicago and then San
Jose.
The Chinese exhibit both a clear preference for New York City and a

moderately high level of concentration in their next major places of
destination—Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area. Like Indians, a
high proportion of recent Chinese immigrants possess university degrees;
and, like Cubans, they often prefer areas where an ethnic-enclave economy
already exists. In this case, traditional Chinatowns and emerging ones in
suburban areas seem to provide the lure for the entrepreneurially inclined,
as well as those seeking wage work in ethnic firms.23

The largest national contingents are relatively similar in their levels of
metropolitan concentration, although this convergence is not the outcome
of the same historical process. The largest group by far—Mexicans—is

formed overwhelmingly by workers and their families. The proportion of
professionals and managers among occupationally active Mexican
immigrants remained the lowest among all major immigrant groups in
2010, as it had been in prior years; the percentage of urban workers and
farm laborers was, however, the highest. Originally a rural-bound flow,
Mexican immigration has become mostly urban in recent years. The
considerable dispersion of this group can be attributed to its size and its
long-standing character as a source of wage labor throughout the
Southwest and Midwest and, since the 1990s, to its growing extension to
new areas of settlement in the South and Northeast.24

Filipinos represent another large group with a long history of settlement
in the United States. Early arrivals, in particular those going to Hawaii,
were mostly rural workers.25 Unlike Mexicans, however, contemporary
Filipino immigrants are a diverse group, combining family reunification
with a sizable contingent of new professionals, especially nurses. A
tradition of serving as subordinate personnel in the U.S. Navy accounts for
sizable Filipino concentrations in Pacific fleet ports, in particular San
Diego. By 2011, Filipinos who obtained legal permanent residency were
settling primarily in Los Angeles, followed by New York—a new but
growing destination—and then by San Francisco and San Diego.
Koreans are an entrepreneurial group of more recent vintage, with a

sizable number of professionals. Their main destination remains Los
Angeles, where an ethnic-enclave economy grew rapidly during the 1980s
and 1990s. Koreans have also become prominent in produce retailing and
other intermediary small businesses in East Coast cities. New York and
Washington, D.C., came next to Los Angeles as their places of destination
in 2011; they were also the single largest foreign group arriving in large
mid-Atlantic cities such as Philadelphia and Baltimore.26

Like Cubans, the Vietnamese are not newly arrived immigrants but
mostly former refugees who have adjusted their legal status. The influence
of government resettlement programs in the spatial distribution of refugee
groups can be seen clearly in this instance. About 17 percent of 2011

Vietnamese immigrants planned to settle in the Orange County area, their
preferred location. Earlier evidence had suggested that the Vietnamese,
like the Cubans in the past, began leaving areas of initial settlement and
concentrating in other cities, primarily in California but also in the Houston
and Dallas areas in Texas. As early as 1993, the proportion of Vietnamese
settling in Orange County had reached 18 percent, with adjacent Los
Angeles and San Diego absorbing an additional sizable share of these
former refugees.27 By 2011 the share of new Vietnamese immigrants who
chose Orange County remained at about the same level, with San Jose and
San Diego accounting for 11 percent, Houston and Dallas for another 11
percent.
In general, however, refugee groups that are sponsored and resettled

initially through official programs tend to exhibit higher levels of spatial
dispersion at the start of their American lives than subsequently. This
pattern is illustrated in table 12, which presents data on preferred areas of
residence of the five largest refugee groups admitted in 1987, 1993, 2001,
and 2010. All three Southeast Asian nationalities, generally resettled
through officially sponsored programs, chose California as their preferred
destination, but much smaller fractions were initially settled there. Over
time, however, family sponsorships led to increasing concentrations in their
preferred locales. In 1987 only 6 percent of Hmong refugees from Laos
were resettled in Fresno, but by 1993 the proportion going to Fresno had
quadrupled to 25 percent. The proportion of Iranians settling in Los
Angeles increased by 10 percent between 1987 and 1993.
Like immigrants of the same nationality, Cuban “refugees” in 1987 were

not new arrivals but mostly individuals who had come during the Mariel
boat lift and then adjusted their earlier “entrant” status. After the initial
resettlement period, Mariel refugees were free to select their place of
residence. Like other Cubans, they gravitated heavily toward South
Florida. As table 12 shows, 78.5 percent of all 1987 Cuban refugees and
76.5 percent of all 1993 Cuban refugees settled in Miami, as did 66
percent of all Cubans admitted in 2001.

TABLE 12 METROPOLITAN DESTINATIONS OF THE FIVE MAJOR
REFUGEE GROUPS ADMITTED IN 1987, 1993, 2001, AND 2010

SOURCES: U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, 1987 Statistical Yearbook,
table 40; U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, 1993 Statistical Yearbook,
table 37; U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, 2001 Statistical Yearbook,
table 33; U.S. State Department, Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration
(PRM), country reports, 2011.

aIncludes migrants from Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Serbia, Kosovo, and
Montenegro.

bIncludes migrants from Ukraine, Russia, Belarus, and other former Soviet Union
states.

As we saw in chapter 1, geopolitical events since the early 1990s
changed the composition of refugees admitted into the United States. In
the 1990s the flows of Cambodians and Laotians slowed to a trickle, while
new waves of refugees were ushered in from the successor republics of the
former Soviet Union. They were joined by Bosnians, Croats, Serbs, Iraqis,
and Somalis coming as refugees in the wake of American interventions in
their respective countries. For these newer arrivals a pattern of dispersal
to new destinations, similar to that experienced by earlier refugee groups,
was the norm. In 2001 the two most common destinations for newly
admitted refugees from the former Yugoslavia were Chicago (9 percent)
and St. Louis (5 percent); for those from the former USSR it was New York
(16 percent) and Sacramento (13 percent); and for Iraqis Detroit (19
percent) and San Diego (12 percent).
The 2001 figures for Iraqis were for refugees admitted in the fiscal year

ending on September 30; virtually all had been admitted before the attacks
of September 11, after which their numbers plummeted—as did refugee
admissions generally—all the more after the United States went to war
against Iraq in March 2003. Not until 2008 did refugee admissions from
Iraq increase substantially, and by 2010 they were the largest refugee
group admitted. New refugees from Burma and Bhutan followed in number
of admissions, being resettled primarily in new destinations such as
Indianapolis, Phoenix, Columbus (Ohio), and Erie (Pennsylvania). If history
is any guide, these groups likely will subsequently gravitate toward
locations selected for reasons of history or propinquity, thereby increasing
their respective levels of concentration.

PREFERRED PLACES

Immigration to the United States is today an urban phenomenon,
concentrated in the largest cities. In 2010 less than 5 percent of legal
immigrants went to live in nonurban areas; 38 percent settled in just five

metropolitan locations (New York, Los Angeles, Miami, Chicago, and
Houston), and 85 percent resided in the one hundred largest metros. In
particular, recent years have seen the gradual end of what was a
significant component of pre–World War I immigration: rural-bound groups
coming to settle empty lands or work as farm laborers.
This trend is probably less marked among undocumented immigrants,

many of whom continue working in agriculture, from California’s Central
Valley to dairy farms in upstate New York. There are no reliable figures on
the size and occupational distribution of the undocumented population, but
a series of studies conducted among returning immigrants in their places of
origin indicates both a continuing rural presence and an increasing urban
concentration. Many undocumented immigrants apparently begin as rural
workers but gradually drift into the cities, attracted by higher wages and
better working conditions.28 As we saw in chapter 1, there is a close
interaction between legal and illegal immigrants from the same countries.
A large proportion of legal migration from countries like Mexico and the
Dominican Republic is composed of formerly undocumented immigrants
who managed to legalize their situation. Hence, the spatial distribution of
the recorded component of these inflows gives us a partial glimpse of what
takes place underground.29

The bias of contemporary immigration toward a few metropolitan places
is not a phenomenon of recent years but one that has occurred regularly
during the last several decades. Year after year, with remarkable
regularity, the same cities emerge as preferred sites of destination for the
total inflow and its major national components. Table 13 illustrates this
trend with data for selected years, beginning in 1967. During the
subsequent forty-five years, approximately one-fourth to one-third of total
immigration concentrated in the three principal areas of destination. Until
the 1990s New York remained always the preferred site, while the next
two places alternated among Los Angeles, Chicago, and Miami. The single
most significant change during the period was the emergence of Los
Angeles as the most preferred destination of immigrants overall by the
turn of the century; but by 2011 New York had regained its primacy.

Table 13 presents trends for the four major nationalities for which data
are available during the entire period. Mexicans went from 12 percent of
total immigration in 1967 to more than 20 percent in 2002, all the while
increasing their absolute numbers from some forty thousand to more than
two hundred thousand per year, before reducing their numbers after 2006
and their share to 13.5 percent of total immigration by 2011. Dominicans
maintained roughly the same proportion of total immigration throughout
these years, peaking in 1993 and decreasing through 2002 before peaking
again in 2011. Filipino immigration experienced a significant absolute
increase between 1967 and 1987 and then stabilized at about fifty
thousand immigrants per year through 2011. Cuban immigrants—mostly
adjusted former refugees—declined significantly until the mid-1980s and
then increased again to about 5 percent of total immigration in 1987. This
quantum jump is an outgrowth of the Mariel exodus, which also accounts
for an extraordinary rise in spatial concentration. More than 70 percent of
recent Cuban immigrants cluster in just three cities, with the
overwhelming majority going to Miami.

TABLE 13 DESTINATIONS OF MAJOR IMMIGRANT NATIONALITIES
OBTAINING LEGAL PERMANENT RESIDENCE IN SELECTED YEARS

SOURCES: U.S. Census Bureau, Statistical Abstract of the United States (1968, 1976,
1988, 1994, 1998); and U.S. Office of Immigration Statistics, Yearbook of Immigration
Statistics (2003, 2012).

aSan Juan is not listed after 2002 in the OIS statistical yearbook.

As seen previously, Dominicans come close to Cubans in level of
concentration, although their strong preference for New York has declined
in recent years. Filipinos and Mexicans are far more dispersed, yet, with
some exceptions, their preferred areas of destination remain the same. Los
Angeles consolidated its place during this period as the major area of
settlement for both groups, and in the 1980s and 1990s San Diego surged
ahead to third place for Mexicans and second place for Filipinos, replacing
more traditional destinations. By 2011, however, after Los Angeles,
Mexicans preferred Houston and Dallas; New York and San Francisco
occupied the second and third settlement choices for Filipinos.
Reasons for the spatial concentration of immigrant flows, the strong

urban bias of recent ones, and the consistency of their destinations over
time are all linked to the characteristic economics of immigration. Like
native youths, newly arrived immigrants are newcomers to the labor

market who tend to search for immediately available opportunities.
Regardless of their qualifications and experience, recent immigrants
generally enter at the bottom of their respective occupational ladders.
Thus, foreign physical laborers are channeled toward the lowest-paying
and most arduous jobs; immigrant professionals—such as engineers,
programmers, physicians, and nurses—also must accept less desirable
entry jobs within their professions and even outside of them.30 Last,
entrepreneurs also start small, with shops catering to their own community
or in riskier “intermediary” ventures in the inner city.
In the absence of deliberate recruitment or other ad hoc factors, entry

jobs at the bottom of the respective ladders are more easily accessible in
large urban agglomerations, especially in those experiencing rapid
economic growth. Once immigrants from a particular nationality “discover”
the existence of such opportunities, migration becomes self-perpetuating
through the operation of ethnic networks. It is thus not surprising that the
principal concentrations of the largest immigrant groups at present are
found in Los Angeles, a large metropolitan area that has experienced
sustained economic expansion in recent decades. Nor is it surprising that
Cubans concentrate in Miami, another fast-growing city that has become
the center of U.S. trade with Latin America. Washington, D.C., is also an
attractive area of destination for entrepreneurially oriented groups
because of the presence of a large inner-city minority population, along
with a sizable segment of well-paid government workers.
Less obvious are the forces leading to the continuation of New York–

bound immigration, given the industrial decline of the area in recent
history. Between 1980 and 1990 the most affected sector in New York was
manufacturing, where employment decreased by almost one-third. New
York’s industrial decline raises the question of why immigrants persist in
going there instead of following manufacturing jobs to their new locations
in the Carolinas, Georgia, Florida, or Texas. One reason is that, despite
declines in both population and employment, New York continues to be the
nation’s largest urban agglomeration. Another is that large, established
ethnic communities continue to serve as a magnet for new immigrants from

their home countries. More important, however, amid industrial decline
there has been significant economic growth spurred by other sectors,
including services and construction. From 1977 to 1987 close to two-thirds
of all new jobs created in New York were in the information industries. In
1990 total construction activity was up by more than 25 percent over the
1980 level. Between 1981 and 1990 demand for office space remained
strong,31 Manhattan alone gaining more than fifty-three million square
feet of new office space.
About half of the jobs generated in distributive and producer services in

New York City are in the highest-paid earning classes; this is particularly
true in the so-called FIRE sector (finance, insurance, and real estate) and
in transportation, communications, and utilities. However, about 45
percent of employment in producer services and 65 percent in consumer
services are formed by jobs paying minimum or near-minimum wages.
Approximately 20 percent of employment in construction is also in this low-
wage class, a figure that increases significantly among nonunion
workers.32

Immigrants have found in these low-paying jobs a continuing and
expanding entry point into New York’s labor market; in turn their presence
has been a significant element fueling the city’s economic expansion. In
addition to producer services, consumer services, and construction, there
are indications of renewed industrial activity, but it is developing through
subcontracting, sweatshops, home services, and other informal
arrangements. Several field studies point to a heavy concentration of
immigrants among both owners and workers in this informal industrial
economy.33 Thus, recent economic growth in New York has been
accompanied by a profound reorganization of production and distribution
activities in a number of sectors.
As Saskia Sassen has noted: “The large influx of immigrants from low-

wage countries over the last fifteen years . . . cannot be understood
separately from this restructuring. . . . It is the expansion in the supply of
low-wage jobs generated by major growth sectors that is one of the key

factors in the continuation of the current immigration to New York.”34

Roger Waldinger has argued that an ethnic division of labor in this context
allows immigrants to gain entry into lower-level service jobs ahead of
native minorities. A hiring queue allocates jobs among ethnic groups in
terms of desirability for preferred jobs. Factors such as the shape of the
queue (the relative sizes of the groups), resources, ethnic networks, and
discrimination determine where a group will fall in the resulting
hierarchy.35

PERSISTENT ETHNICITY

A final question is what locational trends can be expected in the future. In
other words, will recent immigrants and their descendants continue to be
disproportionately concentrated in a few metropolitan places, or will they
gradually disperse throughout the country? Theories of immigrant
assimilation have consistently assumed the latter outcome: insofar as
immigrants and their children become more like native Americans, their
patterns of spatial mobility will become more similar to those of the rest of
the population. In this view of things the gradual disappearance of
concentrated immigrant communities represents the spatial counterpart of
cultural assimilation as foreign groups “melt” into the host society. In some
writings the process is described as an elementary version of queuing
theory, with older immigrant groups leaving urban ethnic areas to new
ones: “There has also been an historical pattern of one group replacing
another in neighborhoods, jobs, leadership, schools, and other institutions.
Today’s neighborhood changes have been dramatized by such expressions
as ‘white flight’ but these patterns existed long before. . . . In nineteenth
century neighborhoods where Anglo-Saxons had once fled as the Irish
moved in, the middleclass Irish later fled as the Jews and Italians moved
in.”36

We showed previously that new immigrants tend to be persistent in their
choice of spatial location. This pattern says little, of course, about the long-

term preferences of particular groups once they have settled in the
country for generations. To explore this question, we must move back in
time and examine locational patterns of groups that have been in the
United States for longer periods. One study provided initial support for the
assimilation hypothesis by reporting a negative correlation between time
in the country and spatial concentration as measured by the index of
dissimilarity (D) from the American population as a whole. For ten
European nationalities, most of which were already well represented in the
country at the time of independence, the correlation between these two
variables is −.72.37 The same study goes on to report, however, that
immigrant groups’ initial settlement patterns have had a decisive influence
on the ethnic composition of each of the country’s regions. For example,
with few exceptions the five largest ancestry groups within each regional
division include groups that were among the five largest immigrant
contingents already living in the area in 1850, 1900, or 1920. Thus,
German and Irish are among the largest ancestry groups in New England,
where they were also among the principal immigrant nationalities in each
of these earlier years; Norwegians and Swedes were strongly represented
in the northern Midwest, just as their ancestors were at the turn of the
century.38

What is true of regions is also true of specific nationalities. Descendants
of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century immigrants, particularly
those coming from the Mediterranean and from non-European countries,
tend to remain in their original areas of settlement. As we have seen,
Mexicans and Filipinos continue to arrive in large numbers and continue to
go to the places in which they were concentrated half a century ago. The
remaining groups are, however, descendants of immigrants who arrived in
the United States mostly before World War II. Despite long residence in
the country, they cluster in the same areas as their forebears. Four-fifths
of all Portuguese Americans reside at present in only two regions of the
country: the Northeast (mainly in Massachusetts and Rhode Island) and

the West (mainly in California and Hawaii); most Japanese Americans are
found in just the latter two states.39

Within major areas of settlement there has been, of course, outward
movement and dispersal, and this pattern has been taken as evidence of
full assimilation. The telling fact, however, is that after several generations
particular nationalities continue to be associated with specific patches of
national territory, giving them their distinct idiosyncrasies and cultural
traits. Such stable locations are a far cry from the image of a thoroughly
homogenized “melted” population with identical proportions of the same
original nationalities found everywhere.
There is little reason to believe that the resilience of these ethnic

communities will disappear in the future. The American population as a
whole is gradually moving away from the Northeast and Midwest toward
the South and Southwest. If present trends continue indefinitely, New
England and the mid-Atlantic region will see their combined share of the
total population reduced from 21 to just 10 percent, and the southern
Midwest and Pacific regions will increase theirs from 24 to 36 percent.
Already in 2010, 60 percent of the U.S. population was located in the South
and the West, a share that keeps increasing. However, this spatial
displacement will not necessarily lead to greater dispersion of ethnic
communities. If trends observed since the late 1980s continue, their
overall spatial concentration will either persist or will be renewed
following the new pioneering displacements observed since the late 1990s.
Reasons for this somewhat surprising outcome are threefold. First,

ethnic groups concentrated in regions losing population are less likely to
leave, so over time their relative proportion increases. Second, when
members of an ethnic minority move, they are more likely to go to areas
where their own group is already numerous, including those experiencing
out-migration. Third, when an ethnic group moves en masse from its
traditional area, it does not become necessarily dispersed but often
regroups in another region. The outcome of these trends, when projected
into the future, is that nationalities such as the Poles will tend to remain
heavily concentrated in the Northeast and Midwest, Norwegians in the

northern Midwest, and Cubans in the Southeast; Jews of mostly Russian
origin will tend to abandon the mid-Atlantic region to reconstitute
themselves as a major ethnic group in the West.40

An instructive example involves the 130,000 Indochinese refugees who
arrived in the United States in 1975. Upon arrival they were sent to four
major reception centers, from which they were resettled in 813 separate
locations spread throughout all fifty states. Data collected at the reception
centers show that less than half of these refugees (47 percent) were sent
to the state of their choice. By 1980, however, 45 percent lived in a state
other than the one to which they had been sent. Nearly 40 percent had
moved to areas of high ethnic concentration in California. Conversely, the
proportion that lived in dispersed communities with fewer than five
hundred refugees of the same nationality dropped from 65 percent to 40
percent. Secondary migration trends during the 1980s and 1990s
continued reinforcing the predominance of a few areas of Indochinese
concentration.41

Given these past experiences and the propensity of major contemporary
immigrations to remain clustered, there is little reason to expect a
dispersal of recent immigrants and their children. Contrary to conventional
assimilationist views, the safest prediction is that ethnic communities
created by present immigration will endure and will become identified with
their areas of settlement, giving to the latter, as other immigrants had
before them, a distinct cultural flavor and a new “layer” of phenotypical
and cultural traits.

CONCLUSION: THE PROS AND CONS OF SPATIAL
CONCENTRATION

The question of why ethnic communities tend to stay put in certain parts of
the country can be discussed jointly with advantages and disadvantages of
this pattern because the two issues are closely intertwined. Overall, the
entire process of immigrant settlement is “sticky” because new arrivals

tend to move to places where earlier immigrants have become established,
and later generations do not tend to wander too far off. Following
assimilation theory, it could be argued that this pattern is irrational
because economic opportunities, especially for the American-born
generations, are often greater elsewhere. Individualistic aspirations should
lead to dispersal because upward economic mobility often requires spatial
mobility.42

There is, however, an alternative logic. By moving away from places
where their own group is numerically strong, individuals risk losing a range
of social and moral resources that make for psychological wellbeing as well
as for economic gain. A large minority that becomes dispersed risks
lacking a significant presence or voice anywhere; in contrast, even a small
group, if sufficiently concentrated, can have economic and political
influence locally. For members of the immigrant generation, spatial
concentration has several positive consequences: preservation of a valued
lifestyle, regulation of the pace of acculturation, greater social control over
the young, and access to community networks for both moral and economic
support.
For subsequent generations, preservation of the ethnic community, even

if more widely dispersed, can also have significant advantages. Among the
entrepreneurially inclined, ethnic ties translate into access to sources of
working capital, protected markets, and pools of labor.43 Others also
derive advantages from an enduring community. There is strength in
numbers, especially at the ballot box, and this fact allows minority groups
to assert their presence and their interests in the political process. As
chapter 5 will show, politics can also serve as an avenue of individual
upward mobility when other paths remain blocked. The ascendance of
urban Irish politicians in the late nineteenth century and that of their
Italian counterparts later on provide classic examples.44 The highly
concentrated Cuban population in South Florida has followed the same
path.

The question of relative advantages and disadvantages can be turned
around, however, and asked from the point of view of mainstream society.
Many writers, most loudly Samuel Huntington, have expressed fears of
continuing immigration precisely because it leads to growing ethnic
concentration, which, they believe, will alter the cultural fabric of the
nation. At worst, secessionist movements have been anticipated in those
areas where immigrants and their descendants become the majority.45

There is little doubt that the best way to minimize the social and cultural
impact of immigration is either to stop it or to disperse new arrivals, but
this also minimizes the potential long-term contribution that immigrant
communities can make. Throughout the history of the United States,
communities created by foreign groups have been a significant force in
promoting the growth and economic development of cities like New York,
Boston, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, as well as entire regions like the
Midwest. Once immigrants have settled and integrated economically, their
traditions and folkways have entered local culture. After a while these
syncretic products become institutionalized and are then proudly
presented as “typical” of the local lore. St. Patrick’s Day parades, German
beer fests, Chinese New Year celebrations, Mardi Gras carnivals, Mexican
fiestas, and the like are so many manifestations of this process. Without
the past and present contributions of immigrant groups, the dynamism and
vibrancy of contemporary American culture would have given way to a
uniform, gray landscape.
But what about separatism? During the first two decades of the century,

immigrants came to represent more than one-fifth of the American labor
force, and they and their children composed absolute majorities of the
country’s urban population. This situation, in which the foreign presence
relative to the native population vastly exceeded that found today, did not
give rise to any secessionist movement. Instead, immigrants focused their
energies on carving an economic niche for themselves; their children
learned English and gradually entered native social circles and the local
political process. Perhaps the most telling case against nativist fears is that
of Mexican Americans in the Southwest. Despite the substantial size of this

minority, its proximity to the home country, and the fact that these
territories were once Mexico’s, secessionist movements within the
Mexican American population have been insignificant.
During World War II and the Korean War, Mexican American youths

could easily have avoided military service by taking a short ride into
Mexico; instead, they contributed tens of thousands of soldiers and battle
casualties to the nation’s war effort.46 There are more Mexican
Americans who have honorably served this nation in its many wars than
words in Huntington’s essay against them.47 Recent illustrations come in
the form of the commanding officer of American troops in Iraq in 2003 and
early 2004, Lt. General Ricardo Sánchez—a second-generation Mexican
American from a poor immigrant family settled right next to the U.S.-
Mexico border—and in the form of many “green card marines,” such as
José Angel Garibay and Jesús Angel González (both twenty-two years old),
who were born in Mexico, grew up in poverty in Southern California, and
were among the first to die in action in Iraq at the start of the war in
2003.48

Ethnic communities have been much less the Trojan horses portrayed by
nativists and xenophobes than effective vehicles for long-term adaptation.
As Andrew Greeley stated: “It could be said that the apparent inclination of
men . . . to consort with those who, they assume, have the same origins
provides diversity in the larger society and also creates substructures that
meet many functions the larger society would be hard put to service.”
Greeley also notes, however, that “the demons of suspicion and distrust
prove very hard to exorcise from interethnic relationships.”49 At a time
when such “demons” are again on the rise in the United States, it may be
well to recall past experience, where spatial concentrations of immigrants
from all over the globe did not lead either to political separatism or to
cultural alienation. Within their respective areas of settlement ethnic
communities created by immigration have grown and diversified; later
generations’ efforts to maintain a distinct culture have been invariably
couched within the framework of loyalty to the United States and an

overarching American identity. Today’s immigrants, in all likelihood, will
follow the same path.

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A JOHN HOPE FRANKLlN (ENTER BOOK

BORKNV5143

M30

Punishing the Poor

l!J ZAPADOCESKA UNIVERZITA v PLZNI Univerzltnr knihovna

NENICMNE I

The Criminalization of Poverty
in the Post-Civil Rights Era

In his lecture course on socialism, Emile Durkheim contends that the
state is “not an enormous coercive power, but a vast and conscious
organization” capable “of an action at once unified and varied, supple
and extensive.”· Historical experience shows that these two aspects are
by no means incompatible, and that a state apparatus can very well be
both at the same time. Such is the case at the dawn of the twenty-first
century with the United States, where, notwithstanding the virulently
antistatist ambient discourse, public force understood il1 the strict sel1se
plays an increasingly decisive role in the patterning and conduct of
national life.

Over the past three decades, that is, since the race riots that shook
the ghettos of its big cities and marked the closing of the Civil Rights
revolution, America has launched into a social and political experiment
without precedent or eqUivalent in the societies of the postwar West:
the gradual replacement of a (semi-) welfare state by a police and penal
state for which the criminalization of marginality and the punitive con-
tainment of dispossessed categories serve as social policy at the lower
end of the class and ethnic order. To be sure, this welfare state was, as
we shall note shortly, notably underdeveloped compared to its Euro-
pean counterparts. For a number of well-known historical reasons, the
sphere of citizenship is particularly constricted in the United States,
and the ability of subordinate categories to mal,e themselves heard,
severely circumscribed.·· Rather than of a welfare state, one should

°Emile Durkheim, Socialism, ed. and intra. Alvin \Y/. Gouldner, pref. Marcel Mau55
(New York: Collier, 1962), 43. My translation. This neo-Hegelian conception is fur-
ther elaborated in a set of little-known papers on the state gathered in Te.t:tes, val. 3,
FOllctiol1S soda/es et institutions, ed. Victor Karady (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1975),
chap. 2, in which Durkheim argues that the modern state must increasingly orient its
action toward the legal regulation of societallife, thus joining through a normative
route with Max Weber’s positive view of the pivotal place of the law in contemporary
political rule .

•• Among these reasons, which are closely interhvined, figure the rigid ethnoracial
division inherited from the era of slavery, the “frontier” tradition and the pervasiveness
of moral individualism, the decentralization of the political and bureaucratic fields,
and the fierce suppression of unions fostered by the strong integration of the capital-

42 CHAPTER TWO

speak here of a charitable state inasmuch as the programs aimed at
vulnerable populations have at all times been limited, fragmentary, and
isolated from other state activities, informed as they are by a moralistic
and moralizing conception of poverty as a product of the individual
failings of the poor.’ The guiding principle of public action in this do-
main is not solidarity but compassion; its goal is not to reinforce social
bonds, and still less to reduce inequalities, but at best to relieve the
most glaring destitution and to demonstrate society’s moral sympathy
for its deprived yet deserving members.

Moreover, the hypertrophied penal state that is bit by bit replacing
the rump social-welfare state at the bottom of the class structure-or
supplementing it according to a gendered division of labar-is itself
incomplete, incoherent, and often incompetent, so that it can fulfiIJ
neither the unrealistic expectations that have given birth to it nor the
social functions that it has as its mission to shore up. And it is hard
to see how its development could go unchecked indefinitely, since in
the medium run it threatens to bankrupt the large states that lead
the pack in the frantic race to hyperincarceration, such as California,
New York, Texas, and Florida.’ Lastly, notwithstanding the thunder-
ing proclamations of politicians from all sides about the necessity to
“end the era of Big government” – the cheery chorus of Clinton’s State
of the Union address in 1996-the US government continues to pro-
vide many kinds of guarantees and support to corporations as well
as to the middle and upper classes, starting, for example, with home-
ownership assistance: almost half of the $64 billion in fiscal deduc-
tions for mortgage interest payments and real estate taxes granted in
1994 by Washington (amounting to nearly three times the budget for
public housing) went to the 5 percent of American households earning
more than $100,000 that year; and 16 percent of that sum went to the
top 1 percent of taxpayers with incomes exceeding $200,000. Over
seven in ten families in the top 1 percent received mortgage subsidies
(averaging $8,457) as against fewer than 3 percent of the families below
the $30,000 mark (for a paltry $486 each).’ This fiscal subsidy of $64
billion to wealthy home owners dwarfed the national outlay for welfare
($17 billion), food stamps ($25 million), and child nutrition assistance
($7.5 billion).

It is the thesis of this book that the United States is groping its way

ist class as early as the end of the nineteenth century. For a comparative perspective,
see Gcsta Esping-Andersen, The Three lVor/d!; of\Velfare Capitalism (Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 1990); and Maurice Roche, Retltillkillg Citize1lSltip: Htel-
fare. Ideology, and Change ill klodem Society (Cambridge: Polity, 1992).

THE CRIMINALlZATION OF POVERTY 43

toward a new kind of hybrid state, neither a “protector” state, in the
Old World sense of the term, nor a “minimalist” and noninterventionist
state, conforming to the ideological tale spun by zealots of the market.
Its social side and the benefits it dispenses are increasingly secured by
the privileged, especially through the “fiscalization” of public support
(for education, health insurance, and housing),’ while its disciplinary
vocation is upheld mainly in its relation to the lower class and subor-
dinate ethnic categories. This centaur state, guided by a liberal head
mounted upon an authoritarian body, applies the doctrine of “laissez-
faire et laissez passer” upstream, when it comes to social inequalities
and the mechanisms that generate them (the free play of capital, dere-
liction of labor law and deregulation of employment, retraction or re-
moval of collective protections), but it turns out to be brutally pater-
nalistic and punitive downstream, when it comes to coping with their
consequences on a daily level.

This chapter provides a preliminary sketch of the twofold shift that
has tipped the balallce of the US bureaucratic field from its protective
to its punitive pole when it comes to managing poor populations and
territories.4 It argues that the downsizing of the social-welfare sector
of the state and the concurrent upsizing of its penal arm are function-
ally linked, forming, as it were, the two sides of the same coin of state
restructuring in the nether regions of social and urban space in the
age of ascending neoliberalism. The gradual rolling back of the social
safety net commenced in the early 1970S as part of the bacldash against
the progressive movements of the previous decade and culminated in
1996 with the conversion of the right to “welfare” into the obligation
of “workfare,” designed to dramatize and enforce the work ethic at the
bottom of employment ladder. We shall show in the next chapter that
the new punitive organization of welfare programs operates in the
manner of a labor parole program designed to push its “beneficiaries”
into the subpoverty jobs that have proliferated after the discarding of
the Fordist-Keynesian compromise. The diffusing social insecurity and
escalating life disorders caused by the desocialization of wage labor and

“In The Hiddell Welfare State: Tax £””pellditures and Social Policy ill the United
States (Princeton, N.1.: Princeton University Press, 1997), Christopher Howard shows
that the social spending of the federal government is increasingly effected in a con-
cealed manner, by way of fiscal arrangements that systematically favor business and
wealthier households and effectively bypass the poor. In 1995, tax expenditures
with social welfare objectives (such as deductions for home mortgage interest and
employer-provided pensions) exceeded $450 billion, more than ten times the budget
for AFDC and food stamps put together. Nine-tenths of these expenditures benefited
the middle and upper classes (compared with two-thirds for official social spending).

44 CHAPTER TWO

the correlative curtailment of social protection, in turn, were curbed by
the stupendous expansion of the penal apparatus that has propelled the
United States to the ranie of world leader in incarceration. This abrupt
rolling out of the penal state will be mapped out in detail in the second
part of the book.

Some Distinctive Properties of the American State

To grasp the nature and means of this political mutation, it is indispens-
able first to identify the distinctive structural and functional properties
of what political scientist AIan Wolfe nicely calls America’s “franchise
state.'” Here I will briefly emphasize five.

1. A “society Without a state,” a society against the state

The first distinctive trait of the state in America has to do with the
representation it is given in the national doxa. Just as France has, until
recently, thought of itself as a “nation without immigrants,” even as its
ind~strial, urban, and cultural history has been decisively stamped by
the mflux of foreign populations since the end of the nineteenth cen-
tury, the reigning civic ideology of the United States has it that it is “a
society without a state.'”

. From the Pilgrim fathers to the Bush dynasty, Americans have always
VIewed themselves as an autonomous people fundamentally rebellious
to any suprasocial authority-save for that of God. This is attested by
the many articles in the Constitution that disperse and curb public
powers, regarded ex hypothesi as potentially tyrannical, and the ven-
omous antistatism of the national political culture. The 1996 campaign
for the presidential nomination offered a translucent illustration of this
streale: all the candidates claimed that they wanted to “clean up Wash-
ington” and the federal government was characteristically presented
as a foreign force, if not as the enemy of the people, by those who were
its very servants. DUring the 2000 campaign, AIbert Gore Jr.,’the sit-
ting vice president for eight years, insisted on locating his campaign
headquarters in Tennessee in order to stage his alleged closeness to
the “people” and distance from “government elites.” even though, as
the son of a senator, he had spent his entire life and career in the cor-
ridors of power in Washington. Another indicator: Americans were
Iileelier to blame the federal government (79 percent), and then ‘~meri
can workers themselves” (75 percent) and their fast-flagging unions

THE CRIMINALlZATION OF POVERTY 45

(62 percent), than they were Wall Stre~t (so percent) for ~e massive
destruction of jobs that marked the begmmng of the 1990S.

2. Bureaucratic fragmentation and dysfunctions

The American state is a decentralized network of loosely coordinated
agencies whose powers are limited by the very fragmentation of the
bureaucratic field and the disproportionate power the latter grants to
local authorities. The sharing of budgetary responsibilities and attribu-
tions among the various levels of government (federal, state, county,
and municipal) is a source of constant dissension and distortion. The
result is that there is often an abyss between the policies promulgated
“on paper” in Washington and in state legislatures and the services
actually delivered on the ground by street-level bureaucracies.’

The related absence of a tradition of public service and of stable
channels for the recruitment and oversight of civil servants, especially
in higher offices, means that the administrative apparatus is directly
subjected to the forces of money, on the one hand, and to the brute de-
mands of Ifelectoral patrimonialism/’ on the other. Thence the bureau-
cratic incoherence and ineptitude that often preside over the design
and implementation of national and local policies.’ It also helps ac-
count for the extreme porosity of the public-private divide: according
to a century-old tradition, updated by the “War on poverty” during the
1960s, a large share of social programs aimed at the lower class (such
as the “Head Start” preschool plan or support for orphans and child
protective services) is subcontracted to private and nonprofit agencies,
which distribute and administer them in the name of the national col-
lectivity. The historically entrenched pattern of reliance on the com-
mercial and third sectors for carrying out many welfare duties of the
state has created a vast and intricate mesh of organizations and interest
groups “dedicated to preserving the private tilt of US social policy,”1O
which further complicates the landscape ofIarge-scale public provision
and creates an institutional terrain very propitious to efforts at further
privatization of its activities.

3. A dual state, or the great institutional-rum-ideological bifurcation

Since the foundational era of the New Deal, the social action of the
US state has been split into two hermeticaIIy sealed domains that are
sharply distinguished by the composition and political weight of their
respective “clienteles” as weli as by their ideological charge.ll The first

46 CHAPTER TWO

strand, under the heading of “social insurance,” is responsible for the
collective management of the life-risks of wage earners-unemploy_
ment, sickness, and retirement. In principle, everyone with a stable job is
entitled to participate in these programs and enjoys benefits construed
as the just counterpart to their contributions (but we shall see shortly
that this principle is in practice routinely violated in the lower tiers of
the job market). The second plank, designated by the loathsome idiom
of “welfare,”” concerns only assistance to dependent and distressed
individuals and households. Its recipients are submitted to draconian
conditions (of income, assets, marital and familial status, residence,
etc.) and are placed under a harsh tutelage that clearly demarcates them
from the rest of society and effectively mal,es them second-class citi-
zens, on grounds that the support they receive is granted without an
offsetting contribution on their part, and thus threatens to undermine
their “work ethic.”

Historically, the main beneficiaries of the “social insurance” side of
the US social state, such as the Social Security retirement fund, have
been men (as full-time workers and heads of house holds), whites (who
have long cornered the lion’s share of stable jobs in the industrial and
service sectors), and the’ families of the labor aristocracy and the middle
and upper classes. Although public assistance programs such as Aid to
Families with Dependent Children (AFDC, income and in-kind grants
to destitute single mothers with young children) reach a broad public
thatis majority white-more than one American household in four was
on the “welfare” rolls at some point during the 1980s”-in the popuJar
imagination their clientele is essentially made up of urban minorities
and dissolute women living off the nation in the manner of social para-
sites.

4. A residual welfare state

The American state is the prototype of the “residual welfare state””
to the extent that it offers support only in response to the cumuJative
failures of the labor market and the family, by intervening on a case-by-
case basis through programs strictly reserved for vuJnerable categories
that are deemed “worthy”: ex-workers temporarily pushed out of the
wage-labor market, the handicapped and severely disabled, and, subject
to varying restrictive conditions, destitute mothers of young children.”
Its official clientele is thus composed of “dependents” from working-
class backgrounds, low-pay workers, the unemployed, and families of
color, who have no influence upon the political system and, by the same
token, no means of protecting their meager prerogatives.

THE CRIMINALlZATION OF POVERTY 47

The United States thus presents the paradox of a nation that vener-
ates children but has no family support or education policy, so that one
child in four (one black child in two) lives under the official “poverty
line”; a country that spends vastly more than any of its competitors on
healthcare as a percentage of its GDP, yet leaves some 45 million people
(including 12 million children) without medical coverage at anyone

. time; a society that sacralizes work, yet has no national framework for
training or supporting employment worthy of the name. All because
“state charity” has for its primary objective bolstering the mechanisms
of the market and especially imposing the tough discipline of deskilled
wage labor upon marginal populations.”

5. A racial state

Finally, the United States sports the highly distinctive property of being
endowed with a racial state in the sense that, much like Nazi Germany
and South Africa until the abolition of apartheid, the structure and
functioning of the bureaucratic field are thoroughly traversed by the
imperious necessity of expressing and preserving the impassable social
and symbolic border between “whites” and “blacks,” incubated during
the age of slavery and subsequently perpetuated by the segregationist
system of the agrarian South and the ghetto of the Northern industrial
metropolis.’ The pervasiveness and potency of this denegated form of
ethnicity called “race” as a principle of social vision and division that
effaces, ideologically and practically, the insuperable contradiction
between the democratic ideal founded on the doctrine of the natural

·We return, in the third part of this book (chapter 6), to the historical sequence
of “peculiar institutions” that, since chattel slavery, have kept bladcs in a marginal
and dependent position and there discover that the task of defining, containing, and
controlling the casualized fractions of the African-American proletariat now befalls
in part to the prison.

The theoretical and empirical relevance of the parallelism between the United
States, Nazi Germany, and South Africa, which might shock gentle souls raised in
the Tocquevillian tradition, is immediately evident upon reading Michael Burleigh
and Wolfgang Wipperman, Tlte Racial State: Germany 1933-1945 (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1991); George M. Fredridcson, White Supremacy: A Compara-
tive Stlldy ill Americal1 and South African History (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1981); and Joe! Williamson, The Crucible a/Race (New York: Oxford University Press,
1986). In this perspective, the trajectory and operation of the US Leviathan differs
sharply from the modal path of the Western bureaucratic state, contrary to the thesis
advanced by Goldberg that maJces the modern state and race coeval and virtually
coextensive with each other. David Theo Goldberg, The Racial State (Maiden, Mass.:
Blackwell,2002).

48 CHAPTER TWO

rights of the individual and the persistence of a caste regime, is essen-
tial to understanding the initial atrophy and accelerating decay of the
American social state in the recent period on the one hand, and the
stupefying ease and speed with which the penal state arose on its ruins
on the other.

Indeed, the originary caesura of the national social space into two
communities perceived as congenitally disjoint and inherently unequal,
between which the other components of the US ethnic mosaic are in-
serted (Latinos, Asians, and Native Americans, according to the official
taxonomy), overdetermines the design and implementation of public
policy in all domains. The white-black cleavage infects the national po-
litical culture and distorts the electoral and legislative game at the local
as well as the federal level, from campaign fund-raising to the drawing
of districts, the rhetoric of candidates for office, the formation of legis-
lative factions and alliances, to the manufacturing oflegislation.” From
its origins, this rigid partition has also thwarted the unification and
organization of the working class. Together with the strong integration
of the capitalist class at the onset of industrialization, it accounts for
the absence of union mobilization of an oppositional kind and, by the
same token, for the feeble political oversight of the markets for labor,
capital, and public goods.”

Lastly, through the intercession of regional cleavages, racial division
anchors the teratological development of a welfare state split into two
blocs, one turned toward whites and the middle and upper classes,
the other aimed at blacks and the unskilled working class during the
foundational era of the New Deal no less than during the expansionary
period of the 1960s; and it underpins the tilting, over the ensuing two
decades, from the assistantial to the penal management of poverty, mis-
perceived as a problem affecting blacks first and foremost.” The ethnic
division of the proletariat and the structural dualism of the semiwelfare
state contribute to perpetuating the racialization of politics, which in
turn feeds the retreat from civic participation, facilitating the strangle-
hold of corporations and wealthy funders on the electoral syst~m.

Rolling Back the Charitable State

These distinctive characteristics explain why, although social inequality
and economic insecurity increased sharply during the closing three
decades of the twentieth century,” the American charitable state has
steadfastly reduced its perimeter of operation and squeezed its modest
budgets so as to allow for the explosive increase in military spending

THE CRIMINAL1ZATION OF POVERTY 49

Table 1. Decrease in welfare payments to poor single mothers (AFDC)’, 1975-95

1970

1975 1980 1985 1990 1995

current dollars 221 264 350 399 432
435

Constant dollars 221 190 165 144 128
119

Change 100 86 75
65 58 49.8

• Median payment for a family of four

SOURCE: Committee on Ways and Means, US House of Representatives, 1996 Green
Book (Washington, D.e.: U.S. Government Prlnting Office, 1997), 443-45, 449·

and the extensive redistribution of income from wage earners toward
firms and the afiluent fractions of the upper class. So much so that the
“War on poverty” has given way to a simile war agai/lSt the poor, made
into the scapegoats of all the major ills of the country” and now sum-
moned to care for themselves lest they be hit by a volley of punitive
and humiliating measures intended, if not to put them back onto the
narrow path of precarious employment, then at least to minimize their
social demands and thus their fiscal burden.

Impaired by the administrative and ideological split between “wel-
fare” and “social insurance,” stigmatized by their close association with
the demands of the black political movement, and tarnished by the
notorious inefficiency of the agencies responsible for implementing
them, programs targeted at the poor were the first victims of the socio-
political reaction that carried Reagan to power in 1980 and then fos-
tered the success of Clinton’s “New Democrats.”” Although the cost of
AFDC never reached 1 percent of the federal budget, every government
since )immy Carter has promoted its reduction as a top priority. And
they have very largely succeeded at the level of recipients (see table 1):
in 1970, the median AFD C payment for a family of four without any
other source of income was $221 per month; in 1990, this sum reached
$432 in current dollars, or $128 adjusting for inflation, corresponding
to a net decline in purchasing power of 42 percent. By 1995, on the eve
of its elimination, the AFD C package came to a paltry $435, or $110 in
1970 dollars, representing a real drop of more than one-half.

Moreover, these nationwide statistics conceal sharp regional dispari-
ties (see table 2). Social assistance was always significantly higher in
the urban and industrial Midwest and Northeast, the historic cradle of
both the working class and the black ghetto, than in the South, where
poverty is more prevalent still and the social safety net virtually non-
existent. Thus, in 1996 the maximum monthiy allowance for a family
of three came to $577 in New York and $565 in Boston, as against a

50 CHAPTER TWO

Table 2. Maximum AFDC payment for a family of three in selected states, 1970 -96′

% change in

1970 1980 1990
real value,

1996 1970-96

New York (City) 279 394 577 577 -48
Michigan (Detroit) 219 425 516 459 -4B
Pennsylvania 265 332 421 421 -60
Illinois 232 288 367 377 -59
Texas 148 116 184 lB8 -6B
Mississippi 56 96 120 120 -46

• In dollars per month

SOURCE: Committee on Ways and Means, U.S. House of Representatives, 1996 Green
Book (Washington, D.C.: US Government J.lrinting Office, 1997), 459, 861, 921.

mere $120 in Mississippi, $185 in Albert Gore’s Tennessee, and $188 in
George W. Bush’s Texas. But the decline in real terms was catastrophic

everywhere, ranging from one-half in Michigan to two-thirds in Texas.
In 1970, the AFDC package covered a national average of 84 percent of
the “minimal needs” officially entitling one to public assistance; by 1996,
this figure had fallen to 68 percent; in Texas, this ratio had plummeted
to 25 percent (compared to 75 percent a quarter-century earlier).

Yet impoverished families must first succeed in receiving the meager
assistance to which they are legally entitled. The second technique for
shrinking the charitable state is not budgetary but administrative: it
consists in multiplying the bureaucratic obstacles and requirements

imposed on applicants with the aim of discouraging them or strildng
them off the recipient rolls (be it oniy temporarily). Under the cover
of ferreting out abuses and turning up the heat on “welfare cheats,”
public aid offices have multiplied forms to be filled out, the number of
documents to be supplied, the frequency of checks, and the criteria for
periodically reviewing files. Between 1972 and 1984, the number of “ad-
ministrative denials” on “procedural grounds” increased by almost one
million, two-thirds of them directed against families who were’ fully
within their rights?’ This practice of bureaucratic harassment has even
acquired a name well known among specialists, “churning,” and it has
given rise to elaborate statistics tracking the number of eligible claim-
ants on assistance whose demands were unduly rejected for each pro-
gram category. Thus, whereas 81 percent of poor children were covered
by AFDC in 1973, over 40 percent did not receive the financial aid to

which they were entitled fifteen years later. In 1996, at welfare’s burial,

THE CRIMINALlZATION OF POVERTY 51

tl’mated that every other poor household in America did not it was es
eive benefits for which it was eligible,

rec I h’ hih
F’ all” there remains the third and most bruta tec mque, w c con-m I’ d th h’ ‘t f simply eliminating public aid programs, on groun s at t elr

SISSO , f
‘ ients must be snatched from their culpable torpor by the stmg 0

reclp f ‘ ‘I’t’ I ‘ty “‘0 hear the chief ideologues 0 Amencan SOClOpO I ICa re-neceSSl . 1.1 • • •
, Charles Murra” Lawrence Mead, and Damel Patnck Moym-action, I’ .

han, the pathological “dependency” of the poor stems from their moral
dereliction, Absent an urgent and muscular intervention by the state to
check it, the growth of “nonworking poverty” threatens to bring about
nothing less than “the end of Western civilization,”” At the start of the

. os several formerly industrial states with high unemployment and
199 , . hi Ill” d M’ h’ urban poverty rates, such as Penn~ylvan1a, 0 0, mOlS, an le 1-

an, unilaterally put an end to General Assistance, a locally funded
grogram oflast resort for the indigent-overnight in Michigan, after a
~rief transition period in Pennsylvania, This resulted in the dumping of
one million aid recipients nationwide,

In 1991, Republican John Engler became governor of the predominantly Demo-
cratic state of Michigan by running on an aggressive antiwelfare platform. He im-
mediately ordered that the Department of Social Services be renamed the Family
Independence Agency and AFOC retitled the Family Independence Program. Even

though expenditures for General Assistance had already plunged from $342 mil-
lion in 1985 to $217 million, Engler invoked the need to balance the state budget
and to prevent the formation of a permanent class of “able-bodied” scroungers
to slash that budget to a meager $37 million in 1992, before abruptly terminating
the program in 1993,25 By contrast, that year Michigan spent $1.32 billion to incar-
cerate 44,000 convicts, and each prisonerwas estimated to cost eleven tImes the
average allowance given to a welfare recipient.

The suppression of General Assistance instantly cut from all assistance some
82,000 adults (receiving an average of $226 a month), half ofthem indigent blacks

living in the collapsing city of Detroit, Some 7,700 recipients were then discreetly
transferred to a newly created program called State Family Assistance and another
4,500 to State Disability Assistance, while others fought to try and gain access
to other governmental support, forced to play a cruel game of “welfare musical
chairs” to subsist, So-called “dependency” receded but hardship remained largely
untouched, with 34 percent of African Americans in the state living under the
official poverty line three years later,” Engler then parlayed his image as a tough
“reformer” (Le., cutter) of public aid into reelection and an acclaimed nomination
on President Clinton’s bipartisan advisory panel on welfare reform. He joined

52 CHAPTER TWO

governorTommYThomp~on of Wisconsin as a national champion in the political
crusade to dismantle welfare.

Out on the West Coast, Los Angeles County combined all three major strategies
for downsizing the welfare state in response to booming need and rising pub-
lic expenditures: cutting the value of aid packages, springing neW administrative
hurdles to ration services, and eliminating programs. In the 1980s, quality control
campaigns, the punctilious micromanagement of cases, and the consolidation of
offices across neighborhoods combined to produce rising rates of bureaucratic
disentitlement. In 1993, the County deleted General Assistance, and by 1997 all
remaining programs had been rolled up under workfare (called CalWorks) with
reduced payments and strict time limits, producing a new “local regulatory”
apparatus for the management of disruptive poverty, wedding “the convolution
of Franz Kafka with the misery of Charles Dickens.””

The downsizing of America’s charitable state has proceeded across
a broad front and has not spared the privileged domain of social pro-
tection. In 1975, the unemployment insurance scheme established by
the Social Security Act of 1935 covered 76 percent of wage earners who
lost their jobs. By1980 that figure had fallen to one in two due to state-
mandated administrative restrictions and the proliferation of “contin-
gent” jobs; and in 1995 it approached one worker in three. While cover-
age shrank, for twenty years the real average value of unemployment
benefits stagnated at $185 per week (in constant dollars of 1995), clis-
bursed for a meager fifteen weeks, giving most jobless people “on the
dole” incomes putting them far below the poverty line.”

The same trend applies to occupational disability, for which the rate
of coverage dropped from 7.1 workers per thousand in 1975 to 4.5 per
thousand in 1991. Lil(ewise for housing: in 1991, according to official
figures, one in three American families was “housing poor,” that is, un-
able to cover both basic needs and hOUSing costs, while the homeless
population numbered between 600,000 and 4 million. Meanwhile, the
federal budget for social housing plummeted from $32 billion in 1978
to less .than $10 billion a decade later in current dollars, amoJnting
to a cut of 80 percent in real dollars.” At the same time, Washington
eliminated funding for general revenue sharing, local public works, and
urban development grants, as well as drastically pared most programs
aimed at reintegrating the unemployed. When the Comprehensive
Education and Training Act (CETA) program was terminated in 1984,
over 400,000 public jobs for unskilled people disappeared. In 1975, the
federal government devoted $3 billion to providing job training to 1.1
million poor Americans; by 1996, this figure had fallen to $800 million

THE CRIMINALlZATION OF POVERTY 53

. (in constant dollars), barely enough”to cover ~29,~00 trainees .. r:rean-
time, budgets allocated to financing summer Jobs for underp~l'”:leged
youth were cut by one-third and the number of their beneficmrles by

one-half.”
But it is at the municipal level that the concerted attack on urban

and social policy was most ferocious. Using the pretext of the fiscal
crisis triggered by the exodus of white families, middle-class revolts
against taxation, and the drying up of federal ~ubsidies, American cit~es
sacrificed public services essential to poor nelghborhoods and theIr m-
habitants-housing, sanitation, transportation, and fire protection, as
well as social assistance, health, and education. They diverted a grow-
ing share of public monies toward the support of private co~mercial
and residential projects that promised to attract the new servIce-based
corporations and the affluent classes.” This shift was justified by invo-
cation of the alleged efficiency of market mechanisms in the allocation
of city resources and federal funds. And it was greatly facilitated by the
rigid racial segregation of the American metropolis, which sapped the
collective capacity of poor residents by fracturing them along the calor
line. A single example suffices to indicate the devastating effects of this
turnaround: while the costs and profits of free-market medicine soared,
in Chicago the number of community hospitals (Le., those accessible
to people without private medical coverage) slumped from 90 in 1972
to 67 in 1981 to 42 in 1991. By that year, outside of the dilapidated and
overcrowded Cook County Hospital, no health center in the entire
city provided prenatal support to mothers without private insurance.
In 1990, the director of Chicago’S hospitals announced that the public
health system was a “non-system on the brink of collapse,” fundamen-
tally incapable of fulfilling its mandate. That this declaration elicited
no response from city and state officials and administrators speaks vol-
umes about the indifference with which the rights and well-being of
the urban poor are regarded.” The fact that the dispossessed fanillies
of Chicago are disproportionately black and Latino (from Mexican and
Puerto Rican parentage) is key to explaining their civic invisibility.

The consequences of the withdrawal of the charitable state are not
hard to guess. At the end of 1994, despite two years of solid economic
growth, the Census Bureau announced that the official number of poor
people in the United States had surpassed forty million, or 15 percent
of the country’s population- the highest rate in a decade. In total, one
white family in ten and one African-American household in three lived
below the federal “poverty line.” This figure conceals the depth and
intensity of their dereliction inasmuch as this threshold, calculated ac-
cording to an arbitrary bureaucratic formula dating from 1963 (based

54 CHAPTER TWO

on family consumption data from 1955), does not take into account the
actual cost ofliving and the changing mix of essential goods, and it has
been drawn ever lower over the years: in 1965 the poverty line stood at
about one-half of the national median family income; thirty years later
it did not reach one-third,’ Comparative analysis reveals that, despite a
notably lower official unemployment rate, “poverty in the United States
is not only more widespread and more persistent, but also more severe
than in the countries of continental Europe.”33 In 1991, 14 percent of
American households received less than 40 percent of the median na-
tional income, as against 6 percent in France and 3 percent in Germany.
These gaps were considerably more pronounced among families with
children (18 percent in the United States versus 5 percent in France
and 3 percent for its neighbor across the Rhine), not to mention single-
parent families (45 percent in the United States, 11 percent in France,
and 13 percent in Germany), This is hardly surprising when the mini-
mum hourly wage is set so low that an employee working full-time
year-round earned $700 per month in 1995, putting him 20 percent
below the poverty line for a household of three, and when public aid is
calculated to fall well below that wage rate in order to avoid creating
udisincentives” to work: 34 the maximum AFDC cash payment in the
median state in 1994 came barely to 38 percent of the poverty line and
reached only 69 percent when combined with the value of food stamps
and other in-kind support,

The degradation of employment conditions, shortening of job ten-
ures, drop in real wages, and shrinldng of collective protections for
the US working class over the past quarter-century have been brought
about and accompanled by a surge in precarious wage work. The num-
bers of on-call staff and day laborers, “guest” workers (brought in
through state-sponsored programs of seasonal importation of agricul-
turallaborers from Mexico or the Caribbean, for instance), office- or
service-workers operating as subcontractors! compulsory part-timers,
and casual staff hired through specialized “temp” agencies have all in-
creased much more quicldy than other occupational categories since

“For years, US social scientists have called for an overhaul of this flawed defini-
tion of poverty. finding it in turn outdated, unreliable, and invalid. In 1995, the Panel
on Income and Family Assistance of the National Research Council officially recom-
mended its revamping, but to no avail. For a provocative discussion of the theoretical
and methodological issues involved in designing a multidimensional index of poverty
understood as civic (in)capacity sensitive to historical and comparative variations and
able to capture the depth of deprivation and the effects of state transfers, see David
Brady, “Rethinking the Sociological Measurement of Poverty,” Social Forces 81, no. 3
(March 2003): 715-52.

THE CRIMINALlZATION OF POVERTY 55

temporary help leading the pack at a ye,arly clip
mid-:197’Os11-0-‘dWa”yJ’0I1e il1 three Americal1s il1 the taborforce IS a 11011-

percent, .. such insecure work must clearly be understood
, wage earnel . d ‘h ocio

‘al c f subemployment solidly roote m t e new s –
” erenm !orID 0 . 35

.” P , I d cape of the country and destmed to grow,
economIC an 5

, field observations and in-depth interviews with the directors ~nd
DraWing on ‘Robert Parker has deciphered the process of normallza-

If oftemp agenCieS, ‘I t
sta , e labor in the United States recorded by longitudlna aggrega e
, of precariOUS wag H’ t dy

tlon h h a detailed anatomy ofthe temporary employment sector, IS s u f
data tb r~~: revealing title of “Flesh Peddlers and Warm Bodies:'” This sect~~ 0
goes Y k t h been booming’ its turnover wentfrom $547 million
h mployment mar e as’ , h
tee $ b’ll’ in 1980 to $16,8 billion twelve years later, while t e num-
‘n 1970 to 3,1 I IOn , I” Thus
I employees increased tenfold to reach 1.5 mlllon In 1993· ,
ber of temp~~~;gest employer is no longer General Motors (the world’s largest
the count~y s f revenue) but Manpower Incorporated, a multinational temp
company In terms 0 I . untries and whose

ncy that hires out the services of 500,000 peop e In 34 co . h
age 0 outlets saw revenues grow byan average of7 percent per year In t e 1980,S,
“~:ada s “normalized” insecurity can be found throughout the US econ,o~y: I~
N , Y t’lons ofthe leading sectors like finance and real estate, In Insur
the maJor corpora If’ I ‘

and hospitals, agriculture and computers, nuclear powerand 0 Ice c ean~~g,
ance . ta’11 trade transportation, universities (one-half of the teac mg
not to mention re I ) d even at
staffin higher education work part-time or on temporary contracts, an

. 37
th heart of public bureaucracies, , I
~he ex ansion of contingent employment is not a cyclical ~r. cO~Jun:rura

p I’ k d to the adaptation of firms to a context of CrISIS, Since It can
phenomenon In e , f b ‘
be observed during periods of recovery as well as in receSSions, Far ~oml e,ln~
the roduct of an impersonal process, inexorably connected to te~ no ogtc~

p business mergers and the internationalization of economiC campetl-
~hanges’h d ‘I ant med{a and the political vision would have it, itis the result
tlon ast e om n . st tegy

f “new employer strategy of externalization of the workforce and ItS CDsts-a, ra
o d b ublic authorities and powerfully reinforced by the active mar-

~:~~~:;~m;o;aryemployment agencies, Its impulse com~s neither::o~;~~s~~
ni n nor the labor market but mainly from domestic supply, T ,

compe [ 0 I s was aimed above all at the maxl-
nessrestructuring ofthe 1980s and ear y 1990 , ‘of labor and

“flexibilization” of the workforce by compressing the Unit cost h
~:nating workers’ rights in order to give (back) to firms fuller contr:i o,~~~ ~h:

arameters of employment, henceforth treated as “adjustment vana es I .
P uest for short-term financial returns. American corporations have thus/onsl

s
–

~ntly used the threat of layolfs, rather than improved wages and bene Its, as a

56 CHAPTER TWO

means of motivating their increasingly insecure workforce and extracting labor
concessions. 39

Not surprisingly, the casualization of jobs affects first and foremost women
the youngest and oldest workers, and finally unskilled blacks and Latinos livin~
in the inner cities, for wham it has translated into an unprecedented social re-
gression: a draconian cut in incomes and decline in living standards (a temporary
worker typically earns around one-third o!the wages of a permanent employee),
a reduction of social and medical coverage to a bare minimum (when they still
exist), a severe narrowing of the temporal and occupational horizon, a fraying of
social relations at work, the deskilling of jobs, and an almost total 1055 of control
over one’s activity. By fragmenting the workforce, the institutionalization of job
insecurity also thwarts traditional forms of collective action and thus serves as a
battering ram to further assault the social benefits of workers who are still pro-
tected.

olO
This means that inSEcurity eventually promises to seriously affect not

only temporary employees but all wage earners, including the middle managers
who currently defend it and are implementing it with zeal.

The United States boasts an official unemployment rate markedly lower than
those of the major European (Quntries: in July 1996, as Congress voted to delete,
welfare, it stood at 5.4 percent, half the average for the continent. But this artifice
of social accounting-the US Labor Department uses one of the most restrictive
definitions of unemployment, regarding any job-seeker who worked a single hour
or more in the course of the previous month as “employed” and overlooking
jobless workers deemed “discouraged”” -cannot conceal the fact that, over the
past fifteen years, three out offour Americans experienced or were directly touched by the
social ignominy of layoffs: 20 percent personally lost a permanent job, 14 percent
saw this fate strike a memberof their household, and 38 percent a parent, friend,
or neighbor. Moreover, 14 percent changed jobs for fear that their post might get
eliminated. The result is that fully one-half of Americans worry that unemploy-
ment will befall them, and 37 percent feel that their job situation is insecure. How
could they not when 3.4 million employees were laid off in 1994 alone, amid the
return of prosperity, as against2.6 million during the recession of1982? And while
working~class families remain the main victims of ongoing economic restructur~
ing, it is among the middle classes that the anxiety-and shame-over downward
mobility reaches its apex.

-Thus, in October 1993, the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimated that the effective
number ~f jobless Americans to be 17 million, whereas the official unemployment
rate pubhshed by the Labor Department (based on the computations of the self-same
Bureau of Labor Statistics) came to only 8.8 million. Massimo Calabresi, “Jobs in an
Age of InseCUrity,” Time .Magazine, 22 November 1993.

THE CRIMINALlZATION OF POVERTY 57

. During the 1980s and 1990S, mass layoffs became a privileged instru-
ent for the short-term financial management of US firms,” so that

:e country’s middle and managerial classes made the bitter discovery
of ‘ob insecurity during a period of sturdy growth. The return of eco-
no~c prosperity to the United States was thus built on a spectacular
degradation of the terms and conditions of employment: between 1980
and 1995, 41 percent of “downsized” employees were not covered by
unemployment insurance and two-thirds of those who managed to find
new work had to accept a position with lower wages. In 1996, 82 per-
cent of Americans said that they were prepared to work longer hours to
save their jobs; 71 percent would consent to fewer holidays, 53 percent
to reduced benefits, and 44 percent to a cut in pay.” The absence of
collective action in the face of stock-market-driven layoffs is explained
by the congenital wealmess of unions, the lock that corporate finan-
ciers have placed on the electoral system, and the power of the ethos
of meritocratic individualism, according to which each wage earner is

responsible for his or her own fate. .
Failing a language that could gather the dispersed fragments of per-

sonal experiences into a meaningful collective configuration, the diffuse
frustration and anxiety generated by the disorganization of the estab-
lished reproduction strategies of the American middle classes have
been redirected against the state, on the one side, which was accused
of weighing on the social body like a yoke as stifling as it is useless, and,
on the other, against categories held to be uundese111ing/’ or suspected of
benefiting from programs of affirmative action, henceforth perceived
as handouts violating the very principle of equity they claim to advance.
The former tendency expressed itself in the pseUdo-populist tone of
electoral campaigns during the closing decade of the century, in which
politicians near-unanimously directed a denunciatory and revanchist
discourse against Washington’s technocrats and other bureaucratic
“elites” -of which they are typically full-fledged members-and public
services-whose personnel and budgets they promised to “trim.” The
second tendency is evident in the fact that 62 percent of Americans
are opposed to affirmative action for blacks and 66 percent are against
affirmative action for women, even in those cases where it is proven
that those helped were targets of discrimination, while two Americans
in three wish to curtail immigration, even as 55 percent concede that
immigrants tal,e jobs nationals do not want (precisely because they are
overexploitative).” This is the logic according to which in 1996, con-
firming its historic role as the nation’s bellwether, California abolished
the promotion of “minorities” in higher education and excluded so-

58 CHAPTER TWO

called illegal immigrants from all public services, including schools and
hospitals.

Whence, finally, the national hysteria around the problem of “wel-
fare” that led to the public aid “reform” of 1996, which we shall anal
. d ·l·th yze
In some . ~t~’ In e next

chapter.

Hypocritically entitled the “Personal
Resp~nslbihty ~nd Work ~pp~rtunity Act,” it amounted to abolishing
the nght to aS51stance and Instituted forced deskilled wage labor as the
sole means of support on the pretext of setting tl,e indigent back onto
the road to “independence.” Sacrificing the poor-and especially the
black urban subproletariat, incarnation and scapegoat of all the coun-
try’s ills-to exorcise the worries of the middle and working classes
over their future is once again to ask those who are the living negation
of the ‘:American dream” to suffer for their alleged alterity so that, in
spite of everything, the country may uphold its faith in the national
myth of prosperity available to all.

Rolling Out the Penal State

How to stem the mounting tide of dispossessed families, street dere-
licts, alienated jobless youth, and the despair and violence that intensify
and accumulate in the neighborhoods of relegation of the big cities?
At all three levels of the bureaucratic field, county, state, and federal,
the American authorities have responded to the rise of urban disloca-
tio~s-fo~ which, paradoxically, they are largely responsible-by devel-
OpIng their penal functions to the point of hypertrophy. As the social
s~fety net of the charitable state unraveled, the dragnet of the puni-
tive state was called upon to replace it. Its disciplinary mesh was flung
throughout the nether regions of US social space so as to contain the
disarray a~d t~rmoil spawned by the intensification of social insecurity
and margmallty. A causal chain and functional interlock was thus set
into motion, whereby economic deregulation required and begat social
welfare retrenchment, and the gradual maleeover of welfare into work-
fare, in turn, called for and fed the expansion of the penal apparatus.

The deployment of this state policy oJ criminalization oJ the conse-
quences oJ state-sponsored poverty operates according to two main
modalitie~. The fir.st and least visible one-except to those directly af-
fected by It-consIsts in re0115anizingsocial services into an instrument
oJ surveillance and control of the categories indocile to the new eco-
nomic and moral order. Witness the wave of reforms adopted between
1988 and 1995 in the walee of the Family Support Act by some three
dozen states that have restricted access to public aid and made it con-

THE CRIMINALlZATION OF POVERTY 59

Pholding certain behavioral norms (economic, sexual, upon u . d h ‘1’
educational, etc.) and upon perfornung onerous an Un:”-

hllLre;aUL:ra,t’ic obligations. The most common of these reqUlre-
. ulate that the recipient must accept any job ar assimilated

stip d I’ d’ ‘ offered to her, whatever the pay an war

assistance received by the families to the school attendance
,arrlO

unt
‘fD’their children or teenage recipient (“Iearnfare”), ar peg them

o in pseudo-training programs that offer few if any skills
job prospects.” Yet others establish a ceiling on th~ cash value of

or set a maximum duration after which no support Will be accorded.
Jersey in the mid-1990S, for instance, AFDC benefits were ter-

minated if an unmarried teen mother did not reside with her parents
(even in cases where the latter had thro~n her o~t), and the amount
she received was capped if she begat add,tlOnal children.

The insufficiency and inefficiency of forced-work programs are as
l’ as their punitive character. While such programs are periodi-

garmg . . f”d d “‘d callyvaUllted as the miracle cure for the epidemiC 0 epen ency Sal
to afflict the American poor, none of them has ever allowed more than
a handful of participants to escape destitution. The reasons for their
failure are several: the jobs proposed or imposed are too precarlOus
and ill paid to offer a platform for economic autonomy; they do not
provide medical coverage or child care assistance, ~aking employment
both risky and prohibitively costly for mothers With yOUllg offspnng;
the workplaces are physically and emotionally degrading; and a ma-
jority of “welfare mothers” already work while receiving aid in the first
place.” At best, such programs replace “dependency” on means-tested
state programs with “dependency” on superexploitativ~ empl~yers at
the margins of the labar market, supplemented by fragile family net-
works, and illegal street commerce where accessible, a combination
that nearly guarantees continued poverty. But precisely: it will be shown
in the next chapter that workfare policy does not aim to reduce poverty
but seeks only to diminish the visibility oJt”e poor in the civic landscape
and to “dramatize” the imperative of wage labar by issuing “a warning
to all Americans who were working more and earning less, if they were
working at all. There is a fate worse, and a status lower, than hard and

d’ I “46 unrewar mg war Co •
The long train of welfare reform measures also extols and embodies

the new paternalist conception of the role of the state in respect to the
poar, according to which the conduct of dispossessed and dependent
citizens must be closely supervised and, whenever necessary, corrected
through rigorous protocols of surveillance, deterrence, and sanctionl

60 CHAPTER TWO

Table 3. Numberofinmates in federal and state prisons, 1970-95 (in thousands)

change
1970-95

1970 1980 1990 1995 (%)

Total 199 320
AmlllalgrOlvth ill

743 1078 442

preceding decade (96) -1.2 6.1 13.2 9
Blacks 81 168 366 542 569
Allllual gIVwtlz for

blacks (96) -0.7 10.8 17.9 9.7

SOURCE: Bureau ofJustice Statistics, Historical Corrections Statistics ill tlte United
States, 1850-1984 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office. 1986); idem., Pris-
oilers ill 1996 (Washington, D.C.: Governn:tent Printing Office, 1997).

very much like those routinely applied to offenders under criminal
justice supervision. The shift “from carrots to sticks,” from voluntary
programs supplying resources to mandatory programs enforcing com-
pliance with behavioral rules by means of fines, reductions of benefits,
and termination of recipiency irrespective of need, that is, programs
treating the poor as cultural similes oJ criminals who have violated the
civic law of wage work, is meant to both dissuade the lower fractions of
the working class from making claims on state resources and to forCibly
instill conventional morality into their members.’ And it is instrumen-
tal in embellishing the statistics of public aid offices by “dressing up” re-
cipients as workers while trapping the assisted population in the urban
wastelands set aside for them.

The second component of the policy of punitive containment of the
poor is massive and systematic recourse to incarceration (see table 3).
Confinement is the other technique through which the nagging prob-
lem of persistent marginality rooted in unemployment, subemploy-
ment, and precarious work is made to shrink on-if not disappear
from-the public scene. After decreaSing by 12 percent during the

“‘This moral agenda is frankly laid out by the ideologues of state paternalism: “The
social problems associated with long-term welfare dependency cannot be addressed
without first putting the bral,es on the downward spirals of dysfunctional behavior
common among so many reCipients . … Character is built by the constant repetition
of diverse good acts. These new behavior-related welfare rules are an attempt, long
overdue in the minds of many, to build habits of responsible behavior among long-
term recipients; that is, to legislate virtue.” Douglas J. Besharovand Karen N. Gardiner,
“Paternalism and Welfare Reform,” The Public Il1terest 122 (winter 1996): 70-84, cita-
tion p. 84.

THE CRIMINALlZATION OF POVERTY

1960s, the population condemned to serve time in state prisons and
federal penitentiaries (excluding detainees held in city and county jails,
awaiting judgment or sanctioned with short custodial sentences) ex-
ploded after the mid-seventies, jumping from under 200,000 in 1970
to nearly one million in 199s-an increase of 442 percent in a quarter-
century never before witnessed in a democratic society. Like the so-
cial disengagement of the state, imprisonment has hit urban blacks
especially hard: the number of African-American convicts increased
sevenfold between 1970 and 1995, after falling 7 percent during the pre-
vious decade (even though crime rose rapidly during the 1960s). In each
period, the growth rate of the black convict population far exceeded
that of their white compatriots. In the 1980s, the United States added
an average of 20,000 Mrican Americans to its total prisoner stock every
year (over one-third the total carceral stock of France). And, for the
first time in the twentieth century, the country’s penitentiaries held
more blacks than whites: African Americans made up 12 percent of
the national population but supplied 53 percent of the prison inmates
in 1995, as against 38 percent a quarter-century earlier. The rate of in-
carceration for blacks tripled ill olllya dozen years to reach 1,895 per
100,000 in 1993-amounting to nearly seven times the rate for whites
(293 per 100,000) and twenty times the rates recorded in the main
European countries at that time.47

We will track down the sources and modalities of this astronomical
increase in the prison population in detail in chapter 4 and demon-
strate in particular that it is utterly disconnected from crime trends.
In chapter 6, we will moreover show how the sudden growth of the
prison relates to the crumbling of the urban ghetto as physical con-
tainer for undesirable dark bodies. Here we want simply to note that a
major engine behind carceral growth in the United States has been the
“War on drugs” -an ill-named policy since it refers in reality to a gue-
rilla campaign of penal harassment oflow-Ievel street dealers and poor
consumers, aimed primarily at young men in the coilapsing inner city
for whom the retail trade of narcotics has provided the most accessible
and reliable source of gainful employment in the wal

“”The Reagan administration’s declaration of a war on drugs resembles Argentina’s
declaration of war against Nazi Germany in March 1945. It was late and beside the

62 CHAPTER TWO

predictable that this policy would disproportionately strike lower-class
African Americans insofar as it was directly targeted on dispossessed
nelghborhoods in the decaying urban core.

!he. rationale f~r this narrow spatial aiming of a nationwide penal
drIve IS easy to dIsclose: the dark ghetto is the stigmatized territory
where the fearsome “underclass,” mired in immorality and welfare de-
pendency, was said to have coalesced under the press of deindustrial_
ization and social isolation to become one of the country’s most urgent

topics of public worry:” But it is also the area where police presence is
particularly dense, illegal trafficking is easy to spot, high concentrations
of young men saddled with criminal justice records offer easy judicial
prey, and the powerlessness of the residents gives broad latitude to re-
pressive a~tion. It is not the War on drugs per se, then, but the timing
and selectIve deployment of th.at policy in a restricted quadrant located
at the very bottom of social and urban space that has contributed to fill-
ing America’s cells to bursting and has quicldy “darkened” their occu-
pants.

One indicator of volume: in 1975 one federal inmate in four was behind bars on
a narcotics conviction; twenty years later, that figure had reached 61 percent.
Meanwhile, the popUlation confined by the Federal Bureau of Prisons had qua-
drupled to approach 90,000, making it one of the largest correctional systems
in the world when it had been a minor auxiliary to the US carceral apparatus until
Reagan entered the White House (see table 4).

One indicator of racial disparity: the ratio of black to white arrest rates for drug-
related offenses was 2 to 1 in 1975; fifteen years later it had zoomed to 5 to 1, even
though the relative propensity of blacks and whites to use drugs had not changed.
More shockingly, the arrest rate of white juveniles fordrug infractions, which had

been dropping steadily from a high of 310 arrests per 100,000 since 1975 con-
tinued to sag on the same slope after the launching of the War on drugs to ‘reach

a low of 80 per 100,000 in 1991-meaning that white teenagers were left entirely
untouched by that aggressive penal campaign. By contrast, the drug arrest rate for
black minors, which had dropped parallel to that of whites from 250 perlOo,ooo

In 1979 to some 185 in 1981, made an abrupt U-turn in 1983 and rocketed to pass
460 per 100,000 by 1989, at the height of the 50-called war.” Clearly, young
black men from the ghetto were the prime quarry of the aggressive rolling out

point. .. : It was welll:nown among public officials and drug policy scholars that drug
use was In steep dechne …. Only the willfully blind could have failed to know that
no wa.r was needed.” Michael Tonry, .Malign Neglect: Race, Class, alld Pllllislllllellt ill
America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 83 and 91.

THE CRIMINALlZATlON OF POVERTY 63

4. Inmates in federal prisons convicted of drug offenses, 1975-95

1975 1980 1985 1990 1995

23,566
27

24,252

25
40,505

34
57,331

52
89,564

– Federal Bureau of Prisons Quick Facts 199B (Washington, D.e.: Government
SOURCE: ‘

printing office, 199 8).

of the penal state after the Civil Rights Revolution, just like young black women
receiving public aid were the choice figure at the center of the whirling debate

around “welfare reform.”
In light of the objectives set by its strategists, the Waron drugs has been a spec-

tacularfailure-so say some 80 percent of the country’s heads of police polled by
the Annual Survey of Police Ch’lefs and Sheriffs after 1995, Since it was declared,
the retail price of cocaine has declined continually, the quantities of narcotics in
circulation on the streets have increased year after year, and the number of black
convicts for drug crimes has swollen without interruption. But it has served well
to point the spear of the penal state onto the most wretched segments of the
country’s urban subproletariat and to erect a public stage onto which politicians
could display themselves in the act of delivering an essential service to the hard-

working citizenry: virile protection from street thugs.

Yet, the doubling of the carceral population in ten years, and its
tripling in twenty years after the mid-1970S, seriously underestimates
the real weight of penal authority in the new apparatus for treating
urban poverty and its correlates. For those held behind bars represent
only a quarter of the population under criminal justice supervision
(see table 5). If one takes account of individuals placed on probation
and ex-convicts released on parole, more than five million Americans,
amounting to 2.5 percent of the country’s adult population, fell under
penal oversight by 1995. In many cities and regions, the correctional
administration and its extensions are the main if not the sole point
of contact between the state and young black men from the deskilled

lower class: as early as 1990, 40 percent of African American males age
18 to 35 in California were behind bars or on probation and parole; this
rate reached 42 percent in Washington, D.e., and topped 56 percent
in Baltimore.” Thus, during the same period when the US state was
withdrawing the protective net of welfare programs and fostering the
generalization of subpoverty jobs at the bottom of the employment lad-
der, the authorities were extending a reinforced carceral mesh reaching

deep into lower-class communities of color.

64 CHAPTER TWO

Table 5. Populations under criminal justice supervision, 1980-95 (in thousands)

%
1980 1985 1990 1995 Change

Probation 1.118 1,969 2,670 3,078 175
Jail 184 257 405 507 142
State and federal prison 320 488 743 851 176
Parole 220 300 531 679 209
Total 1,842 3,013 4,350 5,343 190

SOURCE: Bureau of Justice Statistics, Correctional Popuiations in the United States,
1995 (Washington, D.c’: Government Printing Office, 1997).

The financial translation of this “great confinement” of marginality
is not hard to imagine. As will be documented fully in chapter 5, to
implement its policy of penalization of social insecurity at the bottom
of the socioracial structure, the United States massively enlarged the
budget and personnel devoted to confinement, in effect ushering in
the era of ucarceral big government” just as it was decreasing its com-
mitment to the social support of the poor. While the share of national
expenditures allocated to public assistance declined steeply relative to
need, federal funds for criminal justice multiplied by 5.4 between 1972
and 1990, jumping from less than $2 billion to more than $10 billion,
while monies allotted to corrections proper increased elevenfold. The
financial voracity of the penal state was even more unbridled at the
state level. Taken together, the fifty states and the District of Colum-
bia spent $28 billion on criminal justice in 1990, 8.4 times more than
in 1972; during this stretch, their budgets for corrections increased
twelvefold, while the cost of criminal defense for the indigent (who
malce up a rising share of those charged in court) grew by a factor of
24. To enforce the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of
1994, which envisaged boosting the national carceral population from
9 25,000 to some 2.26 million over a decade, the US Congress forecast
expenditures of $351 billion, including $100 billion just for building
new custodial facilities-nearly twenty tinles the AFDC budget that
year.” We shall see in chapter 4 that these predictions turned out to
be rather accurate: a decade later the country had doubled its popula-
tion under lock, and budgets for corrections were pushing counties and
states deep into debt.

Incarceration in America thus expanded to reach an industrial
scale heretofore unlmown in a democratic SOCiety, and, in so doing, it
spawned a fast-growing commercial sector for operators helping the

THE CRIMINALlZATION OF POVERTY 65′

state enlarge its capacity to confine, by supplying food and cleaning
services, medical goods and care, transportation, or the gamut of activi-
ties needed to run a penal facility day-to-day. The policyofhyperincar-
ceration even stimulated the resurgence and exponential expansion of
jails a/1d priso/1s CO/1structed a/1d/or ma/1aged by private operators, to
which public authorities perpetually strapped for cells turned to extract
a better yield out of their correctional budgets. Incarceration for profit
concerned 1,345 inmates in 1985i ten years later, it covered 49,154 beds,
equal to the entire confined population of France. The firms that house
these inmates receive public monies against the promise of miser’s
savings, on the order of a few cents per capita per day, but multiplied
by hundreds of thousands of bodies, these savings are put forth as jus-
tification for the partial privatization of one of the state’s core regalian
functions.” By the late 1990S, an import-export trade in inmates was
flourishing among different members of the Union: every year Texas
brings in several thousands convicts from neighboring states but also
from jurisdictions as far away as the District of Columbia, Indiana, and
Hawaii, in utter disregard of fanilly visiting rights, and later returns
them to their county of origin where they will be consigned on parole
at the end of their sentence.

Now, to turn the penal apparatus into an organizational contraption
suitable for curbing and containing social disorders (as opposed to re-
sponding to crime) in decaying lower-class and ghetto neighborhoods
ravaged by economic deregulation and welfare curtailment required
two transformations. First its processing and warehousing capacities
had to be vastly expanded. Second, it had to be remade into a flexible,
muscular, and efficacious instrument for the tracking and confinement
of troubled and troublesome persons caught in the cracks of the dual-
ized urban order. Increased reach was achieved by implementing four
major penal planles:

1. “Determinate Sentencing”: under the sanctioning regime known as

“indeterminate sentencing,” put in place across the United States from the

1920S onward, the court condemned an offender to a custodial sentence

defined by a broad bracket (e.g., from two to ten years, or “fifteen to life”);

the effective duration of confinement was set later by a parole board, based

on the behavior of the convict and his progress toward “rehabilitation,”

Under the new “determinate sentencing” regime, introduced around 1978-

84, punishment is set once for all in court by the judge within a narrow

range defined by the application of a quasi-mathematical formula: each
convict is assigned a number of points, converted into months of reclusion,

computed on the basis of scores corresponding to the seriousness of his

66 CHAPTER TWO

crime, the circumstances of its commission, and his criminal background.
At century’s turn, twenty-two states applied determinate sentencing and
another twenty-two a mixed regime. The main effect of this drastic re-
duction of judicial and correctional discretion has been to lengthen the
sentences handed down by judges at conviction.

2. “Truth in Sentencing”: this policy, applied after 1984 in response to the
perceived leniency and inequity of the regime of indeterminate sentencing,
stipulates that every convict shall serve a minimum portion of his sentence
before he becomes eligible for parole. The threshold is set at 75 percent in
four states, 85 percent in thirty states, and 100 percent in four others (Wis-
consin even supplements custodial sentences with an automatic period
of judicial supervision after release equal to one-fourth of the time spent
behind bars). Its implementation entails the amputation of time deducted
for “good behavior” and the elimination of parole for violent offenders in
four states as well as for all convicts in fourteen states. It primary effect: an
automatic lengthening of the sentences effectively served.

3· “Mandatory Minimums”: this federal legislation, voted in 1986 for
drug crimes, establishes a plank of compulsory and irreducible sanctions
for specific offenses, without regard for the injuriousness of the crime,
the justice background of the convict, and the circumstances of his ac-
tions. In the case of narcotics offenders, for instance, the sanction is set
by the amount of drugs involved (measured in grams or feet). Thus the
same automatic punishment of a minimum of five years of imprisonment
without the possibility of early release on parole is given in federal court for
simple possession of one hundred plants of marijuana, one hundred grams
of heroin. ten grams of methamphetamine, five grams of cocaine in solid
form (crack) or five hundred grams in powder form, and one gram of LSD.
In 1988, Congress extended this statute to a long list of crimes committed
with a firearm. Its main consequence has been to widen the use of impris-
onment and to sharply increase sentences both pronounced and served.

4· “Three Strikes and You’re Out”: borrowed from the “national pastim~”
of baseball (a sport in which the batter who swings and misses the ball
thrown at him three times is “out” and loses his turn at bat), this expression
refers to the drastic and mechanical enhancement of sanctions inflIcted in
cases of recidivism and the implementation of life sentences (or “twenty-
five to life”) when the accused has committed three serious or specially
designated felonies. Such laws were adopted by two dozen states and the
federal government in the 19905. They vary greatly by jurisdiction, with
California enforcing a particularly brutal version in which over five hun-
dred oifenses (including minor misdeeds such as a simple theft in a store)
qualify as “third strikes” mandating lifetime imprisonment, and Georgia
applying “two strikes and you’re out” for seven violent crimes.

THE CR1M1NALIZATION OF POVERTY 67

These four trains of judicial measures illustrate well the flexible,
double-sided rationale of penal policy discussed in the prologue, which
spans the material and symbolic orders. Thus truth-in-sentencing and
mandatory-minimums statutes have primarIly the material effects of
reducing systemic discretion and enlarging as well as extending the
confinement of whole categories of offenders by sweeping ever-larger
numbers oflow-Ievel offenders into the carceral system for longer peri-
ods. By contrast, “Three Strikes and You’re Out” and simIlarly vengeful
laws play essentially the symbolic role of communicating the intense
sentiments of public outrage and state severity toward criminals, as in
practice their application is sharply limited, and they fail to generate
significant numbers of additional incarcerations (except in California,
where the very idiosyncratic manner in which the law was drafted and
voted has resulted in its “biting louder than it barks,” but in that regard
it is highly atypical).” As for the determinate sentencing regime, it may
be viewed as fulfilling a mix of instrumental and expressive missions: it
curtails judicial discretion and escalates the intensity of punishment,
bringing the mass of convicts under stiffer correctional control, at the
same time as it signifies a newfound collective commitment to moral

austerity and judicial fortitude.
Whereas the rolling back of welfare was effected through blanket re-

traction and affected all recipients and would-be recipients indiscrimi-
nately, without regard to their needs, options, and location, penal rigor
was delivered very selectively in social space. Class and et/mic selec-
tiveness was achieved primarily by the targeting of certain geographic
zones, which guaranteed that the categories composing their residents
would be the primary if not exclusive “beneficiaries” of the newfound
policing zeal and penal largesse of the state. It was further enhanced
by the multiplication of new law-enforcement tactics and special mea-
sures designed for, and deployed specifically in, declining lower-class
districts, such as order-maintenance policing (known as “zero toler-
ance” in its New York variant, dissected in chapter 8), antigang loitering
ordinances, intensive police sweeps through public housing or public
schools, and youth curfews.”

The establishment of cwfews, aimed at keeping minors off the streets
after nightfall and applied essentially in and around the hyperghetto
and poor barrios, is emblematic of the increased propensity of the
American state to fling its police and punishment dragnet wider only
in those very regions of social space where it is retracting its safety net.
Pointing to a rise in violent crime attributable (or reflexively attrib-
uted) to gangs, 59 of the 77 largest cities in the country have instituted
such prohibitions, half of them between 1990 and 1994. In Chicago,

68 CHAPTER TWO

a municipal ordinance forbids people under age sixteen from being
outdoors without proper authorization between 10:30 at night (11:30
on weekends) and 6 :00 in the morning, Criminologists William RuefIe
and Kenneth Reynolds observe that this raging epidemic of curfews
was “a leap into the unknown,” since no one had documented whether
these measures reduce delinquency rather than simply displace it.”
Since the mid-1990S, numerous studies have indeed found that juvenile
curfews have no suppressive effect on street crime or juvenile offend-
ing and even have serious criminogenic consequences of their own.57

What is certain is that these curfews Significantly increase chances of
incarceration for the young residents of poor urban aleas, According
to FBI datal some 751000 youths were arrested on this basis in 1992,
twice as many as for theft (excluding Cal theft) that yeal, And the rate of
juvenile arrests for loitering and curfew violations more than doubled
between 1992 and 1997, when it pea!(ed at 700 per 100,000 juveniles,”
The ability to modulate their implementation at ground level according
to the geographic, class, and ethnic origins of those caught by them
gives curfews a privileged place in the panoply of new techniques for
the pUnitive containment of young men from the neighborhoods of
relegation gutted by the neoliberal restructuring of malket and state,
Other techniques include “boot camps,” the electronic surveillance
of offenders, and the increasing diversion of juvenile cases into adult
court.

The explosive swelling of the population behind bals, the retraction
of vocational and educational programs within prisons, the massive
recourse to the most diverse forms of pre- and postcustodia! control,
and the multiplication of instruments of surveillance up and down the
penal chain, the “new penology” being put in place does not aim at
“rehabilitating” criminals, but rather at “managing costs and control-
ling dangerous populations”” and, short of this goal, at walehousing
them in isolation to mal(e up for the indigence of social and medical
services that are neither willing nor able to care for them, The rise of
the American penal state thus responds not to rising crime-which
was first stagnant and then declined during these three pivotal decades,
as we will show in chapter 4-but to the social dislocations caused by
the desocialization of wage labar and the retrenchment of the chari-
table state, And it tends to become its own justification inasmuch as
its crimina genic effects contribute powerfully to the insecurity and vio-
lence it is supposed to remedy,

The same congenital properties that inclined the American state to
treat the poor in an increasingly stingy manner on the social welfale
front after the mid-1970S also predisposed it to behave in generous

THE CRIMINALlZATION Of POVERTY 69

The same overlapping divisions between lower
penal front. I d hite and deserving versuS undeserv-

?cil1tdrnidlrue class” blathc (danep’:tru~ture and routine functioning of
‘bed tn e e If

inscrt ditioned it to distribute ever meager we ale
• . field, con

ver
lar er doses of punishment at the bottom

,.nits:aflU to mete ,out ~er as agmeans of reasserting the civic impera-
‘th”clas> and ethmc or I coincidence of these two complementalY

of work, The temporda ‘th the reversal of labor and social trends
‘th ch other an Wl h pu Wl ea , any their convergence onto t e same po –
deepeni~g l~eq~da~ed urban enclaves, their joint invocation of
trapped ‘~ ~ilapl onsibility and (del merit, and their shared

of indlVldua! resp ful ‘ Cacie evidence that restric-
‘tl\e””‘”~” ftute power prtma 1,
‘nllniti\’e ethos cons 1 d nsive criminal justice policies are

‘al Ifale reforms an expa ” ‘
<;; SOCI we 0 the eneralization of social msecunty In . . state responses t 'a! g d that they must therefore be

the nether regions of US SOCl space an

analyzed together,

The Gaols of the sub’p’rol~tariat:
An Experimental Venflcatlon

, e extra enological functions served by the out-
It suffices, to discern th P a! aratus even as crime plummeted

d ext ion ofthe US carcer app ‘a! fil
size ens 60 sketch in broad strol(es the sociologlc ,pro e
for over a decade, to d t ‘t entry point, Whence It turns

‘I’ t 1 ” ‘t accommo ates a 1 s dd ofthe ‘ c len eel ‘h gl t the country’s 3,300-0
h th half million detamees w 0 u th gh out t at e – d th f teen million bodies that pass rou

, ‘I ne day-an e our fr
Jal s on any ~ fa ty ica! year-are essentially drawn ,om
their gates m t~e c~ur~ef~actiOl!: of the working class, and especIally
the most malgmallz~ ilies of calor in the segregated cities rav-
from the subproletanan fam

f
t’ f wage labar and social protec-

d b th nJ’ oint trans orma IOn 0 . age y e co ‘h” I ‘ssion of origin, incalceratlDn
tion ….. Thus, recovering Its lstonca ml

. e tal{en from a survey, conducted by the federal
-The statistics in this section ar MI6 of u representative sample

. [ October 1995 to arc 1 199 ,
Department of Justice rom .’ C I’ w’olf Harlow Profile of Inmates 1996

. . ounty Jails. aro me W” •
of 6,000 detumees In 431 c . . . 8) For comparisons over time,

(Washington, D.C.~ Bureau of Justlce Spta~~ltlcifS’ ,la
9
,,91I,;mates 1989 and Profile of Jail . lied upon’ r0.l’ e 0 JI’ I ‘[

these earlier studies were re ‘Jr I 8 Survey of Inmates of Loea Jat s
D llie Findings om t 1e 197 I) h’l Inmates: Socio- emograp . . Offi 1991 and 1980, respective y ,W 1 e

D C G vernment Prmting ce, h t’ at (Washington, . .: 0 -. d £ r comparisons with t e na IOn
B ublicatlons were use 0 .

various Census ureau p . I’ d h high coefficient of uncertainty oWing
S “t’ al data of thiS un ave a .’ fthe

Population. taus IC .’ ducted the characteristics 0 , , d hich the intervieW’s are con ,
to the conditIOns un er W’

70 CHAPTER TWO

serves above all to regulate, if not to perpetuate, poverty and to ware-
house the human rejects of the market. In this regard, the gargantuan
operation of punishment houses converges with and complements the
aggressive rolling out of worlcfare programs.

Indeed, six in ten occupants of county jails are black or Latino (41
percent and 19 percent, respectively), as against 48 percent in 1978,
whereas these two communities put together represent barely one-fifth
of the national population. lust under one-half held a full-time job at
the time of arrest (49 percent), while 15 percent worked “part-time or
occasionally” and the remainder were 100ldng for work (20 percent)
or economically inactive (16 percent). This astronomical jobless rate is
hardly surprising considering the educational level of this population:
one-half had not graduated from high school, even though this requires
no examination, and barely 13 percent said that they had pursued voca-
tional, technical, or academic postsecondary education (compared to
one-half of this age category in the country as a whole).

As a result of their marginal position on the deskilled labor market,
two-thirds of detainees lived in a household with under $1,000 in in-
come per month (and 45 percent in households with under $600), cor-
responding to less than half the official pOJlerty lille for a family of three
that year-although two-thIrds said that they had received wages. This
indicates that the vast majority of the occupants of county jails do come
from the ranks of the “worldng poor,” that fraction of the worldng class
that does not manage to escape poverty although they work, but who
are largely ineligible for social protection because they work at poverty-
level jobs,’ Thus, despite their penury, barely ‘4 percent received pUblic
aid (payments to single parents, food stamps, food assistance for chil-
dren) on the eve of their arraignment. If we include the 7 percent re-
ceiving disability or retirement benefits and the 3 percent on the unem-
ployment rolls, it turns out that less than one-quarter of jail detainees
received some government support. The twofold exclusion from stable

population questioned, the sensitivity of some of the items asi(ed, and a lack of preci-
sion in the coding of responses. However. the orders of magnitude they establish in the
respects that interest us here are sufficiently clear that We can treat them as reliable,
especially since other, local inVestigations suggest that this study tends to llJtderesti_
mate the material insecurity and sociocultural destitution of the carceral population.

·On the one hand, these jobs generally provide neither medical insura~ce nor Social
coverage (which depends on the goodwill of the employer), On the other, having a job,
and thus an income, however meager, disqualifies them from public assistance and
medical coverage for indigent households (public benefits which, in any case, are now
very hard to obtain and provide only for strictly limited periods, as we shall document
in the next chapter),

THE CRIMINAlIZATION OF POVERTY 71

.. ublic assistance that affects widening sections of the
wage work and p . I’ the lengthening of careers in the illegal ‘ proletariat exp ams , , 6
Amencan d ging of the J’ ail populatIOn: m 199 d thus the pronounce a ‘Thi
econom~, an. three was older than 35, twice as many as In 1978. s
one det:unee m allels that of persistent offenders and the entrench-
aging drrectly par , th I’nner city, where established street ‘ , al commerce In e ,
ing of cnmm t e reneurial turn and included more members
gangs ~avhe,taIt’ ,en.:~ eFo:ti~s as opportunities in the regular economy in thelr t lr Ies
dried up,” ” ‘ty f detainees in American jails is matched

The matenal msecun 0 with both
only by their social del1udement: only 40 perce~; gr~~~~ 14 percent
parents (as against a n~tional av~rage 0~~7g~~:~e~om:’ Nearly half were

:;~:~t::~oc~:~~~~~sdr;h:iv~:; p:~atlhgicee:~:~ar:~:;e:;’:e~~~; ~;:~;~~~~~
[‘ , g in public ousmg- d

grew up Ivm dilapl’dation dangerousness, an ‘ I t due to its extreme ,
housmg mar (e . ‘t 62 Moreover, more
the double class a~d, c~ste segreganfitlOdn ~htat ~::~:gS ~ p’ arent or guardian

thIrd of Jail mmates co eo.
thhan ,os~: alcoholic (30 percent) or drug addict (8 percent), Confir~mdg
w 0 1 ,. 6 t of them were marne , the fragility of their social ties, a bare 1 percen t” de

ercent for men in their age bracket na lOnWI .
compared to 58 p , , ‘familiar to detainees in the strict sense

th:te~!!~~ ~~~~~:;~;nt;:e~~7,:ve 01′ had ; cl;:.:::~t~~:~~,~:o;e~~
brother, 30 percent; their f~h~~~6J’:I:~: ;’:d especially gun-related

. cent), The same goes for p Y, id that they had
. . e men and one In three women sa

violence, One m run d’ their childhood; three per-
suffered physical or sexual abuS~re’::~orted being raped as adults,
cent of men and one woman m s are low estimates, especially
Everything su~gests that these per~:~:a~ready done time behind bars
for the men, SInce most mmates . American houses of deten-

al ‘s quite common m
and homosexu rape 1 e inmate in four is sub-
tion, where it is estimated that as man~:~~~ordlng to a 1994 survey
ject to serious sexual abuse ~~ery ytetahr, C ok County Department of

‘d b th head phYSICian a eo,
carne ?ut yen admitted to Chicago’s jail had prevlOusly
Corrections, half of the me It d one in four had been
been hospitalized as a result of an assau, ,an rcent of shooting
wounded by gunshots at least once, In addition, 60 p~ , childhood,”

” d rsonall witnessed shootmgs durmg elr
victims ha pe Y, ‘the J’ails of Washington, D,e., t d of detamees entenng
A germane s u y £ h d suffered serious injuries unrelated
in 1997 found that, one in our h ~ t ‘ws with a subsample of these
to their incarceratIOn, In-dept m ervle f hooting incident;
men found that 83 percent had been at the scene 0 as

72 CHAPTER TWO

46 percent had had a family member killed with a gun (in mast cases
during a robbery, assault, ar crossfire); and 40. percent still carried same
disability related to. a earlier gunshat waund.”

Material insecurity, cultural deprivatian, sacial denudement, physi-
cal vialence-the deplorable health af the denizens af America’s jails
is in tune with their degraded class pasitian and canditian: mare than
ane-third (37 percent, campared to. ane-fifth afthe general papulatian)
repart that they suffer from physical, psychic, ar ematianal problems
seriaus enaugh to. curtail their ability to. wark. This diagnasis is can-
firmed by the fact that half af the new entrants into. the carceral system
had to. receive treatment upan admissian, aside fram the superficial
medical examinatian to. which all “fish” are subjected during the pro-
cedures initiating them to. their detainee status.’ (Ta this percentage
ane can add the 13 percent af jail.inmates injured while behind bars
as a result af assaults, riats, and accidents.) And detainees are nat anly
mare likely to. be in ill health upan being put under lack; they are also.
at inardinately high risk af becomil1g ill while there, as America’s Jails
and prisans have became gigantic incubators far infectiaus diseases,
with prevalence rates af the majar afflictians far exceeding thase af the
general papulatian. It is estimated that 20. to. 26 percent af all persans
infected with HIV-AIDS in the United States, 29 to. 43 percent afthase
detected with the hepatitis C virus, and 40. percent af all thase struck
by tuberculasis in 1997 had passed thraugh a carrectianal facility.”

It is mareaver well established that American jails have became the
shelters af first resart far the mentally ill who. were thrawn anta the
streets by haspitals in the wal

“The mass processing of detainees at the Los Angeles County jail is depicted in
the two ethnographic vignettes of jail intai{e (drawn from fieldwork carried out in the
summer of 1998) offered in chapters 4 and 5 (pages 146-50 and 186-91).

“‘The proportion of inmates identified as suffering from mental afflictions during
admission is deliberately lowered in keeping with the lack of resources available to
treat them. As one psychiatrist working at the clinic of the Twin Towers. the recep-
tion center of the Los Angeles jail system, explained to me: “\Ve have an instrument
[a psychological test] that gives us 6 to 10 percent of serious cases, but the percentage
diagnosed really depends on how many beds we have. Ifwe had the room and the staff.
we could easily up that figure to 15. :W, or 30 percent.”

THE CRIMINALlZATION OF POVERTY 73

City and caunty jails suffer from severe mental illness (rates far canvicts
in prisan range from 10 to. 15 percent), and this rate has increased aver
the past two. decades as a result af the dawnsizing af the medical sectar
af the state, mare rigid criteria far civil cammitments, and increasingly
negative attitudes among the public and the palice.67 The dispropar-
tianate rate af street arrests af mentally ill persans cambines in turn
with the explasive growth af camputerized criminal recards (analyzed
in chapter 5) to. fartify the tendency af the autharities to. divert their
treatment from the public health to. the penal wing af the Leviathan.

As they came almast exclusively from the mast precarious strata
af the urban proletariat, the denizens af American jails are also., by
(sada)lagical implicatian, “regulars” af the carceral system: 59 percent
have already experienced detentian, and 14 percent were previausly
put on probationJ leaving just under one-quarter who are unovices” to
the jailhause. Far, as shall be discussed shartly, the carceral institutian
has grown mare alltophagolls. This is attested by the rising share af
inmates who. have been repeatedly canvicted: fewer than ane detainee
in faur had served three custadial sentences in 1989; seven years later,
that figure reached ane-third. Finally, it is significant that 80. percent of
tllOse sentenced to. at least ane year of prisan time were defended-if
ane can call it that-by public defenders. Only half af the detainees
sham af the means to. hire their awn lawyer were able to. speak with
caunsel within two. weeks af being lacked up.” In fact, it is routine for
public defenders to. meet their clients far the first time a few minutes
befare they hastily appear together before a judge, since state-appointed
lawyers are typically in charge af hundreds af cases at a time. Thus in
Cannecticut members af the public attarney’s affice, who. afficiate in
three-quarters af the state’s felany trials, each handle an average af
1,0.45 cases in the caurse af a year. As in many ather jurisdictians, they
have filed suit against the agency that emplays them in arder to. campel
the state to. disburse the funds needed to. meet its canstitutianal man-
date to. provide all the accused with minimal means af defense in crimi-
nal caurt.” Over the past decade, the casts af indigent defense services
have ballaaned aut af cantrol, exacerbating the chronic crisis af legal
services far the paar, due nat anly to. the multiplicatian af punitive
statutes such as mandatory minimum sentences and long narcotics-
related sanctionsJ but also to lIan overall increase in criminal filings and
a larger percentage af defendants faund to. be indigent.” This canfirms
that the penal state is mare aggressively raking the very battam layers
of social and urban space?O

The profile in urban marginality drawn from this natianal survey af
jail inmates is fully carrobarated by a twa-year field study canducted

74 CHAPTER TWO

by sociologist-and ex-convict-John Irwin, combining direct obser-
vation and in-depth interviews with the “fresh fish” caught in the net
of the San Francisco jail. Irwin emphasizes that “the persons who fill
the jails in the big cities are largely members of the rabble class, that is,
persons who are poorly integrated into society and who are seen as dis-
reputable”: hustlers and hoodlums, derelicts and the mentaliy ill, drug
addicts, illegal immigrants, and “corner boys” (working-class youths
who hang out in cliques in public places and consort in taverns in low-
income neighborhoods). But, more importantly, their arrest and deten-
tion, and even their conviction and sentencing to prison, are explained
largely by uoffensiveness, as much or more than [by] crime seriousness.”
Worse still, the police and carceral management of social insecurity
certainly has the effect of controlling members of the “rabble” that soil
the city streets in the short run, but over time it also “confirms their
status and continualiy replenishes their ranks.” Aside from the fact that
“jail is the primary institution of socialization into rabble existence,”
the recent campaign of penal harassment of the poor in public space
contributes to aggravating the feeling of insecurity and impunity inso-
far as it “blurs the distinction between actual crime and what is merely
bothersome or offensive.”” And it is well suited to diverting public at-
tention from white-collar and corporate crime, whose human damage
and economic costs are vastly greater and more insidious than those of
street delinquency.

Considering that jail detainees form a more diverse and less deprived
population than the convicts of state prison, it is clear that, when we
are tracking the carceralstock of the United States, we are indeed deal-
ing overwhelmingly with the most precarious and stigmatized seg-
ments of the urban working class, disproportionately nonwhite, and
in a regular if fractious relationship with various public aid programs
targeted at the poor, from orphanages and housing to health and in-
come support. Whatever offenses they may have committed, their tra-
jectory cannot be mapped out and explained within the compass of a
“classless criminology.”” And, whatever behavioral foibles threw them
into the clutches of criminal justice, they issue from and remain ‘an in-
tegral part of the core population that is the traditional focus of public
assistance schemes. This suggests that analysts of the welfare state in
America cannot continue to ignore the vast and growing sections of
the urban (sub)proletariat that are churning through the penal system,
and they must imperatively bring the prison into the picture of the
determinants and correlates of marginality and inequality in the age
of economic deregulation. Integrating the analysis of penal policy and
social policy is ali the more urgent when the welfare rug is being pulled

THE CRIMINALlZATION Of POVERTY 75

nder the feet of the urban poor to be replaced by a trampoline ~mu ‘h’
d low-wage work and the illegal economy of the street-wh,c IS towar .’ f

h t the great “welfare reform” of 1996 entailed. It IS to an analysIs 0
who a “reform” and how it embodies and accelerates the establishment
tg th . th t
of the new government of social insecurity at we turn tn e nex

chapter.

AMERICAN CROSSROADS
EDITED BY EARL LEWIS, GEORGE LIPSITZ, PEGGY PASCOE, GEORGE SANCHEZ,
AND DANA TAKAGI

PRISONS, SURPlUS, CRISIS, AND OPPOSITION IN GlOBAUZING CAUFORNIA

RUTH WllSON GllMORE

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
BERKELEY LOS ANGELES LONDON

86 THE CALIFORNIA POLITICAL ECONOMY

uum of dependency and depravation. The crisis of state capacity

then became, peculiarly, its own solution, as the welfare-warfare

state began the transformation, bit by bit, to the permanent cri-

sis workfare-warfare state, whose domestic militarism is con-

cretely recapitulated in the landscapes of depopulated urban

communities and rural prison towns. We shall now turn to the

history of this “prison fix.”

THREE

TH( PRISON f IX

The rhetoric of imprisonment and the reality of the cage are often in stark

contrast.

NORVAL MORRIS AND DAVID J. ROTHMAN, THE OXFORD HISTORY OF THE
PRISON (1995)

You know, in my life I’ve rarely been amazed. Rarely been amazed. But I’ll tell

you what amazed me is the last time I was in [prison, in 1992]. I thought, you

know, look at all these guys in here. I thought, all these guys were in there for

something, you know, that they had done soMETHING. But then people started

telling me what they were in for. More than half the guys, they were in for

drugs, for possession. I mean, for NOTHING. That was truly amazing, you know,

tome.

40-YEAR·OLD EX-GANGSTER, PERSONAL COMMUNICATION (1994)

88 THE PRISON FIX

ow did California go about “the largest prison building

program in the history of the world” (Rudman and

Berthelsen 1991: i)? We have already seen that California’s

political economy changed significantly in the 1970s, due

both to changes in the location of industrial investment-

capital movement-and to “natural” disasters. Those changes,

and responses to them, provided the foundation upon which new

rounds of capital movement and new natural disasters were

played out. These shifts produced surpluses of finance capital,

land, labor, and state capacity, not all of which were politically,

economically, socially, or regionally absorbed. The new Califor-

nia prison system of the 1980s and 1990s was constructed delib-

erately-but not conspiratorially-of surpluses that were not

put back to work in other ways. Make no mistake: prison build-

ing was and is not the inevitable outcome of these surpluses. It

did, however, put certain state capacities into motion, make use

of a lot of idle land, get capital invested via public debt, and take

more than 160,000 low-wage workers off the streets.

FROM REFORM TO PUNISHMENT

Just as the rounds of disinvestment and calamity that occurred in

the 1970s political economy set the stage for how the 1980s crises

proceeded, so changes in California’s prisons in the 1970s formed

the basis for the system’s expansion. Not once, but twice, the ris-

ing power bloc of “tough on crime” and antiurban strategists

seized hard-won reforms designed to make the prisoner’s lot less

desperate and transformed them into their inverse mirror im-

ages. Efforts to make the California Department of Corrections

(CDC) take rehabilitation seriously wiped rehabilitation from

THE PRISON FIX 89

the books. Efforts to free prisoners from crumbling prisons led to

the construction program that has never ended.

In 1977, California ended its sixty-year commitment to use the

state prison system as the sociospatial means to rehabilitate all but

the most intransigent prisoners (Rudman and Berthelsen 1991;

Cummins 1994). The 1977 Uniform Determinate Sentencing

Act was the legislature’s response to a series of executive branch

courtroom losses during a twenty-five year struggle with state

prisoners. Prisoners had successfully used the federal bench,

under the 1867 Habeas Corpus Act, to demand that California

treat prisoners equitably, relieve overcrowding, and respect con-

stitutional rights (Cummins 1994). 1 Prisons have never been

pleasant places, and overcrowding was not a new phenomenon.
2

Prisoners have always fought both legally and extralegally to se-

cure decent conditions (Cummins 1994; Wicker 1975). However,

the post-World War II civil rights movement’s courtroom suc-

cesses encouraged prisoners to use the system against itself; and

the growing fraction of Black people in the prison population

was cause for identification with struggles in the streets (Jackson

1970; Angela Davis 1971; Wicker 1975; Cummins 1994). The

movement also influenced prisoners from behind bars, because

the criminalization of political activists brought them into the

prison population (Cummins 1994; Angela Davis 1971).

The key issue was sentence length. California’s 1917 Progres-

sive rehabilitation scheme had been coupled with indeterminate

sentences, on the theory that technically qualified “corrections”

professionals would help prisoners become useful and reliable

and that the “corrected” prisoners would then persuade local pa-

role boards of their readiness to rejoin society (Norval Morris

go THE PRISON FIX

1995; E. B. Freedman 1996). In practice, parole boards were

capricious and racist, representing local elites; prisoners sen-

tenced to one year to life languished in the penitentiary for

decades, petitioning at prescribed intervals for a chance to talk

their way out of cages (Jackson 1970).3 California’s Progressives

had argued that they were devising a new system vastly different

from both the exploitative plantation models of Mississippi and

Louisiana (Oshinsky 1996; Lichtenstein 1996) and the Golden

State’s older, punitive system (Bookspan 1991; Rudman and

Berthelsen 1991). However, the Progressive movement was gen-

erally committed to preserving racial and property hierarchies,

while creating institutions that would turn out people who re-

spected authority and knew their own limits (Thelan 1969; Allen

1994; Linda Gordon 1994; see also Don Mitchell 1996). In prac-

tice, California’s indeterminate sentences extended to life sen-

tences for Black, Latino, and white prisoners whose failures to be

rehabilitated translated as their refusal to learn their proper

places in the social order (Irwin 1985; Jackson 1970; cf. Himes

(1945] 1986, 1971).

A second class of issues that prisoners litigated centered on

conditions of confinement. State, media, and intellectuals of the

late 1960s and early 1970s participated in the ideological produc-

tion of “moral panics” (Stuart Hall et al. 1978) to explain the so-

cial and political disorder sweeping the United States. At all lev-

els, states worked hard to characterize people agitating for justice

as morally wrong rather than politically dissident. The ensuing

criminalization of such activists swept what were then record

numbers of men and women off the streets and into custody,

with California in the vanguard (Miller 1996; Donner 1990; cf.

Stuart Hall et al. 1978; Bean 1973). The state’s prison population

THE PRISON FIX 91

grew from about 16,500 to just under 23,000 between 1967 and

1971; the number rose and fell within a fairly narrow band over

the next few years, peaking at 24,700 in 1974 and bottoming out

at 19,600 in 1977 (CDC 1992; Rudman and Berthelsen 1991;

Cummins 1994). In addition to, or as a result of, problems of

sheer physical incapacity, the CDC could not or would not re-

spect the rights of inmates to “adequate life safety, health care

and recreation, food, decent eating … and sanitation stan-

dards, … visitation privileges, and access to legal services” (Sil-

ver 1983: 118; cf. Cummins 1994). Thus, the hostility, density, and

confusion that characterized state prison environments at the

time undermined any rehabilitative capacity prisons might have

had (Rudman and Berthelsen 1991; Cummins 1994).

Federal courts throughout the United States in the 1970s fa-

vorably evaluated many prisoners’ writs of habeas corpus and put

state corrections departments under federal order to remedy

constitutional wrongs (Benton 1983). Courts directed California

to relieve overcrowding and also to group prisoners according to

a transparent system of classifications in order to enhance the po-

tential for every individual’s reform (SPWB 1985; Cummins

1994; Rudman and Berthelsen 1991; see also Bookspan 1991 for

earlier attempts at prisoner classification). If the purpose of these

federally demanded social and spatial remedies was to carry out

the mandates of Progressive-era lawmaking, the legislature re-

sponded by voiding the 1917 statute. The 1977 Uniform Deter-

minate Sentencing Act was California’s formal abdication of any

responsibility to rehabilitate, stating neatly: “[T]he purpose of

imprisonment for crime is punishment.”

In the 1977 Uniform Determinate Sentencing Act, and again

in that year’s Budget Act, the legislature directed the CDC to

92 THE PRISON FIX

forecast prison bed need (LAO 1986).4 The CDC’s initial at-

tempts to predict shortfall were quite modest and focused on ren-

ovating aging facilities and replacing the two oldest prisons-

San Quentin (built in 1852) and Folsom (opened in 1880). The

department’s 1978 Facilities Planning Report proposed renovat-

ing 3,000 prison beds around the state. In 1980, the Facilities Re-

quirement Plan expanded the number of new and replacement

beds to 5,000, and forecast an increase in the capital needed to

carry out the project (LAO 1986).

In the turbulent years of his second and final term (1978-82),

Governor Jerry Brown took up the initial CDC analysis and

started work on designs for new facilities to replace the tier-and-

catwalk-style gothic structures at San Quentin and Folsom

(Morain 1994c; LAO 1986). Brown’s new prisons were supposed

to be used for rehabilitation, in spite of the legislature’s 1977 dec-

laration. The 1977 statute did not forbid rehabilitation; rather, it

excised its central importance (Rudman and Berthelsen 1991). By

his own testimony, Brown could have used his power as the

state’s chief executive to relieve overcrowding by ordering parole

for indeterminate-sentence prisoners who had served time equal

to the new sentencing requirements and by commuting sen-

tences for others who had been in the system a long time.5 In-

stead, he began to investigate the best way to improve plant and

modestly expand capacity, intending-or so he claimed-to use

state-of-the-art prisons for the benefit of prisoners and society

(Morain 1994c).

By 1980, the legislature had already approved replacing San

Quentin with two 500-bed, maximum-security units. In the

summer of 1982, Brown brought in a premier prison architect-

engineer, Paul Rosser, to design small, program- and common-

THE PRISON FIX 93

space-oriented prisons that would focus on education and other

rehabilitative activities (Morain 1994c; LAO 1986). Brown’s plan-

ning combined vestiges of the early twentieth-century Progres-

sive sensibility-seeking to produce social peace through old and

new institutions and techniques of control-with a late

twentieth-century political shrewdness-seeking to convert the

moral panic over crime into an opportunity by having a skepti-

cal electorate support the exercise, rather than the restraint, of

state expansion (cf. L. M. Friedman 1993).

There were so many contradictory processes at work in the

1982 transition year from the lapsed welfare-state Democratic to

the supply-side Republican gubernatorial regime that it is some-

times difficult to grasp how they all coincided. The split widened

between Brown’s commitment to what had become, in law, sec-

ondary (rehabilitation), and the primary purpose enshrined in

the new penal code. Without opposition from the lame-duck

chief executive, the legislature gave the CDC permission to build

on a larger scale than Brown had envisioned (Morain 1994d).

Brown had financed prison design studies out of reserve funds

appropriated by the legislature and initiated the era of new facil-

ities construction by approving a $15,000,000 expansion at the

California Correctional Institution in southern Kern County.

But in 1982, new commitments to the CDC started to rise steeply,

and the department revised its forecast-for the first time

proposing several major capacity-expanding facilities instead of

concentrating on renovation and replacement (LAO 1986). To

meet needs forecast by the CDC, the 1982 legislature approved

siting new facilities in Riverside, Los Angeles, and San Diego

Counties. That same year, the legislature successfully petitioned

voters to approve $495,000,000 in general obligation bonds

94 7H E PRISON FIX

(GOBs) to build new prisons-based on the argument that more

prison cells would enhance public safety and punish wrongdoers

(Morain l994d).

Also in 1982, the legislature reorganized the statutory rela-

tionship between itself, the CDC, and the prison expansion proj-

ect by forming a new entity, the Joint Legislative Committee on

Prison Construction and Operations (JLCPC0).6 Thereafter, the

CDC stood apart from all other state agencies in two ways. First,

its capital outlays would not be managed by the Office of Gen-

eral Services, which meant that its bidding and budgeting prac-

tices varied from long-standing procedures for construction of

state physical plant. Indeed, the CDC was explicitly exempted

from a competitive bidding process and instead allowed to assign

work to outside consultants (BRC 1990; LAO 1986).7 The expla-

nation for this extreme deviation from normal procedure focused

on the CDC’s unique new charge to build an unspecified num-

ber of similar, expensive, highly specialized facilities in rapid suc-

cession (R. Bernard Orozco, interview, 1995; Rudman and

Berthelsen 1991; BRC 1990; LAO 1986). Second, the establish-

ment of the JLCPCO kept the CDC’s ordinary and extraordi-

nary activities under close scrutiny and direction by elected offi-

cials (Rudman and Berthelsen 1991; LAO 1986). The latter

appeared to keep the expansion of the prison system in the pub-

lic eye, insofar as the JLCPCO was required to hold hearings be-

fore either Department of Finance disbursement of appropriated

funds or Public Works Board implementation of CDC plans

(BRC 1990).

George Deukmejian’s gubernatorial victory in 1982 com-

pleted the turn to the right California had begun under Ronald

Reagan in the 1960s. Deukmejian used the accumulating illegit-

THE PRISON FIX 95

imacy exemplified by tax revolts to attack the status quo-start-

ing with the weakest targets, such as persons receiving welfare

(cf. Piven 1992). He followed, rather than led, the tax struggle,

and at the end of California’s second straight year of well-

reported declining crime rates, he proposed budget increases to

fight crime, appealing to voters’ insecurity. It is more than ironic

that he campaigned against big government by arguing how the

government should grow. Deukmejian’s gubernatorial oppo-

nent, Tom Bradley, had as mayor of Los Angeles successfully

controlled the rising share of the city budget that the LAPD and

the police and fire pension fund had commanded for more than

a decade.8 The police fought back by campaigning-statewide,

in uniform-for Deukmejian (Sonenshein 1993). Deukmejian

seized the issue and used the Los Angeles dispute to project race,

crime, and the need for state-building as a single issue, claiming

that the African American mayor’s tightening of the LAPD

budget could only be the work of a man who was soft on crime.

Once Deukmejian took office in 1983, the administration

broadened Jerry Brown’s new prison plan but dropped rehabili-

tation as the reason for new buildings. With punishment, in the

form of “incapacitation,” now the rationale for prison, the ad-

ministration, the legislature, and the CDC (all three partially

consolidated via the JLCPCO) joined forces to expand the state’s

built capacity for incarceration. But the state still had two imme-

diate problems: first, how better to guarantee potential prisoners,

and second, how to finance the facilities to cage them. Toward so-

lution of the former problem, the legislature changed the classi-

fication of certain offenses-such as residential burglary (Rud-

man and Berthelsen 1991) and domestic assault (E.G. Hill

1994)-to felonies requiring prison terms upon conviction. Sim-

96 THE PRISON FIX

ilarly, new drug laws-to some degree modeled on New York’s

Rockefeller minimum mandatory sentence laws enacted in the

early 1970s (Plateau 1996; Miller 1996)-also enhanced the like-

lihood of prison time for people not formerly on the prison track

(Rudman and Berthelsen 1991). The legislature further autho-

rized a State Task Force on Youth Gang Violence to study what

it called “street terrorism”-a topic to which we shall return.

The Board of Prison Terms, overseeing parole officers, made

common cause with the legislature, and instructed its field staff

to be liberal in revoking parole-an option used sparingly before

the new prison era; as a result, since 1983 people on parole have

had great difficulty remaining out of custody through their su-

pervisory period, with about 70 percent being returned to prison

for some portion of that time without having been convicted of

new crimes. 9

With these legal measures in place, the CDC deepened and

widened its planning. Beginning with the 1983 Facilities Master

Plan, it projected shortfalls in available beds as a crisis (LAO

1986). It is surprising neither that the CDC bed shortage esti-

mates varied considerably nor that they tended to climb. The es-

timates ranged from 16,rno to 55,000 throughout the 1980s to a

1994 all-time high of 151,641 for 1998, generated by the “three

strikes” law (SPWB 1985, 1986a, 1987, 1991; LAO 1986; CDC

1993, 1994, 1996). Under Deputy Director James Gomez, who

moved to the CDC from the Department of Social Services

Adult and Family Division in 1983, the department expanded its

planning staff (from 3 to 118), honed its forecasting, and from

1984 on began to produce five-year master plans that combined

technical number-crunching skills with a flair for emphasizing

the drama inherent in the “crisis” (LAO 1986). 10 Projected need

THE PRISON FIX 97

moved in tandem with the judiciary’s legislature-produced ca-

pacity to remand persons to CDC custody. With the problem of

identifying wrongdoers partially solved, the question was how to

pay for all the new beds; and it was the new beds, rather than

court commitments, that led the system’s growth.

CAPITAL FOR CONSTRUCTION

Although Sacramento had successfully persuaded taxpayers to

vote for the 1982 Prison Construction Bond Act, most elected of-

ficials were susceptible to an ongoing fear, inspired by Proposi-

tion 13, of asking voters to approve too many general obligation

bonds. GOBs pledge the full faith and credit of the state of Cali-

fornia, and the state constitution requires that any such debt be

approved by the legislature and ratified by the electorate (SPWB

1985). GOBs also provide a way to circumvent the constitutional

requirement of a balanced budget, because debt service for voter-

approved bonds is exempt from the rule (SPWB 1985). The

problem became how to expand a politically popular program

(prisons) without running up against the politically contradictory

limit to taxpayers’ willingness to use their own money to def end

against their own fears.
Frederic Prager of L. F. Rothschild, U nterberg, Towbin

(LFRUT), 11 one of the most creative and well-connected under-

writers in the California world of municipal finance, and his new

associate Tom Dumphy, came up with a plan approved by a bi-

partisan power bloc, including Democrats Jess Unruh (trea-

surer) and Willie Brown (Speaker of the Assembly), the Repub-

lican governor, George Deukmejian, and prison-expansion

activists in the legislature, led by State Senator Robert Presley

(R-Riverside) and Assemblyman Dick Robinson (R-Orange

98 THE PRISON FIX

County). The capitalists and the statesmen crafted a new way to

borrow money for prisons from existing debt-raising capaci

ties.

The scheme involved using lease revenue bonds (LRBs) to sup-

plement GOB debt.

Prager’s savvy and experience had led LFRUT to dominance

in California’s private college facilities market. The state’s inde-

pendent, not-for-profit postsecondary institutions could borrow

in the tax-exempt markets to develop or renovate infrastructure;

for California, these debts constitute “off-book” or “no-commit-

ment” loans, because their repayment does not entail any taxing

or other fiscal capacity of the state (SPWB r985; Sbragia r986).

Under Prager, LFRUT put together LRBs for the state’s richest

and most powerful private universities-Stanford, the Univer-

sity of Southern California, and the California Institute of Tech-

nology. The creative firm also devised successful bond issues for

schools with more modest debt capacity, such as St. Mary’s, Mo-

raga, Cal Lutheran, and the University of the Pacific, so that they,

too, could improve their facilities. In r98r-82, Prager worked

with the Association of Independent California Colleges and

Universities (AICCU) to issue an innovative revenue bond

whose proceeds would constitute a forward-funded market for

student loans. Thanks to an expose in the San Jose Mercury News

(September 5, r982), the voters got the incorrect idea that only

rich schools (and by inference, rich students) had access to these

public funds. Treasurer Unruh, looking to be reelected that fall,

demanded that public institutions be included in the deal. The

spike in interest rates in the early r98os made it difficult for

middle-income families to borrow for college in the private sec-

tor, while at the same time, mounting energy and other costs

pushed up tuition (R. W. Gilmore r99r). The loan deal was ex-

THE PRISON FIX 99

tended to all students in the state; and Unruh used the program

during his campaign to reassure the state’s r.5 million students

and their parents-presumed members of the voting class-that

his office was looking out for their interests.12 A blunt politician

of the old school, Unruh also knew when to reduce flows to the

public trough; and in the early r98os, a bad economy and a tran-

sitional gubernatorial regime kept the old power broker’s fist

tight on the spigot.
Prager brought Dumphy to LFRUT in r983 to exploit his tal-

ents and connections in city government; he had previously been

a planner in Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley’s administration

and had also served as a youth probation officer in Massachusetts

early in his career (Dumphy r996). Together, Prager and

Dumphy worked hard to develop new California markets for

public debt (cf. Sbragia r986). The private college business was

already starting to tighten, because of most institutions’ limited

capacity to increase tuition-the major source of operating rev-

enue for all expenditures, including student aid and debt service,

at all but the wealthiest schools (R. W. Gilmore r99r). They were

the pivot men between surplus private capital available for in-

vestment in the not-for-profit and public sectors and decreasing

state-approved outlets where the capital could be put to work.

The new prison construction program, in its infancy in r983,

constituted an excellent long-term opportunity for capital in-

vestment. Sacramento’s old and new guards were ready to unite

behind the prison program, but they had to raise much more

money than anyone was brave or foolhardy enough to request

from voters.
Lease revenue bonds were the solution. LRBs are issued by the

Public Works Board of the state of California, established in r946

100 THE PRISON FIX

to help smooth crisis as California adjusted to the postwar econ-

omy (SPWB 1985). Typical LRBs issued by the Public Works

Board are for real property loans for veterans and farmers, as

well as loans for public college and university facilities and hos-

pital buildings. In all cases, nongovernmental borrower pay-

ments or user fees are used to pay back the debt. While in all cases

the Public Works Board is forbidden to pledge California’s full

faith and credit, in the case of public debt for public use, there is

an implied moral obligation that the state will exercise due dili-

gence to avert defaults (cf. Sbragia 1996). It was a risky but suc-

cessful political suspension of disbelief to use the state’s implied

moral obligation to script a scenario in which the Public Works

Board and the CDC were characterized as entities buying, sell-

ing, and leasing property and rights between them (SPWB 1985).

For the prison LRBs, the “revenue” has consisted of general fund

appropriations authorized by the legislature to the CDC annual

operating budget, designated as “rental payments” to the Public

Works Board, which is the actual issuer of the debt (SPWB 1985,

l986a, l986b, 1987, 1990, 1991, l993a, l993b, l993c, l993d). lJn-

like with mortgage, postsecondary, or hospital issues, there is no

potential or actual nontax revenue stream at all.

The economics of prison LRBs is almost identical to the eco-

nomics of prison GOBs; the greatest difference between them is

political-the scope of approval needed to borrow huge sums.

The economic downside is that LRBs are slightly more expensive

than GOBs precisely because they do not pledge the state’s tax-

ing power; for any debt, the higher the risk of nonpayment, the

higher the interest. However, in order to persuade all members

of the prison power bloc to exploit the LRB option, Prager and

Dumphy underscored the sole positive economic difference-

THE PRISON FIX 101

one that is in large part political as well. LRBs do not have to be

placed before the voters in general elections, and on approval by

the legislature, they can be relatively quickly organized and is-

sued in order to maximize favorable credit conditions, enabling

the CDC to build prisons closer to the time the facilities are bid

on, thus theoretically avoiding cost hikes. The capitalists and the

statesmen agreed that the trade-off between slightly higher in-

terest costs and quicker cash availability would balance the eco-

nomic difference and provide an effective political shield from

organized antitax activists.

In less than a decade, the amount of state debt for the prison

construction project expanded from $763 million to $4·9 billion

dollars, a proportional increase of from 3.8 percent to 16.6 per-

cent of the state’s total debt for all purposes (SPWB 1985, 1993).

During the same period, state debt service (annual expenditure

for principal plus interest) increased from l percent to 2.8 percent

of per capita income (California State Controller 1996: 161).

The new source of capital enabled the CDC to follow the sec-

ond of two approaches it had proposed. The earlier of these, in

the late 1970s, had centered on keeping people convicted of non-

violent offenses in their communities and providing treatment

programs for the 70 percent or so of all convicted persons who are

addicted to drugs and alcohol (BRC 1990; LAO 1986; PRCC

1996). The state-of-emergency approach, which started to

emerge in 1982-83 (in Gomez’s first year as deputy director for

CDC operations), sought simply to build as many prison cells as

possible. The end run around taxpayer-voters in order to raise

what turned out to be more than $2.5 billion in LRBs-in addi-

tion to nearly $2.5 billion in GOBs-was thus not only a politi-

cal strategy of economic subterfuge but also one of social policy

102 THE PRISON FIX

that set the Golden State in a new direction (SPWB 1985, l986a,

1986b, 1987, 1990, 1991, l993a, l993b, l993c, l993d).

SITING THE PRISONS

In order to realize the prison expansion program, the state

needed space in which to build the facilities. 13 California acquires

from one to three sections of land (640-1,920 acres) for each ap-

proved site. For a typical facility built since 1982, the buildings,

yards, parking lots, roads, perimeter, and fences incorporate

300-350 acres. 14 Initially, too, there was some concern that siting

might prove a challenge because communities would be afraid to

have prisons in their midst (BRC 1990). There was ample evi-

dence from around the United States that prison siting could be

difficult, with the facilities constituting highly contested locally

unwanted land uses (LULUs), producing “not in my back yard”

(NIMBY) dramas (see, for examples, Lake 1992, 1994; Krause

1992; Sechrest 1992; Carlson 1988, 1992; Travis and Sheridan

1983; cf. Lake 1992, 1994). As a result, the state was prepared to

exercise its right of eminent domain and condemn lands in order

to accumulate sufficient acreage for project development (LAO

1986; State of California 1990).

In anticipation of future siting struggles, the legislature at first

determined that new prisons should be located south of the

Tehachapi Mountains, whence, at the time, 59 percent of prison-

ers originated. The reasoning was that those who produced the

prisoners deserved the LULUs. However, the regional edict was

almost immediately revised, starting in 1982. The legislature ap-

proved new maximum security facilities adjacent to the ex-

panded California Correctional Institution in Tehachapi (a tiny,

high-altitude, sod-producing agricultural valley in southern

THE PRISON FIX 103

Kern County) to replace San Quentin (which was in any case

never closed). The legislature also approved a new hospital

prison to supplement the crowded and deteriorating hospital

prison at Vacaville (Solano County) in the Great Central Valley,

forty-five minutes’ drive southwest of Sacramento. As word of

these authorizations traveled back to legislators’ constituencies

from 1982 on, word returned by way of delegations of comm u-

h . h h ?” nity boosters, “But what about us? W y not ng t ere.

In 1983, the CDC established a Prison Siting Office under the

general direction of the department’s Government and Com-

munity Relations Branch. A nasty fight in Los Angeles over the

siting of the prison authorized for that county provided the

backdrop for the political and marketing work of the siting of-

fice. The legislature had selected a site in East Los Angeles, the

heart of the city and county’s Mexicano and Chicano commu-

nity. The characterization of Los Angeles as a county producing

criminals but unwilling to shoulder its responsibility to house

them played well across the state political map, especially in the

suburbs and the inland valleys. At the same time, both the gov-

ernor and legislature presumed that the promise of jobs would

offset the hesitancy of a working-class community of color to

have a prison located in its midst. The state was surprised by the

vehement political opposition to the prison organized by neigh-

borhood mothers (“Las Madres”) in the area’s public housing

project and an activist Roman Catholic priest (Pardo 1998; Krier

1986; Pulido l995b). The political danger in imposing the prison

on East Los Angeles against the will of the area’s residents lay in

the fact that any elected official, Democrat or Republican, was

increasingly vulnerable to the voting power of California’s ex-

panding Latino population (Paddock 1986). The governor thus

104 THE PRISON FIX

retreated before the potential identitarian political bloc pre-

sented by protesters, even though he had vowed that the prison

would be sited in the city. Eventually, the owner of the tract sold

the land to a nonstate entity (Paul Jacobs 1986), although it was

another year before the project was officially shelved (Wolinsky

1987).15

The LA prison battle gave legislators from other state regions

the chance to voice their constituents’ willingness to have a prison

in their midst, and the siting office helped by sending represen-

tatives-usually women-to talk reassuringly at town meetings

about the benefits and costs associated with such a development

plan. An anti-LA righteousness, which turned on an almost pa-

triotic notion of duty, cloaked the eagerness of small-town dele-

gations who came to Sacramento looking for prisons to revive

isolated, flagging economies (Wolinsky 1987). Industry closures,

downsizing, and capital abandonment left large tracts of land

available for development. Contrary to contemporary folklore,

the towns where prisons were sited, while deeply divided by

class, are not all Anglo communities, and unlike in Los Angeles,

the political opposition to prison development was more easily

managed by pro-prison forces, aided by the CDC’s persuasive

prospectuses promising jobs and other amenities. In largely rural

areas with few employers, opposition to the prisons did not gal-

vanize so readily. In Avenal, Corcoran, Coalinga, and Del Norte,

for example, the major opposition came from those materially, or

romantically, dependent on the traditional economy. 16 At the

same time, with few or no alternatives available to raise income

(such as rent) generated by real property, smallholders in the

towns and most workers, then and now, have clung to the gen-

THE PRISON FIX 105

erally unsubstantiated belief that the benefits of a prison out-

weigh the negative effects.
The concentration of new prisons in the Central Valley, and

along the state’s southern and southeastern perimeter from Rock

Mountain (southern San Diego County) to Blythe Valley (River-

side County), is the result of the confluence of political and eco-

nomic forces embedded in, and built on, the historical power of

agriculture and r.esource extraction in the state. Although agri-

cultural and resource extraction activities account for only about

3
percent of total state product, these sectors, running at about

$30 billion annually, have commanded great power in Sacra-

mento, not least because they dominate the districts and counties

where they are located, controlling many local legislators and

county and town governments, in part through making substan-

tial campaign contributions (Walters 1992; Don Mitchell 1996;

Pisani 1984).
In the midst of the LA prison debacle, the CDC Siting Office

determined that rural communities would be the most easily

managed sites. 17 The 640 to l ,920 acres sought for each site would

not come laden with costly political opposition in small towns.

Those that were eventually successful in having prisons sited in

their vicinity had well-organized delegations and very few ob-

jections to or demands on the CDC’s proposals. They also had

large landholders willing to sell nearby surplus acres that the

towns could incorporate in order to reap the imagined harvest of

state subventions, sales tax, and other incomes. We have already

seen that roo,ooo acres per year of irrigated agricultural land had

been coming out of production starting in 1978; eighteen of the

twenty-four new prisons sited between 1982 and 1998 were (or

106 THE PRISON FIX

are being) built on formerly irrigated agricultural lands, and all

but four of the twenty-four at the time of their siting lay outside

the swathes of suburbanization moving into the Central and In-

land Valleys. 18

It seems contradictory that large, powerful landholding capi-

talists, accustomed to activating the state’s capacity in enormous

profit-enhancement projects, such as water development, would

relinquish acres to the state. What was in it for them? First, they

sell land-often the worst-that would otherwise be idle and

more often at an inflated price (CCPOA n.d. [1996]; BRC 1990).

Second, the state improves the land, and those improvements,

coupled with the promise of employment, in the short run in-

crease nearby land values. These two goals were summarized by

a former head staffer of the JLCPCO concerning a dispute be-

tween the CDC and a site where the owners had surreptitiously

extended the state-owned infrastructural improvements-at

state cost-onto an adjacent parcel they intended to develop into

a shopping mall: “They have all this land, and they are trying to

bring up the values so they can develop it. That’s how they hope

to save their town.” 19

Surplus land connects to surplus labor; as in the past, rural

capital has successfully externalized to the state costs associated

with changes in production. Prison development has had the in-

tended, although rarely realized, effect of providing jobs, and

therefore supplementing household incomes for workers, who

presumably would be less likely to organize for jobs, higher

wages, or more radical goods, such as land reform, that can be

gained only at capital’s expense (Woods 1998). Rather, the actual

and almost dispossessed (Jacqueline Jones 1992) have in this in-

stance, as in so many others, been deflected to petitioning the

THE PRISON FIX 107

state for benefits within the narrowing scope of prison develop-

ment and related opportunities.

PRODUCING MORE PRISONERS

The state initiated new rounds of criminalization as elected offi-

cials scrambled to sponsor new laws. The rationale for the laws

purported to be reducing violence in communities. The means

was sentence enhancement, or intensified “incapacitation”-to

prevent people from committing crimes by keeping them in cages

for as long as possible. Sentence enhancement adds fixed amounts

of extra time to standard sentences for certain offenses. The leg-

islature relieved the judiciary of the responsibility to determine a

wide range of sentences by writing the specifics into the law. Leg-

islators from across the political spectrum, from Robert Presley

(R-Riverside) and Bill Jones (R-Fresno) on the right to Jim Costa

(D-Fresno) in the center to Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles) on

the left, sponsored sentence-enhancing legislation; almost every-

body sponsored some law, collectively creating a plethora of new

crimes for the state’s fifty-eight district attorneys to prosecute.

The legislature had commissioned a State Task Force on

Youth Gang Violence in 1984, whose findings, reported back to

the legislature in 1986, resulted in the Street Terrorism Enforce-

ment and Prevention (STEP) Act of 1988, as subsequently

amended. With that law, California established a mandate di-

recting all local law enforcement agencies to identify street gang

members and enroll them in a statewide database. The law en-

hances sentences imposed on those whom enforcement has iden-

tified as street gang members. 20 Upon future encounters with law

enforcement, listed persons face additional charges based on

their alleged status as gang members. Thus, while a non-gang

108 THE PRISON FIX

member arrested for a particular offense would be charged only

with that offense, a gang member would be charged both with

the offense and with being a gang member who had committed

the offense. U pan conviction, the sentence for the original offense

would be “enhanced” by from one to five years of extra time.

The decriminalization of controlled substance possession in

the 1970s had caused the number of people in prison on drug-

related charges to plummet (CDC 1992,Historical Trends).

Drug

recriminalization, coupled with mandatory sentences for drugs

that had not been decriminalized and for new drugs such as

crack cocaine, pushed controlled substance commitments back

up throughout the r 98os. Whereas in r 977, drug offenses had ac-

counted for only some ro percent of new admissions to the CDC,

by 1990, they accounted for 34.2 percent (Rudman and

Berthelsen r 99 r; CDC r 992, Historical Trends), al though all drug

use peaked in 1978 and fell thereafter (Tonry 1995).

In addition to new laws designed to control drugs and gangs,

the state launched a high-profile “three strikes” campaign. Al-

though, as in most other jurisdictions in the United States, Cali-

fornia had had sentence enhancement for repeat convictions for

many years, the legislature passed the nation’s second “three

strikes” law in March 1994, and an initiative on the following

November ballot solidified the statute into an expression of “the

people’s” will (Reynolds et al. 1996).21 More broadly written than

any law of its type in the United States (John Clark et al. 1996),

the California version includes nonviolent prior convictions

among eligible “strikes,” sets no age, temporal, or jurisdictional

limitations on priors, and allows prosecutors to use their power

to “wobble” charges in order to make current misdemeanors into

felonies and therefore strikable.22

THE PRISON FIX 109

From 1980 onward, crime was objectively and subjectively

different from what it had been prior to the 1977 Uniform De-

terminate Sentencing Act and the subsequent authorization,

funding, and siting of new prisons. Politicians of all races and

ethnicities merged gang membership, drug use, and habitual

criminal activity into a single social scourge, which was then used

to explain everything from unruly youth to inner-city homicides

to the need for more prisons to isolate wrongdoers. The media

amplified the message by giving crime reporting top billing

(Hadjor 1995; Males 1996; Miller 1996; Glassner 2000). Inner-city

residents were, indeed, seeking relief from fearful disorders in

their communities, and they, like their suburban counterparts,

tended to accept the primary definitions of what crime was and

what should be done about it-until direct experience of the

law’s unevenness raised questions about the actual intent of the

legislation in the first place (chapter 5).
The legislature and initiative-passing voters handed prosecu-

tors powers once reserved for judges-such as evaluation of mit-

igating factors or eligibility for diversion programs (Tonry 1995;

Miller 1996; Reynolds et al. 1996; for federal precedents, see

Baum 1996). While prosecutors could decide not to exercise the

full extent of their new powers-and some did-such agents of

law enforcement were in a contradictory position. As elected of-

ficials, prosecutors were expected to run “against” crime, and if

they failed to do so, they risked being thrown out of office, and

their bureaucracies risked losing ground in county-level budget

competitions.23 The largest jurisdictions in the Southland, espe-

cially Los Angeles County, eagerly embraced the legislative rul-

ings and began vigorous enforcement campaigns, paid for by

both state and federal funds (Sengupta 1992).
24

Police forces

110 THE PRISON FIX

throughout the state, from tiny rural sheriffs’ offices to the highly

capitalized LAPD, systematically fulfilled their mandates

through enhanced surveillance of neighborhoods and individu-

als suspected of extralegal activity (Sengupta 1992).25

Concentrating power through the use of status determina-

tions (gang/not gang; prior/no prior) and minimum mandatory

sentences, the new laws widened and deepened the capacity of

police, prosecutors, and judges to identify, arrest, charge, and

convict people and remand them to CDC custody. Indeed, the

legislature embarked on a criminal-law production frenzy, pass-

ing more than mo, and sometimes as many as 200, pieces of new

legislation each year since 1988-up from the former output of

20-25 pieces, which included routine amendments of existing

statutes (Greenwood et al. 1994). As a result, by 1994, the back-

log had become so great that it was impossible to clear the leg-

islative calendar by the end of each term, and the criminal law

subcommittees of the judiciary committees in both houses of the

legislature had become regular standing committees dealing ex-

clusively with criminal legislation. The establishment of the new

committees also produced powerful legislative niches for their

chairs in the two houses, because legitimizing the prison expan-

sion and operation program of the state’s fastest-growing de-

partment directly depended on the path taken by criminal legis-

lation (SPWB 1985, 1993a, 1993b, 1993c, 1993d; LAO 1986,

1996).

Working-class African Americans and Latinos-especially

Chicanos-experienced the most intensive criminalization

(Schiraldi and Godfrey 1994), trailed by urban and rural Anglos

of modest means. As we can see in table 4, Anglos dominated the

prisoner population in 1977 and did not lose their plurality until

THE PRISON FIX 111

TABLE 4 CDC PRISONER POPULATION BY RACE/ETHNICITY

Total Anglo African Latino Other

Year Number (%) (%) (%)

(%)

1977 19,623 43.0 34.0 21.0 2.0

1982 34,640 36.0 36.0 26.0 2.5

1988 76,171 30.8 37.1 27.8 4.3

1995 135,133 29.5 31.3 34.1 5.0

2000 162,000 29.4 31.0 34.8 4.8

souRcEs: CDC 1992, table 4; CDC, Characteristics of Population, 1995, 2002.

1988. Meanwhile, absolute numbers grew across the board-

with the total number of those incarcerated approximately dou-

bling during each interval. African American prisoners sur-

passed all other groups in 1988, but by 1995, they had been

overtaken by Latinos; however, Black people have the highest

rate of incarceration of any racial/ethnic grouping in California,

or, for that matter, in the United States (see also Bonczar and

Beck 1997).
The structure of new laws, intersecting with the structure of

the burgeoning relative surplus population, and the state’s con-

centrated use of criminal laws in the Southland, produced a re-

markable racial and ethnic shift in the prison population. Los

Angeles is the primary county of commitment. Most prisoners

are modestly educated men in the prime oflife: 88 percent are be-

tween 19 and 44 years old. Less than 45 percent graduated from

high school or read at the ninth-grade level; one in four is func-

tionally illiterate. And, finally, the percentage of prisoners who

worked six months or longer for the same employer immediately

112 THE PRISON FIX

1980

1995

2000

TABLE 5 CDC COMMITMENTS BY
CONTROLLING OFFENSE

(%)

Violent Property

63.5 24.2

41.8 25.3

25.3 26.0

Drug

7.4

26.4

39.0

souRcEs: CDC 1992; CDC, Characteristics of Population, 1995, 2000.

before being taken into custody has declined, from 54.5 percent

in 1982 to 44 percent in 2000 (CDC, Characteristics of Population,

various years).

At the bottom of the first and subsequent waves of new crim-

inal legislation lurked a key contradiction. On the one hand, the

political rhetoric, produced and reproduced in the media, con-

centrated on the need for laws and prisons to control violence.

“Crime” and “violence” seemed to be identical. However, as

table 5 shows, there was a significant shift in the controlling (or

most serious) offenses for those committed to the CDC, from a

preponderance of violent offenses in 1980 to nonviolent crimes in

1995· More to the point, the controlling offenses for more than

half of l995’s commitments were nonviolent crimes of illness or

of illegal income producing activity: drug use, drug sales, bur-

glary, motor vehicle theft.

The outcome of the first two years of California’s broadly

written “three strikes” law presents a similar picture: in the pe-

riod March 1994-January 1996, 15 percent of controlling of-

fenses were violent crimes, 3 l percent were drug offenses, and 41

THE PRISON FIX 113

percent were crimes against property (N = 15,839) (Christoper

Davis et al. 1996).
The relative surplus population comes into focus in these

numbers. In 1996, 43 percent of third-strike prisoners were

Black, 32.4 percent Latino, and 24.6 percent Anglo. The deliber-

ate intensification of surveillance and arrest in certain areas,

combined with novel crimes of status, drops the weight of these

numbers into particular places. The chair of the State Task Force

on Youth Gang Violence expressed the overlap between pre-

sumptions of violence and the exigencies of everyday reproduc-

tion when he wrote: “We are talking about well-organized,

drug-dealing, dangerously armed and profit-motivated young

hoodlums who are engaged in the vicious crimes of murder, rape,

robbery, extortion and kidnapping as a means of making a living”

(Philibosian 1986: ix; emphasis added). The correspondence be-

tween regions suffering deep economic restructuring, high rates

of unemployment and underemployment among men (cf. S. L.

Myers 1992), and intensive surveillance of youth by the state’s

criminal justice apparatus present the relative surplus population

as the problem for which prison became the state’s solution (see

also Males 1999).

INDUSTRIALIZING PUNISHMENT

As should be clear by now, surplus state capacity is not an ab-

solute thing, but rather a quality that can emerge over time as a

result of the difference between what states can do technically and

what they can do politically. Technical capacity does not disap-

pear even when certain practices lose legitimacy in the eyes of

voters, or capitalists, or other key interests. The idea here is not

that there are idle bureaucrats on “pause” waiting for someone to

114 THE PRISON FIX

hit “play,” but rather, more modestly, that power is not a thing

but rather a relationship based on actually existing activities.

Thus, the renovation of surplus state capacity, the putting into

motion of its potential power, is grounded in contradictory po-

litical economic conditions-conditions that are at once enabling

and constraining. The successful political promotion of fear of

crime as the key problem, and the ideological legitimacy of the

U.S. state as the institution responsible for defense at all levels, al-

lowed California to act (cf. R. W. Gilmore 2002a). The state

could build prisons, but not just anywhere. The state could bor-

row money, but not always openly. The state could round up per-

sons who correspond demographically to those squeezed out of

restructured labor markets, but not at the same rate everywhere.

After twenty years, $s billion in capital outlays, and the accumu-

lation of 161 ,394 prisoners (as of April 2004),26 the CDC has be-

come the state’s largest department, with a budget exceeding 8

percent of the annual general fund-roughly equal to general

fund appropriations for postsecondary education.

The rapid growth of the CDC in the 1980s, aided by the co-

operation of police, city councils, county supervisors, district at-

torneys, and legislators, prompted agency critiques that focused

not on justice but rather on efficiency. Was the CDC fulfilling its

mandate in the most cost-effective manner? The critiques did

not discuss whether crime was, indeed, the central social problem

for state action, nor did they refer to the post-1980 decline in

crime rates-even incorrectly to claim that prisons work. The

Legislative Analyst’s 1986 report “The New Prison Construction

Program at Midstream” proposed streamlining features of the

CDC’s design, bid, and build system in order to gain cost savings

and have new beds available when the projected shortfalls were

THE PRISON FIX 115

expected to occur. The report also criticized the department’s

planning and productivity, whose weaknesses, according to the

analyst, derived in part from variables associated with consult-

ing, siting, and scheduling problems. The report revealed the di-

alectics of politics and economics that shaped the prison expan-

sion program from the start. It characterized the department’s

productivity shortfall as the result of an insufficiently rational-

ized process and recommended that the legislature take charge

of moving the department into greater efficiency through “mile-

stones” (or “speedup”) from concept through occupancy-in ef-

fect, by legislating efficiency (LAO 1986: see esp. 43-45).

The year 1990 saw a major turn in the political atmosphere:

voters approved a prison construction GOB in April but then

roundly defeated another prison GOB the following November.

In 1990 and 1991, reports prompted by the Legislative Analyst’s

1986 report suggested that the CDC could do a better job of fore-

casting the types of prisoners it would have in custody, and there-

fore do a better job budgeting for expanded capacity. As noted

earlier, the CDC has consistently forecast high growth in highest-

security (Level IV) prisoners, and, according to both the Blue

Ribbon Commission on Prison Population Management (1990)

and Rudman and Berthelsen (reporting to the legislature in

1991), it consolidated the tendency to classify those in custody as

higher risks than they might actually be.27 Level IV beds are the

most expensive to build; and Level IV prisoners are the most ex-

pensive to maintain, because oflow guard-prisoner ratios.

In 1991, California experienced what turned out to be a tem-

porary decline in the number of arrests leading to felony convic-

tions, but when James Gomez, who had assumed the CDC di-

rector’s mantle the year before, was asked by a reporter to

116 THE PRISON FIX

comment on the news, he expressed concern that a drop in actual

prisoners from forecast numbers might adversely affect the de-

partment’s construction program (Hurst 1991 b). Growth and ef-

ficiency were the primary considerations in the view of this ca-

reer bureaucrat, who had been hired by the department for his

experience managing large budgets and staffs and for his plan-

ning skills (SPWB 1985). The ideological and material processes

at work made Gomez’s shocking response on some level an ex-

pression of common sense.

Crime topped most polls as public anxiety number one in

1991-perhaps because of the sudden rise in violence following

the U.S. victory in the Persian Gulf (R. W. Gilmore 2002a;

Archer and Gartner 1984)-even though California was deep

into its worst recession since the Great Depression (Walker

1995). Indeed, the recession brought about a temporary decline in

arrests, because urban police forces under emergency budgetary

constraints decided not to pursue drug users and some other cat-

egories of arrestable people (Hurst l991a, l991b). The lull in ar-

rests did not last, however, and law enforcement around the state

reintensified across-the-board surveillance and arrests in 1992,

prompted by the general crackdown following the Los Angeles

uprising in April of that year (Mike Davis l993b, l993c). The

CDC ratcheted up forecasts again, and the legislature approved

$985 million in LRBs, which were issued in 1993 (SPWB l993a,

l993b, l993c, l993d). Consistently, from 1982 to 1996, the CDC

had six to ten new prisons in some stage of planning, design, or

construction, at an average cost per establishment of a quarter-

billion dollars.

The size, cost, and complexity of CDC construction and op-

erations prompted a new round of critical studies, published in

THE PRISON FIX 117

the spring of 1996. The California Department of Finance Per-

formance Review cited the department for lax attention to bud-

get lines and for outsourcing functions, such as medical care, that

could more efficiently, and cost-effectively, be internalized by the

department inside prison walls (CDF 1996). The CDC’s enor-

mous operating budget is also a rather flexible one, and the de-

partment has been able to move costs among line items during a

fiscal year. Thus, funds designated for prisoners’ medical ex-

penses can be used to pay guards’ overtime, when guards escort

prisoners to outside facilities for treatment. In the CDF report,

guards’ overtime constituted a general cause for concern, with

the department following U.S. big-firm industrial practice by re-

quiring lots of overtime rather than expanding the size of

benefit-basis staff (CDF 1996; cf. Harrison 1994; David Gordon

1996; Henwood 1997). The CDF pointed out that straight-time

pay to permanent part-time guards (reserves) would be cheaper

than overtime pay to the average rank-and-file benefit-basis

guard (CDF 1996). The overtime issue focused both on the cost

of overtime and on the CDC’s failure adequately to plan for

staffing needs.28 The issue of planning was, for the CDF, a sign

that the CDC, the state’s agency of control, was itself out of con-

trol, and might require the kind of direct oversight by another

agency-such as the CDF-that it had been exempted from for

the previous fourteen years (CDF 1996; LAO 1986; cf. Gregory

Hooks 1991).
The second critical study published in 1996, commissioned by

the University of California, brings into sharper focus the in-

trastate competition that the CDC’s growth had produced (Ash-

ley and Ramey 1996). The report demonstrates how rival agen-

cies tried, via critique, to situate themselves at the CDC’s trough.

118 THE PRISON FIX

David Ashley and Melvin Ramey, professors of civil and envi-

ronmental engineering from UC Berkeley and UC Davis, re-

spectively, took on the question of capital cost reduction. As with

the earlier studies, the central problem remained crime and its

mitigation through imprisonment, and the solution turned on

cost-effectiveness in the design-bid-build sequence for prison

construction-rather than any reevaluation of, for example, the

relation between crimes (old or new), education, and recidivism

(Ashley and Ramey 1996; cf. Rudman and Berthelsen 1991). The

unspoken power of this study lies in the way the university pre-

sents itself, via its sober, analytical engineering faculty, as an em-

inently efficient institution. Certainly, the university had been

struggling to transform its image from that of a product of Pro-

gressive Era-through-Cold War social welfare activism to that

of a competitive knowledge factory increasingly responsive to

market forces (R. W. Gilmore 1991).29 To that end, in 1995 the

Regents of the University of California formally shed affirmative

action over the objections of faculty, staff, students, and senior

administration at the university’s nine campuses, because, in the

race-neutral language of racism, affirmative action is an ineffi-

cient (nonmarket) mode of resource allocation. The pitched

competition between the CDC and all others dependent on the

general fund seems to have prompted the university to criticize

the CDC in such a way that the university itself would become a

necessary player in the CDC project as a supplier of efficiency ex-

pertise, while freeing up funds for other productive state activi-

ties.

Community colleges approached cooperation more straight-

forwardly than did the elite University of California. The num-

THE PRISON FIX 119

ber of applicants for prison guard jobs was consistently high dur-

ing the 1980s and 1990s, with as many as 200 competing for each

apprentice slot. To tighten the pool, and to enhance the profes-

sional specialization associated with being a guard, the CCPOA,

in conjunction with the CDC, determined that new recruits

after July l, 1995, should be minimally armed with an approved

A.S. degree in correctional science before reporting for basic

training at the department’s Richard McGee Training Facility.

Community colleges throughout the state in the immediate labor

market of new prisons, such as West Hills College in Coalinga,

instituted A.S. degree programs with the explicit aim of both

preparing new applicants for apprentice appointments and edu-

cating current guards, who become eligible for raises and pro-

motions after completing the program (West Hills Community

College District l 996). The colleges hoped that in addition to en-

hancing enrollments, the program would give local residents a

better chance of filling one of the state’s best working-class career

slots. They also provided basic orientation for all new guards and

some training for reserves (permanent part-time officers); for all

enrollments, they charged the state general fund according to av-

erage daily attendance (ADA), as they would do with any other

academic program (West Hills Community College District

1996; LAO 1996).30

The new degree requirement for guards, with a prescribed

curriculum, illustrates one tendency of the state’s burgeoning

punishment system to both specialize and centralize staff and

functions (cf. Chandler 1990). Professional expertise and techni-

cal specialization in the governmental sector is not new, having

evolved over several generations from the Progressives’ move-

120 THE PRISON FIX

ment to make the state at once immune to corruption and more

active in people’s everyday lives (see, for examples, G. E. Gilmore

1996; Linda Gordon 1994; Hooks 1991), and from capital’s need

to spread out the costs of developing productive infrastructure

and controlling labor to as many pockets and balance sheets as

possible (O’Connor 1973; Piven and Cloward 1971; Woods 1998).

We have seen that the legislature established permanent com-

mittees to review the proliferating crime bills. In addition, after

r 993, the legislature slowly moved toward rationalizing and uni-

fying the state’s trial court system, with the goal of making the ju-

risdictions more uniform, efficient, and cost-effective (LAO

1993, 1996).

In the manner of a modern industrial enterprise (Chandler

1990), the CDC further embraced the move toward centraliza-

tion and functional specialization by establishing an internal fi-

nance capital department headed by Tom Dumphy, the under-

writer who helped devised the LRB solution to the politics of

debt issuance. Dumphy’s appointment responded to allegations

of inefficiency by having an expert on staff who could guide the

structure and sale of either LRBs or GOBs and enable the CDC

to issue competitive rather than negotiated bonds. The move

came at a time when the difference between negotiated and

competitive bond costs, while still measurable, had dropped (Si-

monsen and Robbins 1996). However, the key argument for set-

ting up the office was the CDC’s forecasting, which continued to

project severe shortfalls in prison capacity a decade into the

twenty-first century (CDC 1996; LAO 1996). The “midstream”

in the title of the Legislative Analyst’s r 986 report seems to have

been a moving metaphor, with the CDC never more than

halfway to completion of its project. 31

THE PRISON FIX 121

PIGS GET FATTENED, BUT HOGS GET SLAUGHTERED

In the summer of 1996, rival power blocs staged a showdown in

Sacramento. On one side were Governor Pete Wilson, James

Gomez, director of the California Department of Corrections

(CDC), and Don Novey, president of the California Correctional

Peace Officers’ Association (CCPOA), who sought to issue $r.6

billion dollars in lease-revenue bonds to build six new prisons.

The other bloc, led by the powerful Democratic State Senators

Bill Lockyer (Hayward) and Dan Boatwright (Contra Costa),

had rejected the CDC’s request, approved by the governor and

promoted by the CCPOA.
On the heels of the deeply critical performance reviews by the

CDF and the University of California, the Los Angeles Times

published an expose about the extraordinary number of prison-

ers shot dead by guards in Corcoran, one of the state’s two new

supermax facilities. Such sudden, intense, and unfavorable

scrutiny puzzled the CDC director. For most of the prior fifteen

years, the CDC had been California’s fastest-growing depart-

ment, with an operating budget that had grown to nearly roper-

cent of the state’s general fund. The CDC prison construction

project was, according to a number of analysts, the largest in the

world. Strategists envisioned packaging the design, engineering,

and contracting successes that emerged from the experience of

building nearly two dozen new small-city-sized complexes, and

selling the Golden State prison plan to the rest of the United

States and abroad.
Director Gomez asked his political boss, Senator Boatwright,

then JLCPCO chair, what the department could possibly be

doing wrong suddenly to attract so much negative attention-

after so many years as the state’s darling agency. According to an

122 THE PRISON FIX

eyewitness, the senator replied in his dry, Arkansas-bred drawl,

“Aw Jim! Don’t you know? Pigs get fattened, but hogs get

slaughtered!” (R. Bernard Orozco, interview, 1996).

But was it yet a fully grown hog? Surpluses that accumulated

in California, combined with the state’s need to legitimate itself

in the face of profound fiscally expressed voter disapproval, en-

abled the CDC to expand into the state government’s largest de-

partment. As in the rest of the United States, crime became

firmly established as a permanent problem, for which the solu-

tion is the continued proliferation oflaws, courts, judges, bailiffs,

law enforcement personnel, technologies of surveillance, heli-

copters, and other means of domestic warfare, including, of

course, prisons. And yet, as Dan Boatwright pointed out to the

dispirited James Gomez, something that got as big as the CDC

would sooner or later come up against a limit to growth. Why?

At least theoretically, because the variably assessed returns on in-

vestment-in legitimacy, in safety, in securing the Central Val-

ley voters or local economies, or big-rancher contributions-

would dwindle to a margin no longer worth the costs.

The combatants who lined up on opposing sides in Sacra-

mento represented several perspectives on the future of the CDC

hog. Some thought it should reproduce smaller versions of itself

at lower levels around the state. Others thought it should be sold

while the market for hogs was good. And still others thought it

should just grow as big as it might. How to decide? Those who

favored putting the GOB on the ballot wanted the voters to tell

them what to do. The opponents of that plan insisted that the

voters had spoken again and again and unequivocally empow-

ered the state to determine the correct path.

Bill Lockyer and Dan Boatwright were determined to test the

THE PRISON FIX 123

CDC’s (and their own) legitimacy by putting the first prison

GOB in six years on the November 1996 ballot. Don Novey and

his union, the CCPOA, aligned with Governor Pete Wilson,

were afraid that if the voters said no, the prison expansion pro-

gram would be hamstrung, because few legislators would be

brave enough to pass an LRB immediately after a negative ref-

erendum on prison debt. Wilson decided not to fight Lockyer

and Boatwright, Gomez started to look for a new job, and the

CCPOA, one of the state’s largest political donors, circulated a

4
oo-page report on the most efficient way to build and staff new

facilities, endorsed by testimonials from CCPOA-funded vic-

tims’ associations, the National Rifle Association, and other such

d h
. 32

experts aroun t e nation.
Lockyer formed a bipartisan, bicameral Prison Reform Con-

ference Committee to figure out how Sacramento could free it-

self from across-the-board primary responsibility for punish-

ment (PRCC 1996). In the scenario that Lockyer proposed,

“reform” meant both rationalizing and extending the system fur-

ther, filling in the gaps between the homes and streets where pris-

oners come from, and the state cages where they serve time, with

an assortment of community and county-based surveillance, cus-

tody, punishment, and treatment structures and programs

(PRCC 1996). The vertical integration envisioned in the reform

plan returned the responsibility for dealing with certain types of

convictions, such as drugs, routinely committed as felons to the

CDC, back to local law enforcement, promising that Sacramento

would foot the bill, at least at the outset.33 The CDC’s average

daily cost of keeping a prisoner in the system has hovered around

$s
9
; Lockyer intended to give that amount to local and county ju-

risdictions that come up with plans for dealing with people who

124 THE PRISON FIX

might be supervised outside CDC facilities. There was an incen-

tive; successful jurisdictions would not need to spend the full $s9

per prisoner retained. Thus, if a prisoner were sentenced to a

program of drug testing and day reporting, at a daily cost of$12

for staff, equipment, and facilities, the jurisdiction could keep the

balance and use it for whatever law enforcement needs it might

have (PRCC 1996).34

While the Lockyer plan seemed to promise an end to the end-

less expansion of prison cells, it still depended on forecasts of

ever-growing numbers of criminals eligible for the lockup. The

plan also called for construction of two more state facilities (E. G.

Hill 1996, in PRCC 1996). The plan also recapitulated, at the

state level, the ways and means that federal programs, from wel-

fare to crime control, are being pushed down the political scale

with near-term funds attached. In the case of crime, legal, fiscal,

and programmatic linkages form an unbroken criminalization

armature across every conceivable landscape of the future. In

other words, surplus and crisis reemerged, at this conjuncture, in

the form of too many prisoners on the one hand-products of the

earlier surpluses-and on the other, a changing sense of the

CDC’s ongoing legitimation to expand, rather than simply re-

fine, technologies of incarceration.

For Dan Boatwright, who “termed out” of the Senate at the

end of 1996, and other fiscal conservatives in the legislature, pri-

vatization was the proper route to take. In April 1996, the Sen-

ate held hearings on SB 2156, a bill to establish a “Correctional

Facilities Privatization Commission” to sell bonds to build pri-

vate prisons, and to lease private space for prisoners (SB 2156,

April 16, 1996). Those in attendance to support privatization in-

cluded representatives from the United States’ largest prison op-

THE PRISON FIX 125

erators in the private sector: Wackenhut and Corrections Cor-

poration of America, both of which hired former state employ-

ees to lobby Sacramento (Morain 1994c). When the bill got to the

Senate floor later in the spring, it failed to pass, because, accord-

ing to one observer, the “Republicans did not line up” -perhaps

because the CCPOA had registered its unalterable opposition to

privatization.35 The CCPOA feared, rightly, that if the private

sector were brought in, the new guards would be low-wage,

nonunion workers, as is the case throughout the private security

industry (Greene 2001; cf. Christie 1993).
The guards published their own plan, titled Meeting the Chal-

lenge of Affordable Prisons: A Plan to Reduce the Cost of Building

and Operating California Prisons to Ensure Incarceration of Violent

and Habitual Offenders without Bankrupting Taxpayers (CCPOA

n.d. [1996]). The report’s long title managed to condense, onto a

bright red cover, all the key words in mainstream prison debate.

The CCPOA’s plan was to build “megaprisons”
36

that would

each hold 20,000 people-up from the 2,500-6,000. The

megaprisons would be built where there were already prisons-

in places such as Delano and Corcoran-creating intensive dis-

tricts (of which there are already several, although none so big as

those proposed). Prisoners would do much of the building, thus

saving labor costs. And, finally, the state would continue to fund

prisons using LRBs, in the name of fiscal efficiency (CCPOA n.d.

[1996]).

CONCLUSION

California began to come apart during the world recession of

1
9
73-75. After a false boom in the late 1970s, fueled by federal

outlays that created jobs in both the military and aerospace in-

126 THE PRISON FIX

dustries and at the community level, California entered a new

phase of political and economic restructuring in the early 1980s,

during which time the bifurcation between rich and poor deep-

ened and widened. While profits rose, capital’s need for new in-

fusions of investment dollars was increasingly met out of re-

tained earnings. Deep reductions in well-waged urban jobs that

had employed modestly educated men of color-especially

African Americans and Chicanos-overlapped with changes in

rural industrial processes and a long drought. These forces pro-

duced surpluses of capital, labor, and land, which the state, suf-

fering a prolonged period of delegitimation, manifested in the

taxpayers’ revolts, could not put back to work under its declin-

ing military Keynesian aegis (cf. Hall and Schwarz 1988). How-

ever, by renovating and making “critical already-existing activi-

ties” (Gramsci 1971: 330-31), power blocs in Sacramento and

elsewhere throughout California did recombine these sur-

pluses-and mixed them with the state’s aggressive capacity to

act-by embarking on the biggest prison construction program

in the history of the world.

What has happened to each component, each surplus in this

story? Have their crises been resolved? Finance capitalists

achieved what they were after by issuing $s billion in bonds for
new prison construction, with more issues in the wings; while

they did not make any more money than if they had raised the

funds by precisely the same means to build schools or parks or

anything else, state capacity to issue debt was circumscribed by

defensible categories as (and through which) the role of govern-

ment changed. Landowners concentrated in the agricultural

counties have divested themselves of surplus acreage and

brought in the state as local employer and local government sub-

THE PRISON FIX 127

sidizer. Labor remained divided, by race, region, and income-

while “taxpayers,” who themselves are mostly working people,

used polling booth power inconsistently-sometimes but not al-

ways against “stranded communities” (Jacqueline Jones 1992) of

under- and unemployed people of color and white people who

have the highest risk of spending time in prison. Voter vagaries

suggest that even politician- and media-fueled fear embodies

contradictions, especially as prison and felony expansion touch

more and more households that once might have believed them-

selves immune. Did the new power blocs achieve total, unques-

tioned legitimacy? 37 The answer is embedded in the kinds of

practices this operationalization of state capacity have produced.

The JLCPCO was disbanded in November 2003. Yet there is no

end in sight for the elaborate, expensive, and constantly multi-

plied apparatuses of coercion and control developed in harmony

with, and sometimes by the makers of, the weapons of destruc-

tion produced for hot and cold warfare throughout the twenti-

6 G
,. )38

eth century (cf. Bartov 199 ; uenn 1994 ·

Becoming “Copwise”: Policing, Culture, and the
Collateral Consequences of Street-Level
Criminalization

Forrest Stuart

Over the last four decades, the United States has witnessed a historic expan-
sion of its criminal justice system. This article examines how street-level crimi-
nalization transforms the cultural contexts of poor urban communities.
Drawing on five years of fieldwork in Los Angeles’ Skid Row–the site of one of
the most aggressive zero-tolerance policing campaigns to date–the study finds
that residents develop and deploy a particular cultural frame–“cop wisdom”–
by which they render seemingly-random police activity more legible, predict-
able, and manipulable. Armed with this interpretive schema, “copwise” resi-
dents engage in new forms of self-presentation in public, movement through
the daily round, and informal social control in order to deflect police scrutiny
and forestall street stops. While these techniques allow residents to reduce
unwanted police contact, this often comes at the expense of individual and
collective well-being by precluding social interaction, exacerbating stigma,
and contributing to animosity in public space.

Over the last four decades, the American criminal justice system
has undergone a dramatic expansion, which has drawn increasing
attention from sociolegal scholars (i.e., Kohler-Hausmann 2013;
Natapoff 2012). Analyses customarily proceed from a now-
ceremonial retelling of incarceration statistics: 2.2 million people cur-
rently sit in jails and prisons while roughly 5 million people are
under some form of correctional supervision (Glaze and Kaeble
2014). Yet while these numbers are staggering, they “both underesti-
mate the reach of the criminal justice system and, in some sense, mis-
represent the modal criminal justice encounter” (Kohler-Hausmann
2013: 352). Indeed, incarceration and community supervision are
but the tip of a larger iceberg. Below the surface, and often eluding
official record keeping, are millions of street-level police stops, infrac-
tion citations, and low-level arrests. The best estimates suggest that
roughly 40 million people have face-to-face contact with police per

The author wishes to thank Stefan Timmermans, Alexandra Murphy, David Snow,
Elijah Anderson, the editors of Law and Society Review, and the journal’s anonymous
reviewers for insightful feedback and commentary on various versions of this article.

Please direct all correspondence to Forrest Stuart, 1126 E. 59th Street, Chicago, IL
60637; e-mail: forreststuart@uchicago.edu

279

year (Eith and Durose 2011). Excluding routine traffic stops, 5.5 mil-
lion people are involuntarily detained by police every year, the
majority of whom are released without charge (Brayne 2014). Dis-
proportionately directed toward poor communities of color, recent
criminal justice expansion subjects the country’s most disadvantaged
residents to a consequential form of street-level criminalization in
which mundane public behaviors become subject to intense police
suspicion, interrogation, and intervention.

This article develops a systematic framework for more
adequately analyzing the lived consequences of street-level criminal-
ization. Specifically, it demonstrates that the constant threat of police
contact operates as a powerful “cultural agent” that significantly
transforms the cultural contexts and social relations of poor com-
munities of color (Garland 1990). This study extends several areas
of sociolegal research by bridging scholarship on the collateral con-
sequences of criminal justice contact with cultural analysis. Research-
ers are devoting increasing attention to the diffuse and deleterious
effects of criminalization on the social health and stability of margi-
nalized communities. Cultural analysis provides key conceptual tools
for understanding how and why the criminal justice system gener-
ates patterned systems of understanding and action among criminal-
ized populations even when criminal justice actors are not actively
present. The following pages illustrate that in communities where
the threat of unwanted police contact and enforcement looms con-
stant, residents develop and refine a particular cultural frame–what
I term “cop wisdom.” Cop wisdom allows these individuals to render
seemingly-random police activity more legible, predictable, and
manipulable. Armed with this interpretive schema, “copwise” resi-
dents engage in creative and circumspect tactics for evading, deflect-
ing, and subverting criminal justice interventions.

In the tradition of legal consciousness scholarship, this article thus
“de-centers” the law by shifting emphasis from formal legal institutions
to the informal processes by which the law “invokes commonplace sche-
mas of everyday life” (DeLand 2013; Ewick and Silbey 1998: 17; Saguy
and Stuart 2008). In doing so, the article reveals a pervasive, though
unexamined mechanism by which heightened law enforcement
(re)produces inequality: While cop wisdom may enable residents to
reduce the likelihood of police contact, they often deploy this frame in a
manner that constricts vital social interactions, contributes to animosity
in public space, and undermines individual and community well-being.

Collateral Consequences of Criminalization

Collateral consequences, or “invisible punishments,” refer to
the negative effects of criminal justice involvement that typically

280 Cultural Consequences of Street-Level Criminalization

manifest outside of the traditional sentencing framework (Hagan
and Dinovitzer 1999; Travis 2002). Rather than being imposed
by the decision of a sentencing court, these effects occur by
default through associated social processes. To date research on
collateral consequences has focused primarily on the manner in
which felony convictions “mark” former prisoners long after the
conclusion of their incarceration. Such consequences include
exclusion from public or government-assisted housing,
employment-related barriers, ineligibility from public benefits,
voting restrictions, and deportation (Stuart et al. 2015).

Research has successfully leveraged demographic data and
large-scale surveys to uncover the myriad effects of incarceration
on individuals and communities. However, far less is known
about the collateral consequences of escalating street-level crimi-
nalization, such as increased police surveillance, stop-and-frisks,
infraction citations, and low level arrests. Unlike incarceration,
the daily, street-level manifestations of criminalization seldom
show up in official statistics, which makes analyzing their spill-
over effects relatively more difficult. Moreover, the sociology of
policing has focused primarily on the experiences and perspec-
tives of officers (Bittner 1967; Reiss 1972). While this scholarship
has produced rich accounts of how officers’ subjective under-
standings shape interactions with the public (Van Maanen 1978;
Stuart 2014; Stuart 2016; Stuart and Herbert Forthcoming), citi-
zens’ understandings and experiences during these exchanges
require more investigation (see Stuart 2015).

Over the past five years, a small handful of ethnographic and
self-report studies have redirected attention to the perspective of
policing’s targets, particularly the urban poor. These accounts
uncover a number of serious, though potentially contradictory
effects regarding street-level criminalization. One of the most preva-
lent consequences is “system avoidance,” defined as the tendency of
individuals to avoid vital social institutions (Brayne 2014). Alice
Goffman (2014) finds that individuals with outstanding warrants
and parole and probation violations intentionally avoid institutions
and private spaces, such as hospitals and places of employment, for
fear of being discovered and apprehended by authorities. Drawing
on nationally-representative panel surveys, Sarah Brayne (2014)
confirms that compared to those with no criminal justice contact,
individuals who had contact with the criminal justice system had 31
percent higher odds of not obtaining medical care when they
needed it. Importantly, those who had merely been stopped by
police avoided medical institutions at the same rate as those who had
been convicted. Other researchers focus on various interpersonal
consequences of street-level criminalization. As Victor Rios (2011)
documents, some individuals develop a dangerous and self-

Stuart 281

defeating form of hypermasculinity by engaging in physical and sex-
ual domination of their peers. Others commit additional crimes and
break rules in an attempt to reclaim dignity and intimidate those
who wish to criminalize them. Still others attempt to overcompen-
sate in their appearance and behaviors in order to communicate to
authority figures that they are not criminal.

Existing studies of street-level criminalization thus catalogue a
range of responses taken up by those subject to elevated levels of
law enforcement. However, as researchers continue to seek out
additional populations and locations for further case study, it is
imperative that we first reconcile these discrete and, at times,
contradictory outcomes within a more generalizable theoretical
framework. Fortunately, the findings to date provide a useful
starting point. Despite the diversity of individual reactions to
criminalization, there is a unifying thread running throughout:
namely, the central role of perception. As Brayne (2014) alludes,
perceptions of current or future criminalization may be as conse-
quential in shaping individuals’ behavior as the criminalizing
practices themselves. Indeed, all of the above responses to crimi-
nalization–whether it is avoiding hospitals (Goffman 2014) or act-
ing lawful (Rios 2011)–are born out of individuals’ subjective
perceptions and understandings of criminal justice actors’ ten-
dencies and motivations, as well as their anticipations of how
these authorities will most likely “read” and act toward particular
situations. As the link between criminalization (a structural condi-
tion) and individuals’ responses (human action), these indigenous
understandings and patterned behaviors fall squarely within the
realm of culture (Bourdieu 1977; Swidler 1986; Small, Harding,
and Lamont 2010). Cultural analysis, then, provides the most
appropriate conceptual tools for analyzing the concrete mecha-
nisms by which criminalization engenders shared systems of per-
ception among its targets.

The Cultural Context of Criminalized Neighborhoods

In recent years, the study of culture has moved back into the
center of social scientific study. Contemporary research no longer
conceives of culture as monolithic values, and rarely discusses it as
intergenerational, pathological, or independent of structural condi-
tions (see Hannerz 1969; Swidler 1986). Adopting a “cognitive
view” (DiMaggio 1997), these scholars instead conceptualize cul-
ture as a constellation of evaluative schema, scripts, and repertoires
that people use to make sense of their social context. Culture influ-
ences action “not by providing the ultimate values toward which
action is oriented, but by shaping a repertoire or ‘tool kit’ of

282 Cultural Consequences of Street-Level Criminalization

habits, skills, and styles from which people construct ‘strategies of
action’” (Swidler 1986: 273). This article focuses on one particular
element of this tool kit, namely, “frames.” Formulated most notably
in Erving Goffman’s (1974) Frame Analysis, frames refer to the
interpretive lenses through which we observe the social world and
make sense of experience. Frames encode our evaluations and
expectations about events, behaviors, and consequences. In doing
so, they provide guides for ongoing social action.

Research into the sources and consequences of cultural
frames has moved in two related, yet distinguishable directions.
On one hand, social movement scholars and media sociologists
use the concept of frames to explain the development and adop-
tion of public opinion (see Benford and Snow 2000; Gamson
1992). This research generally asks how various constituencies
(i.e. the media, journalists, politicians, social movement organiza-
tions, and voters) construct, contest, and mobilize around particu-
lar meanings of public issues and events. Whether the media
frames nuclear power, for example, as “progress” or a “devil’s
bargain” shapes (though certainty does not over-determine) how
members of the public make sense of accidents at nuclear power
plants (Gamson and Modigliani 1989). On the other hand, schol-
ars interested in more interactional and micro-level processes
leverage the concept of frames to explain how and why individu-
als “read” and act in response to more immediately encountered
phenomena (Small, Harding, and Lamont 2010). These research-
ers focus on the subjective meanings that individuals construct
regarding, for instance, the micromovements of others (Lee
2009) or the built environment of their neighborhood (Small
2004). This article pursues this second line of inquiry, as it is
more concerned with the impact of aggressive policing on resi-
dents’ micro-level, in situ readings than their engagement with
broader public opinions about policing.

By investigating how residents develop and deploy frames at
the interactional level, this article builds on and advances a num-
ber of influential studies of urban poverty. Important for the pro-
ceeding analysis, much poverty research examines the cultural
frames that emerge in poor neighborhoods amid inadequate
police protection and the resulting threat of criminal victimization
(for reviews see Wacquant 1998; Rios 2011). For example, writing
on inner-city neighborhoods in the mid-twentieth century,
Kenneth Clark (1965: 86) notes that “the lowering of police vigi-
lance and efficiency” led to the “unstated and sometimes stated
acceptance of crime and violence as normal.” Historical accounts
indicate a similar condition in LA’s Skid Row. Until the 1990s,
city leaders publicly instructed the LAPD to patrol the neighbor-
hood with a deliberately “light touch,” so as not to displace its

Stuart 283

poor residents into surrounding, more well-to-do neighborhoods
(Goetz 1992; Haas and Heskin 1981). The Los Angeles Times cap-
tures the results of this formal policy in a 1989 story, aptly titled
“Well That’s Just Skid Row.” According to the column, Skid Row
residents had become so “inured to street violence” that “the bru-
tal slayings of two people within two blocks of each other the
night before drew far less attention than the taping of an episode
of the television show, ‘Beauty and the Beast’” (Citron 1989: B3).
Inadequate policing and the normalization of crime thus contrib-
utes to a “wholesale restructuring of the social, temporal, and
spatial organization of everyday life” in which “simply maneuver-
ing one’s way through the streets is a major dilemma. . .that can-
not but affect all aspects of neighborhood life” (Wacquant 1998:
30).

Elijah Anderson’s (1990) concept of “street wisdom” is argu-
ably the most systematic examination of the specific cultural
frames that can emerge as a result of normalized crime.
Anderson (1990) demonstrates that without adequate police pro-
tection, poor residents are forced to take safety into their own
hands, and in doing so, they often develop a sophisticated form
of street wisdom, an interpretive framework that “allows one to
‘see through’ public situations, to anticipate what is about to hap-
pen based on cues and signals from those one encounters” (1990:
5). Equipped with this orientation, “streetwise” residents avoid
victimization by conducting what we might think of as a “folk
criminology,” in which they re-interpret their world through the
eyes of hypothetical criminals. This cultural frame significantly
impacts three important spheres of community life, providing a
powerful guide for: (1) residents’ self-presentation in public, (2)
residents’ “daily round,” and (3) residents’ capacity and willing-
ness to exert informal social control.

As residents become adept at their folk criminology, their
self-presentation in public is dominated by attempts to display
“safety signals” (Anderson 1990). These are behavioral cues, ges-
tures, and movements intended to ward off danger and reduce
unwanted interactions. As Sally Engle Merry (1981) describes,
one of the most effective safety signals is to maintain a deter-
mined, businesslike manner:

[A]n appearance of self-confidence and strength, and a stud-
ied indifference to the safety of pockets or purses where
money could be concealed send off signals that a person is a
poor choice of a victim. . . . Any indications of fear, timidity,
or clutching of purse or pocket communicate the opposite:
fear and something to hide. (Merry 1981: 175)

284 Cultural Consequences of Street-Level Criminalization

Streetwise residents thus understand that their self-presentation
in public has to, above almost all else, communicate that they are
a poor target for victimization.

The cultural influence of police neglect and routinized victim-
ization is similarly found in research on the daily round of the
urban poor–that is, the day-to-day routines by which residents
satisfy their basic needs (Logan and Molotch 1987). In order to
remain safe, residents constantly consult their street wisdom to
re-interpret and act toward their immediate physical and social
environment. In his study of a housing project inundated with
gangs during the 1990s, for example, Venkatesh (1997) writes
that “the manner by which [residents] can move about in [the
neighborhood] and surrounding spaces–both where they can visit
and how they get there–is effectively altered once they are forced
to acknowledge and incorporate street gang inscriptions” (104).
By consulting their folk criminology and anticipating the behav-
iors of those who might do them harm, streetwise residents thus
learn to identify and avoid “hot spaces” (Gotham and Brumley
2002), “no man’s lands” (Suttles 1968), “no-go areas” (Klinenberg
2002), and other places associated with potential victimization.

Problematically, as residents internalize and naturalize this
cultural frame, they tend to withdraw from public sociality, which
can carry detrimental consequences. Merry (1981: 194) reports
that the most cautious residents elect to “stay at home at night,
and often prefer not to venture outside alone even in the day-
time.” In doing so, however, they are less able to meet new
acquaintances, interact with peers, and build the social capital
that is consistently shown to help mitigate the negative effects of
poverty, unemployment, and homelessness (see; Desmond 2012;
Morrill et al. 2005). Revealing the direst consequences of self-
sequester, Klinenberg (2002) finds that disaster-related deaths are
far more prevalent in neighborhoods where residents are fearful
to enter into public, as they are less likely to come into contact
with those who might otherwise provide aid.

Closely related to the erosion of public sociality, residents’
preoccupation with criminal victimization is purported to exacer-
bate “social disorganization,” defined as “the inability of a com-
munity structure to realize the common values of its residents
and maintain effective social controls” (Sampson and Groves
1989: 777). In Jane Jacobs’ (1993 [1961]) now-classic formulation,
residents become unable to serve as capable guardians, or “eyes
on the street.” In the absence of adequate social control, these
neighborhoods become susceptible to even more crime, igniting a
dangerous feedback loop. It is important to note that this rela-
tionship between a lack of informal social control and elevated
crime has been a driving rationale behind the turn to zero-

Stuart 285

tolerance models of law enforcement inspired by the broken win-
dows theory. Proponents of this theory argue that increased
police visibility and aggressiveness will reduce residents’ previous
fear of crime, and in turn embolden residents to become more
active eyes on the street (Wilson and Kelling 1982; Hinkle and
Weisburd 2008).

In short, throughout the urban poverty literature we can dis-
cern a central (though not always explicit) concern with the cul-
tural frames that develop amid inadequate police protection and
the resulting threat of victimization. In recent years, however,
policing has intensified to historic levels in many of America’s
most impoverished neighborhoods. While the crime-reduction
capacities of zero-tolerance policing remain in serious question
(see Harcourt 2001; Hinkle and Weisburd 2008), one thing is
certain: Residents are increasingly subject to aggressive and
repeated police detainments, interrogations, citations, and arrests
for otherwise mundane behaviors. For the urban poor, these
interactions often carry the possibility of eviction, homelessness,
unemployment, and loss of social services and benefits. These
communities are, in a word, “doubly burdened” by the simulta-
neous threats of both victimization and criminalization. They are
overpoliced, yet often remain underprotected.

Against this backdrop, this article asks: How does the omni-
present threat of criminal justice contact influence the cultural
frames of poor urban residents? After a brief description of the
setting and methodological approach, the remainder of the article
analyzes the cultural collateral consequences of street-level crimi-
nalization. The analysis devotes particular attention to the man-
ner in which aggressive law enforcement, and the cop wisdom it
engenders, influences residents’ self-presentation, daily round,
and informal social control. The article concludes by considering
the implications of criminalization on poor urban communities,
offering theoretical implications for legal consciousness scholar-
ship and social disorganization research, and presenting evidence
regarding the proliferation of cop wisdom in other communities.

Setting and Methods

The following analysis draws on ethnographic data from Los
Angeles’ Skid Row district–an impoverished, predominantly black
neighborhood that is home to one of the most intensive zero-
tolerance policing campaigns to date. The fifty block area, located
on the eastern flank of the downtown LA’s financial district, is
home to approximately 12,000–15,000 residents. Two-thirds of
the total population resides in the large collection of single room

286 Cultural Consequences of Street-Level Criminalization

occupancy (SRO) hotels and small apartments built in the early
and mid-twentieth century. Roughly seventy two percent of SRO
residents are black, and have a median annual income of just
over $4,500. Almost ninety percent of SRO residents are unem-
ployed, while forty-five percent report a mental illness or disabil-
ity (Los Angeles Housing Department 2005). Widely considered
the “social service hub” of southern California, Skid Row is char-
acterized by an unrivaled density of nonprofit service organiza-
tions, boasting over 40 percent of all city shelter beds and over
25 percent of all county shelter beds (DeVerteuil 2006). With
one-third of the population classified as homeless, the neighbor-
hood has long held the title of “homeless capital of America.”

Skid Row and the surrounding four miles of downtown fall
under the jurisdiction of the Los Angeles Police Department’s
(LAPD) Central Division. In 2006, under the direction of LAPD
Chief William Bratton, Central Division launched an aggressive
zero-tolerance policing strategy in Skid Row, called the Safer
Cities Initiative (SCI). Deploying an additional 80 police officers
to Skid Row’s 0.85 mile area, SCI immediately made the neigh-
borhood home to arguably the largest concentration of standing
police forces in the nation (Blasi and Stuart 2008, Blasi 2007).
In the first year alone, Central Division officers made over
9,000 arrests and issued 12,000 citations. Adhering to the bro-
ken windows theory of policing (Wilson and Kelling 1982)–
which calls on officers to crack down on low-level infractions
and misdemeanors–these arrests and citations were largely for
minor offenses like sitting on the sidewalk, loitering, littering,
and jaywalking.

Data on the impacts of this policing strategy were collected
over the course of five years of ethnographic fieldwork, begin-
ning in early 2007. Throughout that time, I spent between 10
and 30 hours per week in the neighborhood. I concentrated my
time in Skid Row’s public spaces, private residences, and neigh-
borhood institutions. I shadowed and informally interviewed a
range of residents and peer groups, as well as patrol officers and
LAPD supervisors. The bulk of this article draws from data col-
lected while observing the daily activities of two loose groups of
residents. The first group consisted of residents who regularly
congregate and socialize in and around Skid Row’s two “pocket
parks,” often to play chess, talk current events, or exercise.
Beyond the time spent interacting in public, I shadowed several
of these residents throughout their daily round, into their SRO
units, and throughout their court hearings. The second group
consisted of roughly 14 street vendors who set up small sidewalk
shops along Skid Row’s main thoroughfares. Like many impover-
ished urban areas, Skid Row is characterized by an active

Stuart 287

informal economy (Duneier 1999; Gowan 2010; Venkatesh 2009),
which rests at the heart of inhabitants’ myriad strategies to make
ends meet. Skid Row’s vendors sold a variety of products and
services, from clothing and canned food to haircuts and cash
loans.

These diverse resident groups provide ideal “cases” for
examining the impacts of aggressive street-level criminalization
on the community context more generally (Rios 2015). Rather
than focus on individuals involved in serious criminal activity,
who were likely to have experienced frequent police contact
and punishment even before the arrival of zero-tolerance polic-
ing (see Goffman 2014), this article instead directs attention to
the mundane behaviors and people that are newly or increas-
ingly criminalized as a result of aggressive law enforcement. This
allows the analysis to more precisely isolate the distinct effects of
policing while revealing more generalizable social relations and
processes.

Ethnographic methods–defined as a form of social research
“based on the up-close, on-the-ground observation of people and
institutions in real time and space”–is uniquely suited “to detect
how and why agents on the scene act, think and feel the way
they do” (Wacquant 2003: 5). My fieldwork was specifically
intended to uncover residents’ lived experiences as they came
into contact with the police and cycled through the criminal jus-
tice system. I observed approximately 1,500 police-citizen interac-
tions, which allowed me to systematically analyze how street-level
criminalization impacts residents’ commonsense understandings
of their world, and how they act on this local knowledge. Given
the heavy police saturation and aggressive enforcement in the
area, I was able to take detailed field notes on the periods leading
up to, during, and long after these exchanges. Observations were
recorded in the stepwise fashion advanced by Snow and
Anderson (1987), which consists of making mental and jotted
notes in the field, and then expanding jottings in detailed and
extensive field narratives following each day’s observations.1

Adhering to an abductive approach (Tavory and Timmermans
2014), I subjected these fieldnotes to multiple rounds of coding,
in dialogue with relevant literature. Research questions and foci

1 I recorded many of my conversations with Skid Row residents, with their permis-
sion, on a digital recorder that I carried throughout my fieldwork. This helped to ensure
the accuracy of their statements. Other conversations were documented accordance with
ethnographic convention: I utilized the jottings and notes that I wrote “in real time” during
interactions to recreate dialogue and statements as I wrote up formal fieldnotes immediately
after the conclusion of the day’s fieldwork. This also helped to ensure accuracy.

288 Cultural Consequences of Street-Level Criminalization

of inquiry were honed through theoretical sampling, as promi-
nent themes and salient patterns emerged from the data.

The Omnipresent Threat of Police Contact

For Skid Row residents, the threat of police contact looms
constant. According to the most comprehensive survey to date,
residents report being stopped, questioned, and frisked by offi-
cers and released without charge an average of 5.3 times per year
(Los Angeles Community Action Network 2010). Residents report
that during almost three-quarters of these stops, they were hand-
cuffed, searched, and had their names run through a warrant
database. However, these numbers likely underestimate the prev-
alence of police interactions. One of the residents I came to
know, a middle-aged black woman named Diane, described street
stops as so regular that they had become, in her words, “almost
like bathing.” Officers routinely stand at busy intersections, stop-
ping, interrogating, and ticketing entire groups of pedestrians
that are unable to traverse the intersection rapidly enough. This
occasionally includes those who require canes, walkers, and
wheelchairs. I myself was stopped and/or questioned fourteen
times in the first year of fieldwork.2

The SCI policy mandates that officers engage in such contin-
uous street stops. In conversations and interviews, Central Divi-
sion leadership articulated that at least one purpose for detaining
and interrogating individuals in this fashion is to enable officers
to search for narcotics or evidence of other criminal behavior. In
the words of a senior officer:

You won’t believe the stuff [narcotics] we pull off people in
the course of a simple ticket for jaywalking. It’s important
that we make touches [interrogations] whenever we get a
chance, because the drugs are the root of the problems down
here. That’s what’s at the heart of the violence and the crime.
You never know when you’re gonna pull something off of
somebody. I tell you it never ceases to surprise me.

Assuming that any individual may be involved in more serious
crimes, officers routinely subject a host of mundane and
seemingly-innocuous behaviors to intense scrutiny.

2 During my second year of fieldwork, I began introducing myself to many of the
area’s patrol and command officers. I also began conducting fieldwork alongside police offi-
cers. This reduced, though certainly did not eliminate, the rate at which I was questioned
while traveling through the neighborhood.

Stuart 289

The markedly lowered threshold for street stops is exempli-
fied in the manner in which even a resident’s outward physical
disability can constitute grounds for officer suspicion and further
investigation. A 2010 LAPD document, for example, justifies offi-
cers’ repeated street stops of residents who rely on wheelchairs
and walkers:

Some street drug dealers. . .use the community around them
to mask their behavior such as using a wheelchair or walker
to conceal their supply of narcotics, while also looking dis-
abled. This also serves as a deterrent to law enforcement as a
disabled suspect requires additional legal safeguards and
resources in the event of an arrest.3

This extreme police vigilance is not lost on Skid Row resi-
dents, for whom repeated stop-and-frisks generate spiraling legal
entanglements. With each successive police interaction, residents
face an increased likelihood and length of incarceration. Consider
the experiences of a black resident, named Tex, who split his
nights between SRO rooms and the street. One day, in 2009, Tex
was walking with several bags of belongings. He stopped to buy a
single cigarette (or “loosie”) from another pedestrian. Tex set
down his bags beside him in order to fish out his loose change
from his pocket. Before he could do so, however, two officers on
bicycles appeared seemingly out of nowhere. They detained,
handcuffed, and searched him against a nearby wall. They ran
his name through the warrant and parole databases. After finding
no immediate grounds for arrest, the officers issued him a cita-
tion for LAMC 41.18(a)–a municipal ordinance that prohibits
pedestrians from obstructing the sidewalk. According to the offi-
cers, his belongings, which he had set down only moments ear-
lier, were impeding the flow of pedestrian traffic. With his sole
income coming from a monthly General Relief (GR) check of
$221, Tex resigned that he would not be able to pay the nearly
$200 fine. After sleeping on the streets for eight months, the fine
increased to over $500 and a warrant was issued for his arrest.
Tex only became aware of this when he was rustled from his tent
at 6:15 am. He had overslept the legal “camping” hours desig-
nated by LAMC 41.18(d)–a prohibition against sitting, lying, or
sleeping on the sidewalk. The officers arrested him on account of
his current offense, outstanding warrant, and unpaid fines. After
spending three days in jail, the judge issued Tex a twelve-month
suspended sentence and an additional $195 fine. He warned Tex

3 Complaint to Enjoin, Abate, and Prevent Public Nuisance Activity, pages 8–9.

290 Cultural Consequences of Street-Level Criminalization

that any future citations or arrests would result in a far harsher
sentence.

Even short jail stints like Tex’s carry dire consequences.
Arrest and incarceration rendered at least five residents I came
to know unable to pay their rent on time, which led to their
prompt eviction. As they sat behind bars, their landlords
removed and dumped all of their belongings onto the sidewalk
in front of their buildings. They were also burdened with the
stamp of “abandonment” on their rental histories, which made
securing affordable and adequate housing even more difficult.

Becoming “Copwise”

Skid Row residents quickly recognize that refraining from
illegal activity is insufficient to eliminate unwanted, unwarranted,
and sometimes violent police contact and its residual consequen-
ces. In response, some residents engage in additional, proactive
strategies to more effectively avoid and avert officer scrutiny.
These residents recognize that, far from behaving randomly, offi-
cers adhere to what police scholars describe as an “ideal economy
of intervention” (see Bittner 1967). While officers certainly satu-
rate the neighborhood at an overwhelming level, residents recog-
nize that officers’ time, resources, and attention are nonetheless
finite; officers cannot possibly intervene in every instance in
which it might be possible or “necessary.” This forces officers to
privilege certain individuals and behaviors as the most appropri-
ate targets of their immediate scrutiny and intervention.

Residents convey a striking awareness of officers’ dilemma. One
afternoon, I stood in one of Skid Row’s small parks with a middle-
aged black man named Dante. The two of us watched through the
park’s iron gates as two patrol officers stopped, questioned, and
eventually arrested a young black man on the adjacent sidewalk.
Dante snickered at the sight. Seconds later, Dante articulated a com-
mon understanding of patrol practices by drawing a striking analogy
between the police and a predatory animal stalking its prey:

Living down here is like living way back in Africa, you feel me? You
got a lion out there in that tall grass just waiting to jump out on
your ass. If you don’t wanna be lunch then you gotta be ready. It’s
simple though. The lion, he’s lazy, so he’s looking for that easy kill.
He’s looking for the weakest in the herd. Remember, you don’t
gotta outrun that lion. Shit, nobody can do that. All you really gotta
do is outrun the slowest nigga on the safari. It’s the same with these
motherfucking po-po. It’s all about figuring out their psychology
and making sure yours is better. They can’t jack up everybody.

Stuart 291

For residents like Dante, successfully avoiding unwanted
police contact thus hinges on residents’ ability to accomplish two
tasks. First, residents must adequately decipher the general ten-
dencies, considerations, and “psychology,” in Dante’s formulation,
that motivate officers’ actions. In other words, they must deci-
pher what counts as a privileged police target. Whereas residents
in dangerous neighborhoods employ a folk criminology to antici-
pate victimization, residents in criminalized neighborhoods are
forced to engage in what we can think of as a “folk ethnography
of policing.” To conduct this lay analysis, residents compile “data”
that they collect during their own run-ins with police, as well as
during those instances that they witness or hear about
secondhand.

Skid Row’s public spaces and peer groups provide a key
forum that allows residents to disseminate and collectively inter-
pret their data on police actions. As they stand in small circles dis-
cussing politics, sports, and past exploits, residents devote
considerable time to comparing (and contesting) rival analyses
regarding why they were able to escape police contact while
others may have failed to do so. On one occasion, I stood with
Tex and a small group of similarly-aged black men as the conver-
sation turned to Tex’s citation and eventual arrest. As he retold
the story and relayed the continual hardship it was causing him,
another man in the group, named Big Ron, began piecing the
scene together. In a somewhat paternalistic tone, he offered Tex
an explanation for his initial police stop:

Big Ron: Let me ask you this. What do you think those pigs
were looking for when they rolled up on your ass?

Tex: [sighing in defeat] They were looking to give me a ticket
for blocking the road. It’s bullshit ‘cause I was only stopping
to buy a Newport. I was just—

Big Ron: Naw naw, man. I mean what is this pig really looking
for? He don’t give a shit about your bag. That’s just a smoke-
screen. What he’s really looking for is to see if you’re high or
if you’re about to get high.

Tex: But I wasn’t high! And these motherfuckers still fucked
with me.

Big Ron: That’s my point. You wasn’t trying to get high, but
that’s not the way you looked. That’s not the way you looked.
Think about it. . . . You’re talking to this cat you clearly don’t
know. You’re digging in your pocket for some change. Yo,
imagine that you’re one of these pigs. Put all the facts together.
What does it look like to them? It looks like you’re a straight
dopefiend, and it looks like you’re buying some dope. Of

292 Cultural Consequences of Street-Level Criminalization

course they rolled up on you! They wanted to get all up in
your pockets.

Tex: I see what you’re saying. I kind a asked for it.

Big Ron’s folk analysis illustrates how residents collaborate to
make seemingly unpredictable police interactions more legible by
attempting to “see like a cop.” Residents put themselves in offi-
cers’ shoes to re-interpret the surrounding street scene, pedes-
trians, and public behavior so as to anticipate who and what will
become subject to additional police scrutiny. Seeing like a cop
thus relies a double interpretation: in order to anticipate how an
officer will behave, residents must anticipate how officers are
anticipating problematic and suspicious people typically behave.
As Big Ron contends, such problematic actions include striking
up conversations with unknown pedestrians and exchanging
cash.

Importantly, these folk analyses are more than a thought
experiment. This re-interpretive project gives rise to the second
requirement for avoiding unwanted police contact: After resi-
dents adequately decipher officers’ tendencies, they must attempt
to adjust their own appearances and behaviors in order to carve
symbolic and physical distance between themselves and officers’
privileged targets. In doing so, residents restructure their daily
lives, down to the level of bodily comportment, so as not to be
mistaken for those they perceived to be more “deserving” of
police contact. Three of the most discernible adjustments occur
in the realms of self-presentation, the daily round, and informal
social control.

Self-Presentation in Public: Performing “Innocence Signals”

Paralleling the manner in which residents in dangerous,
under-policed neighborhoods strive to cultivate and refine their
outward presentation of safety signals (Anderson 1990; Merry
1981), residents in hyper-policed neighborhoods develop the
technique of displaying what we can think of as “innocence sig-
nals.” In Skid Row, residents carefully manage their outward
appearances and demeanor in order to reduce their relative suspi-
cion in the eyes of officers, to more conspicuously differentiate
themselves from officers’ privileged targets. Like safety signals,
this distancing project extends all the way down to residents’ cor-
poreal conduct. Residents make conscious efforts to avoid the
subtle actions and unconscious gestures that they anticipate to
attract additional police scrutiny and thus lead to a detainment
and interrogation.

Stuart 293

By far the most prevalent of the innocence signals that Skid
Row residents broadcast are those aimed at communicating
sobriety, or at least some disassociation with crack cocaine use.
One such resident was Mike, a black former auto mechanic. A
proud graduate of Narcotics Anonymous (NA), Mike had spent
10 years of his early adulthood battling a crack addiction. He
frequently shared his “war stories” with me as we stood watch-
ing the nearby street scene. He was quick to point out those he
perceived to be, in his words, “A-1 certified dopefiends,” and
thus likely to be detained by passing officers in a matter of
minutes. One afternoon, he taught me how to recognize
addicts:

When you’re high, you do all kinds of stupid shit you don’t
even realize you’re doing. Like you see dudes out here that
always be scratching their arms. Or like some guys lick their
lips a lot. It’s because your body gets all hyped up.

Mike mimicked uncontrollable fidgeting as he spoke.

When I got really high, I was always rubbing the top of my head.
You know, like smoothing out my waves [stroking his curly hair so
that it lays down flat]. It wasn’t ‘til I kicked my habit that I even
realized I had damn near rubbed myself bald!

Much like a poker player’s “tell,” residents interpreted these kinds of
habitual movements–what many refer to as “dopefiend shit”–as the
precise behavior that betrays addicts’ underlying and “true” identities
and intentions to on-looking officers. Mike continued:

The crazy thing is that they’re teaching them that kind of
stuff in the academy. They got all kinds of videos and shit, so
these guys know you’re high from just looking at you. They
can see that shit from halfway up the damn block! They see
you before you even see them. That’s why you don’t see me
messing with my waves out here no more. Shit, if I got an
itch, you better believe I’m waiting to scratch that shit ‘til I
get off the block.

While Mike was clearly being hyperbolic, his statements illustrate
that residents recognize the need to constantly perform sobriety
and noncriminality for an audience of officers that fixate on even
the most miniscule of gestures, including behaviors as innocent as
self-grooming.

Mike’s friends share his sensitivity to innocence signals. When
the group of men convene and catch up with one another each

294 Cultural Consequences of Street-Level Criminalization

week, they capitalize on their familiarity with and aversion toward
dopefiend shit in order to engage in a peculiar form of entertain-
ment and friendly competition. From their vantage point safely
inside the park, the men make wagers on which nearby pedes-
trians, based on their outward appearance and behaviors, are
most likely to draw the notice of officers and become subject to a
stop-and-frisk. The men frequently cast their spotlight on subtle
behaviors that, while liable to escape an untrained eye, the men
believe are likely to prompt a stop-and-frisk. Once, as we stood
chatting in the park, Steel, a black man in his fifties, pointed to a
young Latina woman, no older than twenty-five, as she paced
back and forth outside of the park. She continuously chewed on
the drawstring of her dark red sweatshirt. She occasionally spoke
to passersby, perhaps soliciting them for money. “Check it,” Steel
said in a soft whisper, as if not to alert her that we were watching.
“See how she keeps tugging at her hair? She’s in bad shape,
man. . . . That right there is a dead giveaway. Watch. Money says
when five-oh [the police] hits that corner, they’re about to jam
her up.” Another man named Tony suddenly appeared at my
shoulder as Steel finished speaking. “Naw dog,” he interrupted,
“if it’s my money, it’s on this one over here: Squeaky Clean.” He
pointed to a mentally-disabled man seated on the curb who
meticulously picked at his clothing, attempting to remove small
pieces of lint or dirt that only he could see. “Yup,” Tony contin-
ued, “Squeaky is going to jail today.” However, the next passing
patrol car singled out neither of these individuals. Instead, the
officers detained and arrested a different man walking past. See-
ing this, Steel and Tony grumbled in lighthearted disappoint-
ment, joking that they had both “lost.”

This game serves as more than simple entertainment to pass
the time with friends. These exchanges also hold an important
instructional quality. As residents debate the fates of those around
them, they catalogue and continually reinforce the “dos” and
“don’ts” for effectively staying off the police radar, for example:
refrain from sudden or nervous movements and curtail excessive
self-grooming. Residents are quick to point out those who are
unable or unwilling to follow these rules, while building an exclu-
sive community with those who are.

Residents’ concerns with outward signs of criminality and
their associated performances of innocence carry important
sociological implications. Throughout the late twentieth century,
urban sociologists documented that the looming threat of vic-
timization and the resulting street wisdom led to elevated levels
of distrust. Suspicion of fellow inhabitants prompted residents
to internalize and reproduce the negative stereotypes of the
urban poor, which stimulated internal differentiation and

Stuart 295

mutual distancing as residents constructed rigid moral dichoto-
mies between themselves and their neighbors–as “respectable”
versus “shady” (Drake and Cayton 1945), “decent” versus
“street” Anderson (1999), or “good” versus “ghetto” (Jones
2010). This process was particularly pronounced in Skid Row
districts. As Howard Bahr (1973: 287) described over four deca-
des ago, “Skid Row is where. . .the resident must fight a contin-
ual battle to maintain enough self-esteem to live. He may stress
little things which set him apart from other men, or continually
remind that his past was different, that he is not a ‘bum’ like
many of those around him.”

With the arrival of zero-tolerance policing and street-level
criminalization, however, residents have been forced to double
down on these negative images. Living under the constant threat
of police contact, they are even more pressed to highlight and
enlarge the symbolic distance separating them from their “less
respectable” neighbors. For if residents fail to demonstrate their
own elevated level of decency, the result is no longer simply the
loss of a preferred sense of self or a failure to secure a favorable
identity. In highly-policed neighborhoods, residents who fail to
publically convey decency run the risk of winding up in hand-
cuffs or jail. Yet, as they hone their cop wisdom, alter their self-
presentation in public, and reduce unwanted police contact, resi-
dents become locked in a zero-sum game: Since officers are not
simply going to cease conducting street interrogations (organiza-
tional mandates demand as much), the most copwise residents
end up redirecting and displacing police attention onto those resi-
dents who are more “deserving” of it. This emerging cultural
frame thus exacerbates the internalization and actualization of
stigma among the urban poor.

The Daily Round: Re-Interpreting Space and Time Through
the Eyes of Officers

Cop wisdom not only encourages residents to monitor and
adjust their public appearances and behaviors; it also spurs them
to renegotiate their daily round. Residents learn that even the
best innocence signals can be rendered moot if deployed in those
contexts that give rise to elevated police scrutiny. As a result, resi-
dents’ folk analyses can turn from questions about problematic
self-presentations to questions about problematic places and
times. By seeing like a cop, residents attempt to discern the par-
ticular meanings that officers attribute to certain streets, buildings,
and public spaces, as well as the significance granted to specific
hours, days, and weeks. This strategy resembles the interpretive

296 Cultural Consequences of Street-Level Criminalization

work documented among housing project residents who must
navigate between the crossfire of feuding gangs (Venkatesh
1997). In Skid Row, residents must also concern themselves with
steering clear of the LAPD’s localized war on drugs.

Tyrell, a soft-spoken black resident, exemplifies how this re-
interpretive process manifests in mundane, yet hardly trivial,
daily action. After several police detainments on the streets adja-
cent to his SRO building (two for blocking the sidewalk and one
for loitering), Tyrell worried that a subsequent police stop might
result in unmanageable fines and the potential of jail time. Facing
this dilemma, Tyrell attempted to pinpoint the factors that he
believed to be most responsible for his stop-and-frisks. As he
relayed one day, the common variable he discovered in each
instance was that officers had observed him standing or walking
too closely to idle groups of pedestrians that had congregated
along the sidewalk. He explained:

The cops around here, they see a bunch of people just stand-
ing so they roll up to see if anybody’s holding [in possession
of narcotics]. And it don’t even matter if you’re a part of it. I
was just passing by a bunch of guys one time and I got
caught up. They cuffed me just like they did them. I kept
saying I was just walking by, but they told me to shut up. It
turns out one of these fools had a pipe and another nigga
had a bottle of whiskey. They hauled my ass to the station like
I was some kind of accomplice. I sat there for four hours,
handcuffed to a bench, before they let me go.

Following the ordeal, Tyrell began deploying a number of
strategies that he hoped would decrease his chances of being
“caught up” near suspicious sidewalk groups again. First and
foremost, he re-routed his daily paths through the neighbor-
hood streets to avoid not just those he knew to be associated
with drug activity, but virtually any area that attracted large
groups. This particularly included the sidewalks near the neigh-
borhood’s major service providers, community organizations,
and public toilets. Displaying even more dedication to avoiding
police contact, Tyrell timed all his walking routes from his front
door to the various bus stops in the area. He discovered that if
he could sync his walking times with the transit schedule, he
could effectively eliminate the need to stand idly on the
sidewalk.

Residents’ efforts to move purposefully through neighbor-
hood spaces and avoid idle chit-chat often made fieldwork diffi-
cult and frustrating. In early field notes, I described Tyrell and
several other men as “fast moving targets” as they breezed past

Stuart 297

me during serendipitous encounters on the street. On two occa-
sions, Tyrell and I concluded our brief greetings some twenty
feet apart, with Tyrell walking backwards, refusing to slow his
brisk pace toward his ultimate destination. On one occasion, I
jogged to catch up with him. To my surprise, we arrived at the
bus stop just as the bus pulled to the curb. We took our seats and
began the twenty-minute ride to a nearby discount grocery store.
Tyrell apologized for his earlier brevity and explained why he
could not afford to miss this particular bus. Since his most recent
detainment, he had begun restricting his movements beyond his
SRO room to the early mornings. Tyrell pointed out of the
nearby window to illustrate his point. On the sidewalk, two offi-
cers stood questioning a middle-aged black woman who struggled
against her handcuffs. Tyrell narrated the scene:

Five-oh still got the skeleton crew out here right now. They
won’t really start hitting the block hard [patrolling intensely]
for a couple hours. They know a lot of people are still passed
out from partying last night. When they wake up, the cops
will roll out. That’s when you get caught up.

Anticipating how officers anticipated their more privileged targets
to behave–including these individuals’ sleep schedules–Tyrell was
typically off the streets and self-sequestered in his room by the
early afternoon. On our return to his SRO building, Tyrell
breezed past a group of neighbors who stood just outside the
front door. Pointing back at the group, Tyrell warned me that
“it’s just a matter of time before five-oh comes by rubber-necking
and wants to see what’s up. I’m not trying to be a part of that.”

Like Tyrell’s re-interpretation of various times of the day, resi-
dents also draw on their cop wisdom to assign new significance to
particular days on the calendar. For Skid Row residents, the first
few days of each month can be simultaneously relieving and
anxiety-filled. Like many other poor neighborhoods, a significant
portion of residents are dependent on monthly social welfare
payments, whether it is a GR, Veteran’s Benefit, Supplemental
Security Income (SSI), Social Security, or disability check. These
payments are typically distributed in the first week of the month,
a period that residents refer to as “Mother’s Day.” During
Mother’s Day, residents are once again able to pay their rent, buy
groceries, wash clothes, settle debts, and afford entertainment.
Yet, Mother’s Day also promises intensified patrols and increased
police stops. During this period, Skid Row’s already-busy streets
teem with additional activity and a higher number of seemingly-
idle bodies as residents trek out to run their various errands.
Compounding this dilemma, Central Division leadership and

298 Cultural Consequences of Street-Level Criminalization

beat officers openly rationalize that with more money in resi-
dents’ hands and circulating through the neighborhood, this
period will yield the highest number of narcotics arrests. As a
result, the division’s brass calls for increased narcotics investiga-
tions and street stops.

Following an unexpected detainment and arrest just after he
received his GR payment, Houston, a razor-thin black resident,
resolved to “put his blinders on” when he ventured into public
around Mother’s Day. This meant refraining from public conver-
sations with strangers and nonstrangers alike:

After that arrest, I don’t talk to nobody out here on these
streets. Especially when the checks come out. You just never
know. I don’t care even if it’s somebody from my building.
You just never know where the conversation is gonna go, or
what kind of dirt somebody else got on their shoes. And you
don’t know if they are gonna put that dirt on you. Who
knows, there might be a undercover sitting around the corner
that’s keeping an eye on him. You might end up catching a
case [get arrested and charged], just off of talking to this
man.

Houston’s modifications to his daily round attest to the lengths
residents go to literally synchronize their lives with the rhythm of
policing.

It is necessary to briefly pause here to highlight the recursive
logic underlying copwise residents’ cognitive schemas. These re-
interpretations of people, space, and time reveals that residents
build their cop wisdom on a foundation provided by street wis-
dom. At the same time, however, cop wisdom also intensifies
street wisdom. In the course of their efforts to anticipate and
avoid police contact, residents become even more heavily
invested in noticing and avoiding potential signs of criminality
and danger given off by others as well as themselves. While a res-
ident like Tyrell designs his daily round primarily to preclude
police contact, he does so in a way that necessarily reduces his
presence in situations that might lead to criminal victimization. In
order to avoid being misrecognized by police as an opportunistic
street criminal, for instance, Tyrell avoids traversing poorly lit
streets at night, where these kinds of offenders might be inclined
to search for victims. One ironic result of cop wisdom, then, is
that it indirectly leads some individuals to more stridently avoid
those who might do them harm. This elevated safety, however,
comes at a price.

Residents’ paranoiac adjustments to their daily round carry
important implications for the perpetuation of urban inequality,

Stuart 299

as cop wisdom leads residents to intentionally constrict their
opportunities for public sociality. These transitory public interac-
tions that criminalized residents strive to circumnavigate are any-
thing but trivial (see Morrill et al. 2005). Particularly for the
urban poor, these moments are vital for developing “disposable
ties” (Desmond 2012)–the short-lived social relations between
new acquaintances that result in reciprocal or semi-reciprocal
resource exchange. In the face of inadequate primary and kin-
based social ties, many of the urban poor rely heavily on dispos-
able ties with virtual strangers in order to make ends meet,
whether it is moving in with one another, pooling income, or
raising children. As Matthew Desmond (2012) finds, bus stops
are one of the quintessential sites for developing disposable ties.
These are locations that gather people with similar needs and
provide idle time for low-stakes small talk with strangers.

Problematically, in Skid Row, as in other poor neighborhoods
(Rios 2011; Goffman 2014), even bus stops have become subject
to heavy police surveillance and enforcement. The cultural frame
that develops in response renders the necessary contexts (public
space) and behaviors (impromptu conversations between strang-
ers) as things to be actively avoided. Scotty, an unemployed black
resident in his thirties, is a case in point. Scotty was excited when
he received a lead on an off-the-books job at a shipping ware-
house on the edge of Skid Row. Yet, when he arrived at the pre-
determined time and found the building locked, he quickly grew
anxious. He continued banging on the door, but only waited
twenty minutes before rapidly heading home. “I can’t be standing
out there like a sitting duck,” he told me the next week. “How’s
that gonna look to these cops? Like I’m casing the joint, that’s
how.” Scotty complained that, due to his fear of being misrecog-
nized by the police, he felt fearful to ask nearby pedestrians for
information or help. Dejected, Scotty returned to the warehouse
once more before finally giving up on the potential job.

Of course, not all residents are so averse to public space.
Indeed, many continue to inhabit public spaces and rub should-
ers with strangers. Yet, as the next section reveals, when they do
so, this contact is frequently characterized by apprehension, fear,
and even hostility toward fellow residents.

Informal Social Control: “Cooling off the Block”

Many residents of criminalized neighborhoods simply do not
have the option of self-sequester and isolation. For some, basic
economic survival requires that they spend much of their waking
hours in highly trafficked public spaces. Skid Row’s street

300 Cultural Consequences of Street-Level Criminalization

vendors constitute one such group. The nature of their economic
enterprise precludes the possibility of simply sidestepping those
people, places, and times that are most likely to draw heightened
police protection. Turning a profit often requires remaining sta-
tionary and visible for multiple hours at a time, in a location that
provides a steady flow of potential customers. While afternoons
and Mother’s Day may bring intensified police patrols, these peri-
ods also promise a substantial increase in profits. Faced with this
dilemma, these residents mobilize their acquired cop wisdom in
an alternative manner, by carving distance from officers’ privi-
leged targets through more active and confrontational means. In
order to forestall police contact, these residents physically banish
and displace particular individuals, behaviors, and scenarios from
the immediate vicinity.

Throughout my fieldwork alongside the vendors, I was struck
by the rigorous public order they maintained along the adjacent
sidewalks. They constantly tidied the sidewalk, quelled argu-
ments, and directed street and sidewalk traffic (see also Duneier
1999). Of all the activities they regulated, however, none received
more concerted reproach than drug-related behavior. Upon
noticing a nearby pedestrian attempting to roll a marijuana blunt,
load a crack pipe, or solicit narcotics from other pedestrians, the
vendors would gang up to reprimand the individual and force-
fully run them off the block. During one illustrative occasion, a
young dealer in crisp clothing and bright red sneakers walked
slowly past the collection of sidewalk shops with two desperate-
looking customers in tow. He stopped to dig into his pockets and
handed a small, clear plastic baggie to one of his customers.
Noticing the transaction, a heavy-set vendor named Keith called
out to him. “Hey man,” he yelled, “I can’t have you pushing that
poison out here. That shit ain’t cool!” At first the dealer did not
budge. However, three other vendors quickly extracted them-
selves from their ongoing sales to take several steps toward the
dealer and order him to vacate the area. Seeing he was outnum-
bered, the dealer put his product back in his pocket and ordered
his now-confused customers to follow him up the street.

Continually interfering into the local drug economy and col-
lectively ensuring public order, the vendors appear to be acting
as quintessential examples of Jacobs’ (1993 [1961]) famed eyes on
the street. At first glance, the vendors’ behavior also provides
modest confirmation of broken windows hypothesis that when
residents observe intensified police patrols, they will feel com-
pelled to more actively engage in informal social control. I made
a concerted effort to question the vendors about neighborhood
conditions prior to the launch of SCI in 2006. To a man, they
verified that their voluntary regulation of surrounding activity

Stuart 301

had not been as forceful prior to the escalating levels of police
contact that they witnessed or experienced firsthand. Yet, field-
work observations also revealed that the men undertook these
new informal controls as a result of a mechanism that was drasti-
cally different than that outlined in the broken windows thesis.
The vendors did not become more active eyes on the street
because the influx of police decreased their fear of crime and crim-
inals. Rather, they began intensely regulating their surroundings
because the influx of police increased both their fear of police and
their heightened probability of police contact.

In fact, prior to the launch of SCI, the vendors treated
nearby drug activity with notable ambivalence. A number of the
vendors described a tacit “understanding” and “truce” between
themselves and local drug dealers. A vendor named Larry, for
example, emphasized that the two economic sets of actors draw
from the same customer base; the presence of drug sales often
increased his own profits. “It was live and let live,” he told me
one evening as we stood next to his inventory, which included
several piles of snack food and sodas. “To be honest, there were
days when I made more money when cats were out here selling
that chronic [marijuana]. When people get high, they get the
munchies. . . . I was right there to hook them up.”

This unspoken truce eroded, however, once the men began to
feel the effects of the LAPD’s new enforcement strategy. One eve-
ning, I asked Keith, Larry, and another vendor, named Jerome, to
detail their experiences. Like Tyrell and Houston, who adjusted
their daily round so as not to be caught up near officer’s “real” tar-
gets, the vendors described their own criminalization as a case of
mistaken identity.

Keith: One day they started rolling through like a bunch of
storm troopers. At first they were just jacking up all the young
bucks that were stupid enough to do their business right out
in the open. But once all those guys were gone. . .they finally
had to do some real police work if they wanted to get the
smart ones that were doing their business on the down-low.
The police started running around the hood trying to be all
Matlock and shit, jacking everybody up, getting in everybody’s
pockets.

Larry: That’s when they started looking over here all hard
after they hit that corner. [Larry took several steps backward,
toward the intersection from which officers typically arrive.
He pretended to examine the rest of us closely as he played
the role of a hypothetical officer watching us from a patrol
car.] They’re just over there sitting in the cut, trying to find a
reason to jump out. They’re over here like, “I think he’s

302 Cultural Consequences of Street-Level Criminalization

about to make a sale.” And what they’re trying to see is if I’m
involved in it. You know, if I’m contributing to the operation.
Like, giving them [dealers] cover, or hiding a package, or
making change for them. . .

Jerome: And that’s when we get caught up! We get hemmed
up even though it’s some other cat that’s the one over here
pushing.

Larry: It’s a real asshole that doesn’t wanna see the difference
between what we’re doing and what they’re doing out here.
That’s why I’m steady telling these young bucks to move on
up the block with that mess.

Through what they understood to be repeated cases of mistaken
identity, the vendors thus concluded that the visible or even sus-
pected presence of narcotics activity was likely to result in police
suspicion and intervention. While the vendors accepted that they
could not eliminate police encounters altogether, they recognized
that they were not powerless. As Larry’s role play captures, they
tried to reduce their odds of police contact by constantly re-
reading the street scene through the eyes of officers and preemp-
tively expelling likely police targets before officers arrived on the
scene and carried out this task through more formal, blunt, and
punitive means. Referring to this pre-policing task as “cooling off
the block,” the men cemented a system of informal social control
that neither Jacobs (1993 [1961]) nor Wilson and Kelling (1982)
had likely imagined. When the eyes on the street are compelled
to see like a cop, the resulting regulation is primarily intended to
diminish the reach, impact, and effectiveness of the police. As the
remainder of this section details, these informal controls also
carry the potential to further undermine community cohesion,
undercut the possibilities of individual and collective mobility,
and internally reinforce territorial stigma.

When the Eyes on the Street See Like a Cop

In many disadvantaged urban neighborhoods, it is tempting
to see any increase in collective, voluntary regulation and public
guardianship as a significant improvement, no matter its underly-
ing motive. Indeed, at the end of the day, the vendors were effec-
tively eliminating (or at least displacing) drug commerce and
related illicit behavior. This raises pragmatic questions for police,
city officials, and scholars concerned with improving conditions
in marginalized communities. Does it matter that informal con-
trols ultimately emerge out of a fear of police? Does it matter that
prohibitions are intended to subvert policing?

Stuart 303

An answer to these questions emerges upon cataloging the
full spectrum of people and activities that ran afoul of the ven-
dors’ informal controls. The underlying motive for voluntary reg-
ulations matters immensely, as it determines who and what the
eyes on the street come to view as “problematic” in the first place.
This process was readily apparent in the vendors’ vigorous
enforcement of the city’s revamped collection of sidewalk ordi-
nances, which prohibit obstructing and sitting on the sidewalk.
Recognizing that the sight of individuals violating these ordinan-
ces was likely to attract the attention of passing officers, the ven-
dors cooled off the block by fiercely disbanding groups of
chatting pedestrians, by preventing homeless people from sitting
down on the curb, and by running anyone off who threatened to
clog the nearby walkways. As one might expect, some residents
were resistant to or incapable of abiding by the men’s commands.
This frequently led the vendors to respond with the same ferocity
with which they approached drug dealers.

When an elderly, homeless, and clearly mentally-disabled
man dared to take a seat on the curb 20 yards from the vendors,
the men quickly sprang into action. Jerome was the first to notice
the man. He walked over to him and demanded that he find a
new place to rest. When the man did not reply, Jerome raised his
voice and repeated his orders. This caught the attention of two of
the other vendors, who launched a chorus of curses at the elderly
man. They derided him as a “lazy bum” and “degenerate
asshole” as they walked to Jerome’s side, bent down, grabbed the
man under his arms, and lifted him several feet into the air. The
man kicked violently as the three vendors carried him to the far
side of the block, where they indifferently deposited him against
the wall of a building. Noticing my surprise at their hostility, one
of the vendors justified the men’s actions. “You know what’s
gonna happen when one-time [the police] comes and give that
dude a ticket,” the vendor defended. “When they’re done,
they’re gonna come over here and fuck with us. They like getting
two birds with one stone. So we had to get him out of our sphere
of influence.”

The vendors’ verbal and physical intimidation of nearby
pedestrians punctuates the fact that their diligent and ostensibly
beneficial prohibitions on drug activity and illicit behaviors were
necessarily accompanied by animosity, and even cruelty, toward
fellow inhabitants engaged in otherwise innocuous, but now-
criminalized acts. Compelled to act as surrogate officers and
address problems before police officers arrived, the vendors’
attempts to cool off the block introduced an additional source of
anxiety, fear, and violence into the daily lives of their neighbors.
For those who ran afoul of the vendors, the interactions with the

304 Cultural Consequences of Street-Level Criminalization

eyes on the street could be just as detrimental as their interac-
tions with police.

Handling Strangers and Enforcing a New Racial Order

Beyond its capacity to promote aggression along Skid Row’s
sidewalks, criminalization distorts the theorized benefits of infor-
mal control in additional ways. According to both Jacobs (1993)
[1961]) and Wilson and Kelling (1982), a prime function of the
eyes on the street is to handle problematic strangers. The eyes on
the street have a primary duty to identify, approach, and poten-
tially expel anyone who appears “out of place” or lacks a legitimate
reason for being present. Through their surveillance and regula-
tion, the eyes on the street thus continually reinforce the neighbor-
hood’s normative geography (Cresswell 1996)–that is, the
prevailing local notion of what is normal, just, and appropriate
within a given location. However, when the eyes on the street are
forced to see like a cop, these individuals are propelled to adopt
and emulate officers’ criteria for distinguishing dangerous outsiders
from those who rightly “belong” in the neighborhood. In Skid
Row, the vendors closely mimicked the elevated suspicion that offi-
cers direct toward whites, which led these eyes on the street to stri-
dently eject and prohibit such individuals from the surrounding
public space. In doing so, the vendors cemented a new racial
order that carried dire consequences for fellow residents.

Consider the vendors’ mounting hostility toward Sam, a white,
formerly-homeless Skid Row resident. After kicking his alcoholism,
securing disability payments, and moving into permanent housing,
Sam began selling bootleg DVDs and cigarettes several yards away
from the men. As Sam became a more regular presence, a handful
of the vendors started expressing their escalating anger. Curious
about the mounting animosity, I asked Carter, a usually-friendly
vendor, why he looked at Sam with such disdain. At first I
assumed that the souring reception was due to increased market
competition. Carter’s response disproved this hypothesis:

It’s the fucking po-po, that’s the issue. They come rolling by
quick and just kinda look over here real fast after they hit
that corner. . . . There’s certain things that we know make
them stop and give us shit. Sam sticks out like a sore thumb!
When you’re talking about Skid Row, white is black, you feel
me? You know these cops are in their car like, “Hmmm, who
is this white guy kicking it with all these brothers? This can’t
be no good. Let’s go check this out.” That’s all it takes
and. . .you’re jacked up.

Stuart 305

Over the next two weeks, whenever Sam arrived, most of the black
vendors picked up their inventories and moved further down the
block. Their hostility toward Sam reached an apex one day, when
the vendors ganged up and collectively purged Sam from off the
block, much the way they drove off drug dealers.

For the black vendors, Sam’s racial identity was a serious prob-
lem, though not necessarily because of any racial animosity they
themselves might have harbored. Rather, their aversion to the man
was rooted in the police contact they anticipated his race to generate.
For the vendors, Sam was not “black enough” to inhabit Skid Row’s
public spaces without arousing police suspicion. Fieldwork alongside
Central Division officers confirmed the vendors’ preoccupations.
Officers openly communicated that, because of gentrification in the
areas surrounding Skid Row, well-to-do whites increasingly descend
from their nearby lofts and condominiums into Skid Row in order
to buy or sell inexpensive narcotics, or to generally “slum it.” Offi-
cers noted that these individuals were relatively “easy to spot,” how-
ever, based on their race, as well as their clothing and demeanor. In
the words of one patrol officer, “They don’t look anything like the
people with a legitimate reason for being down here.” As a result,
officers were quick to detain and interrogate whites who appeared
to be “trespassing” in the neighborhood.

The vendors’ behavior captures how copwise residents consis-
tently act on their shared understanding that in a criminalized,
predominantly black social space, outward associations with, or
even close physical proximity to whites is likely to increase the
probability of unwanted police contact. The vendors’ regulatory
behaviors thus coalesced with formal police activities to uphold
the prevailing notion that Skid Row is reserved for poor, unedu-
cated blacks. It is noteworthy that despite whatever ambivalence
that the vendors may have once held toward dealers, addicts,
whites, chatting neighbors, or homeless people, the arrival of
zero-tolerance police patrols had the effect of activating animosity,
which in turn amplified the economic and social marginalization
experienced by Skid Row inhabitants. For when police officers
aggressively interrogate “trespassing” whites, investigate groups
who congregate along the sidewalk, or deny homeless individuals
the opportunity to rest for a moment on the sidewalk, copwise
residents will be compelled to launch pre-emptive (and some-
times violent) strikes before the police arrive.

Discussion and Conclusion

The meteoric expansion of the criminal justice system and
the spread of zero-tolerance policing subject the daily lives and

306 Cultural Consequences of Street-Level Criminalization

activities of much of America’s urban poor to a historic level of
police surveillance and enforcement. This study unites research
on the collateral consequences of criminal justice and cultural
analysis to offer a more systematic approach for understanding
the diffuse effects of street-level criminalization. Drawing on the
idea of cultural frames, the analysis shows that police hyper-
vigilance leads residents to cultivate cop wisdom in order to
better circumvent intrusive police contact. By re-reading their
physical and social environment through the eyes of passing offi-
cers, residents aim to better distance themselves from those indi-
viduals, behaviors, and scenarios they surmise to attract officer
scrutiny. In Skid Row, the resulting tactics for circumventing the
police carry the alarming potential to hinder social capital, spur a
hostile and racialized public order, and further actualize stigma.
The cultural frames individuals develop throughout interactions
with police officers thus mediate their ongoing routines and rela-
tionships in a manner that “adds up” to a shared cultural context.
It is important to note that we need not view cop wisdom, or any
other cultural frame, as monolithic or deterministic. Rather, indi-
viduals often hold multiple and even competing frames that they
deploy in different contexts and at different times (see Harding
2007).

Conceptually, cop wisdom reconciles poor residents’ discrete
and, at times, contradictory responses to criminalization currently
found in the literature. This study shows that while individuals
may resort to contrasting coping techniques–one person might
alter their self-presentation in public, another might avoid partic-
ular places, and still another might forcibly banish suspicious
looking people–these responses are united by a common inter-
pretive project in which these individuals attempt to anticipate
officers’ perceptions of a given scenario. With each successive
police encounter, individuals gain additional opportunities to
compile and analyze an increasing volume of data about officers’
likely perceptions, tendencies, and behaviors in a given scenario.
The variance in coping techniques is thus a product of both past
experiences and the situational exigencies at hand.

This article advances sociolegal research in several additional
respects. For legal consciousness scholarship, the analysis of cop
wisdom directs attention to an unexamined mechanism by which
the law shapes the subjectivities and actions of citizens. Here I
am referring to the process of “role taking” (Blumer 1986;
Stryker 2003) by which Skid Row residents anticipate and inter-
nalize the perspective of formal legal actors, in this case police
officers. Throughout foundational and contemporary writings,
legal consciousness scholars have intentionally shifted focus away
from the perspectives of attorneys, judges, and other formal legal

Stuart 307

actors to ask how everyday people draw the line between accepta-
ble or unacceptable behaviors (Merry 1990). This move has
allowed researchers to better capture how ordinary citizens
understand and behave regarding the law. The preceding pages
suggest, however, that legal consciousness scholarship can benefit
from “re-injecting” these formal legal actors back into our analy-
ses, albeit in a revised manner.

To date, researchers have explained the variations in how citi-
zens view and respond to potentially problematic behavior, such
as sexual harassment or offensive public speech, by pointing to
demographic factors, including race, class, and gender (Nielsen
2004), or contextual factors, such as workplace or national cul-
ture (Marshall 2003; Saguy 2003). Yet, as the Skid Row case
reveals, citizens often engage in these normative evaluations
based on the evaluations they anticipate that local legal actors will
make. Recall that Skid Row residents form normative judgments
about things like homelessness or drug activity largely through
the eyes of officers. This means that factors like demographics
and context still matter, but they necessarily occupy a different
position in our explanatory models. These factors will remain
associated with citizens’ contrasting schemas primarily because
individuals of varying races, classes, and genders (who live and
work within different contexts) are exposed to very different
legal actors that are operating in accordance with different
imperatives. If everyday people are indeed attempting to “see”
like one formal legal actor or another, future analyses should
make explicit attempts to identify which actor this may be in a
given situation, how citizens concretely take on this role, and how
these thought experiments inform their subsequent actions.

The findings also advance research on informal social control.
Social disorganization theorists tend to operate on the premise
that an increase of informal control is an unambiguous improve-
ment for disadvantaged communities (Bursik and Grasmick
1993; Shaw 1929; Sampson and Groves 1989). This increase is
seen as a rather straightforward sign that residents have grown
more willing to collectively solve neighborhood problems. Yet, as
this article demonstrates, not all increases in informal control are
equally beneficial. In Skid Row, the increase in street-level crimi-
nalization reshapes precisely who and what residents come to
define as a “problem” in the first place. Although the vendors
increased their voluntary regulations, they did so to the ultimate
detriment of community cohesion and vitality. To date, social dis-
organization research has been primarily concerned with the
quantitative levels of informal controls–that is, the extent to which
voluntary regulation increases or decreases as the result of inter-
nal and external stimuli. However, this study indicates that

308 Cultural Consequences of Street-Level Criminalization

informal controls have a critical, though surprisingly neglected
qualitative dimension. Any increases in voluntary regulation mean
little and remain decontextualized if we do not also consider who
and what is the ultimate target of these regulations.

Regarding the generalizability of cop wisdom, recent scholar-
ship and national events provide evidence that this cultural frame
is hardly unique to Skid Row. Indeed, cop wisdom proliferates
among criminalized communities across the US and the globe.
Over the last several years, the American public has become
familiar with the names of an increasing number of young black
men killed at the hands of police–names like Oscar Grant, Eric
Garner, and Michael Brown. In reaction to these deaths, parents
of young black men have sought to instill their children with a
form of cop wisdom intended to reduce the probability of police
contact and violence. One such parenting strategy has come to be
known simply as “the talk” (Amber 2013; Brunson and Weitzer
2011). The talk consists of a set of concrete instructions about
how to behave when police officers may be nearby. Much like the
catalog of dopefiend behaviors compiled and avoided by Skid
Row residents, the talk lists a number of “don’ts” for young black
men as they move through public spaces: Don’t walk through
unknown residential neighborhoods. Don’t carry any dark or
metallic items that can be mistaken for a gun. Don’t leave any
store without a receipt. Don’t put your hoodie up. Don’t run.
The ubiquity of the talk in black households across the nation
alerts us to the fact that an entire segment of the American popu-
lation has been forced to become copwise, with all its advantages
and disadvantages, as a rite of passage into adulthood. However,
in instructing their children how to decrease the risk of misrecog-
nition by officers, parents inevitably socialize their children to
account for, internalize, and act upon the racial and class-based
stereotypes that might color an officer’s perceptions. As they
instruct their children how to avoid acting like the “real” crimi-
nals, parents unwittingly provide an early lesson in lateral deni-
gration and distancing.

The Skid Row data indicate that precisely how residents in
other communities will act on their cop wisdom depends largely
on how they are policed; it will depend on what particular
appearances and behaviors officers deem suspicious, out of place,
or generally worthy of further investigation. This is ultimately an
empirical question, as well as a call for future comparative
research. In Skid Row, officers direct much of their attention
toward narcotics activity, which leads residents to adopt the corre-
sponding innocence signals. In other neighborhoods, officers
may be more concerned with interceding in different matters,
such as gang activity or prostitution. Residents’ innocence signals

Stuart 309

will likely follow suit. For example, if officers perceive whiteness
as a sign of innocence, residents may regard such individuals not
as liabilities, as is the case in Skid Row, but rather as assets. While
we would need to observe responses to policing in, say, the
Bronx, East St. Louis, or Detroit to uncover the specific tactics
residents use to avoid or reduce police scrutiny in those places,
we will nonetheless continue to find that (the threat of) unwanted
police contact intimately shapes residents’ perceptions of and
interactions with their social and physical environment. We will
also find that cop wisdom constricts certain social relationships
and activities while emboldening others.

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dering Culture and Poverty,” 629 Annals of the American Academy of Political and
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Verbal Construction and Avowal of Personal Identities,” 92 American J. of Sociology
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First Century,” 9 Sociology Compass 940–50.
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Chicago Press.
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Groups,” 26 Annual Review of Law and Social Science.
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312 Cultural Consequences of Street-Level Criminalization

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Forrest Stuart is Assistant Professor of Sociology and the College at the
University of Chicago. His book, Down, Out, and Under Arrest, consid-
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tion of gangs and urban violence.

Stuart 313

IMMIGRANT ORGANIZING AND THE NEW
LABOR MOVEMENT IN LOS ANGELES

Ruth Milkman
Department of Sociology, UCLA

tract

This article trac

the transformation of Los Angeles, which was considered a show-
case of anti-unionism a century ago, into a key site of labor movement revitaliza-
tion and a model of successful immigrant organizing. It traces the history of
unionization in L.A. over time, and analyzes data from the 1990s on the charac-
teristics of L.A.’s union members. Although immigrants are still less likely to
be union members than native-born workers, this is because of their sectoral
location, not because they are “unorganizable.” On the contrary, in some respect

foreign-born workers tend to be more receptive to unionization eVorts than thei

native-born counterparts, despite the vulnerability non-citizens and undocumented
immigrants often experience. Here the dynamics of recent immigrant organizing
successes in L.A. are analyzed, highlighting the importance of Latino immigrants’
propensity for militancy, on the one side, and the key role of the new activist
leadership of a number of key unions, on the other. While the recent successes
are impressive in quality, they have not had much impact on union density
in L.A., which remains low. Yet they indicate the potential for a larger-scale
transformation

To the surprise of many observers, Los Angeles emerged in the 1990s
as a key site of labor movement experimentation and as a showcase for
successful immigrant organizing, an embryo of the broader revitaliza-
tion eVort that the new AFL-CIO leadership and its allies are currently
attempting to jump-start. While the long-term prospects for that eVort
remain ambiguous, L.A. labor has won a series of important union
organizing victories in recent years, with over 90,000 new membe

recruited in 1999 alone. (Meyerson 1999) The L.A. County Federation
of Labor has also become a formidable political force, launching mas-
sive voter registration and get-out-the-vote campaigns among newly
enfranchised immigrants that have been pivotal in a wide variety of
local, regional and even statewide electoral contests.

Immigrant workers, mostly from Mexico and Central America, com-
prise the overwhelming bulk of the working class in contemporary south-
ern California, which has more foreign-born residents than any other
part of the nation. Although many of the region’s Latino immigrant
workers are undocumented, and despite the widespread belief that such
workers are extremely diYcult to organize, they have been at the core

Critical Sociology 26,1/2

of the L.A. labor movement’s revival. In a range of low-wage blue col-
lar occupational settings, from janitorial work, to construction, to home
health care, to name only the most prominent examples, Latino immi-
grants have swelled the ranks of unions in L.A. and have demonstrated
a capacity for militancy that is second to none.

This article traces the metamorphosis of L.A.—once a legendary
citadel of the open shop—into what Mike Davis (2000: 145) recently
called “the major R&D center for 21st-century trade unionism.” It ana-
lyzes the relationship between immigration and unionization and exposes
the dynamics that have galvanized foreign-born Latino workers into
such a vital ingredient of L.A.’s model of labor renewal. And it exam-
ines the other crucial ingredient in the mix: the new activist leadership
of key unions at both the local and national levels, and of the L.A.
County Federation of Labor, who have cleared a path out of the wreck-
age of union decline and sclerosis that marked the 1970s and 1980s,
developing key prototypes of innovative organizing in the 1990s.

Historical Background

“There is probably no city in America where such unfriendly senti-
ment obtains against organized labor as in this beautiful city of L

Angeles,” a printing union oYcial commented in 1912. (Stimson 1955:
426) Indeed, for most of the twentieth century, L.A. had a reputation
as a “company town,” where the powers that be were intransigently
anti-union. The classic comparison was to San Francisco, once the state’s
largest metropolis, where unions gained a foothold early on and where
public sympathy for labor was widespread. L.A.’s labor history was quite
diVerent, as economist Ira Cross pointed out in 1935. There, “almost
a century passed [after the city was founded in 1781] before unions
appeared, and at no time have they played an important part in the
industrial or political life of the community.” (Cross 1935: 268)

Indeed, in the early 1900s, the city was a proud bastion of the open
shop whose economic and political elite, led by notorious Los Angeles
Times proprietor Harrison Gray Otis, was unabashedly hostile to union-
ism. Anti-labor animus was not just Otis’ personal idiosyncrasy, but
rather was woven into the very fabric of L.A.’s political economy, as
Carey McWilliams pointed out long ago (1973 [1946]: 276–77):

Otis and his colleagues were quick to realize that the only chance to estab-
lish Los Angeles as an industrial center was to undercut the high wage
structure of San Francisco . . . Having land to burn, the Southland

60 ruth milkman

dangled the bait of “cheap homes” before the eyes of the prospective
homeseekers. “While wages are low,” the argument went, “homes are
cheap.” . . . From 1890 to 1910, wages were from twenty to thirty and in
some categories, even forty percent lower than in San Francisco. It was
precisely this margin that enabled Los Angeles to grow as an industrial
center. Thus the maintenance of a cheap labor pool became an indis-
pensable cog in the curious economics of the region. For the system to
work, however, the labor market had to remain unorganized; otherwise it
would become impossible to exploit the homeseeker element. The syste

required—it absolutely demanded—a non-union open shop setup. It was
this basic requirement, rather than the ferocity of General Otis, that really
created the open shop movement in Los Angeles.

Periodic forays into the city by unionists in northern California who
hoped to organize their southern brethren accomplished little. “Los
Angeles, in spite of its name, is a wicked city and sadly in need of
someone who can point out the bene� ts of trade union organization
and the iniquities of rampant capitalism,” the San Francisco building
trades publication Organized Labor lamented in July 1910. (cited in Kazin
1987: 202) The catastrophic bombing of the Los Angeles Times building
later that year, which killed twenty people, only served to dramatize
labor’s weakness, particularly after two union men unexpectedly con-
fessed to what Otis called “the crime of the century.” (see Stimson 1955:
chapter 21) Two decades later, despite periodic eVorts to revitalize the
local labor movement, the situation was virtually unchanged. As Cross
(1935: 287–88) summarized:

There have been continuing and costly attempts to unionize the workers
in various occupations [in L.A.], but for the most part with no tangible
results. Strikes, usually insigni� cant in extent, have been called only to be
lost because of the overwhelming supply of laborers and the anti-union
attitude of employers, the newspapers, and the community.

Only in the late 1930s and 1940s, when industrial unionism swept
across the nation, did organized labor � nally penetrate the city of angels’
heavily guarded gates. By 1939, L.A. Mayor Fletcher Bowron could state,
“Even the most conservative manufacturers have come to realize that
workers must organize, that bargaining cannot be with individuals, and
that the eVort to maintain the open shop is a lost cause.” (Perry and
Perry 1963: 521) As the city, already California’s largest metropolis, grew
rapidly under the spur of the World War II economic boom, union
density rose steadily. After the war, L.A.’s unionization rate gradually
approached that in the state as a whole. In 1951, 34% of nonagricultural

immigrant organizing in los angeles 61

wage and salary workers in L.A. were union members, compared to
41% statewide; and at the 1955 peak, the � gure was 37% in L.A., just
below the state level of 39%. While organized labor was still far stronger
in San Francisco (51% unionized at the 1955 peak), the north-south
gap was much smaller than in previous decades. (California Department
of Industrial Relations, 1956)

L.A.’s historic reputation as an anti-union town persisted well into
the late twentieth century. But in fact, from the mid-1950s on, its union-
ization rate was similar to that in California as a whole, as Figure 1
shows, and close to the national average. As was the case throughout
the U.S., union density in L.A. gradually fell over the following decades,
and by the time the state stopped collecting unionization data in 1987,
it had dropped to only 19.6%, half the 1955 peak. This was actually
slightly above the state � gure of 19.1% for 1987, however, and the
decline re� ected national as much as local and regional developments.
The collapse of basic industries like auto, steel, and later aerospace,
along with the national employer anti-union oVensive that began in the
late 1970s, fueled the deunionization process in L.A., as elsewhere.

Unionization Patterns in Contemporary L.A.

In the 1990s, despite the revitalization of the local labor movement
described here, the overall level of union density in L.A. continued to
decline, as ongoing membership losses and rapid economic growth in
the nonunion sector more than oVset the gains from new organizing.
As Figure 2 shows, in 1998 only 15.2% of L.A. workers were union
members (in between the national average of 13.9% and the state aver-
age of 16.1%).1 L.A. lagged slightly behind both the state and the nation
in the private sector, where only 9.0% of workers were union members
in 1998 (compared to 9.5% nationally and 9.8% in California), and
more sharply in manufacturing, where only 7.7% of workers were union
members, half the national � gure. However, public sector workers were
more highly unionized in L.A. than in the state or the U.S., with well
over half (54.8%) counted as union members in 1998. (Hirsch and
Macpherson 1999) With nine out of every ten private sector workers
entirely outside the ambit of organized labor, L.A. was once again a
citadel of the open shop—although there was nothing distinctive about
this by the end of the century.

The few unionized enclaves that remained were mostly relics of an
earlier era. Figures 3, 4 and 5 highlight some of the basic characteris-
tics of L.A.’s union members in the 1990s, using a merged data from

62 ruth milkman

the Current Population Survey for 1994–97.2 As Figure 3 shows, union-
ization is distributed extremely unevenly through the city’s economy. For
example, only 10% of L.A.’s workers are employed in education, but
25% of all union members work in that sector. By contrast, 18% of all
workers, but only 11% of union members, are employed in manufac-
turing. This unevenness is an artifact of the highly peculiar U.S. indus-
trial relations system, which since 1935 has been based not on individual
decisions about union aYliation, but on instead the requirement that
entire workplaces be unionized through the arduous and increasingly
employer-dominated winner-take-all electoral process administered by
the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). Thus the pattern of union-
ization shown in Figure 3 re� ects that fact that some industries, at some
point in the past, have been successfully organized, while others never
have (or if they have, were deunionized subsequently). And crucially,
these data tell us nothing about the current preferences of individuals,
much less the preferences of categories of workers, in regard to union
membership. In short, given the structure of the NLRB system, and the
erosion resulting from the past few decades of deunionization, the main
determinant of whether a given individual is a union member today is
where he or she happens to be employed, and whether that workplace
became (and remained) unionized at some previous point in time—
regardless of his or her pro- or anti-union sympathies.

The data on unionization levels among immigrants and native born
workers and among various ethnic groups, shown in Figure 4, must be
interpreted with these caveats in mind. There is no question that immi-
grants are less likely than the native-born to be union members in con-
temporary L.A.: although native-born whites comprise only about half
of all employees in the area, they account for 57% of its union mem-
bers. In contrast, foreign-born Latinos are 16% of all employees in L.A.,
but only 9% of union members; similarly, foreign-born Asians are 11

of all employees, but only 5% of union members. (On the other hand,
L.A.’s African-Americans are over-presented in union ranks: 10% are
union members, although they are only 6% of L.A. employees.)

Figure 5, which shows unionization rates and employment distribu-
tion by nativity and ethnicity separately for the highly unionized pub-
lic sector and the largely nonunion private sector, suggests the underlying
dynamics. The public sector is far more highly unionized than the pri-
vate sector not because public sector workers have a more favorable
attitude toward unions (though they may), but because there is far less
resistance to unionization when the employer is the federal, state or
local government than when it is a private sector corporation. Indeed,

immigrant organizing in los angeles 63

as Figure 5 reveals, regardless of race, ethnicity or immigration status, public
sector workers are far more extensively unionized than their private-
sector counterparts. Indeed, the unionization rate for foreign-born Latinos
employed in the public sector in L.A. is 62%—the same as for native-
born blacks, and only slightly below the 66% rate for native-born whites!
However, only 5% of the area’s foreign-born Latinos work in the pub-
lic sector (compared to 31% of native-born blacks and 20% of native-
born whites), which all by itself goes a long way toward explaining the
relatively low immigrant unionization rate.

That rate is also aVected by the fact that recently arrived immigrants
are less likely to be union members than those who have been in the
U.S. longer. Among L.A.’s foreign-born Latinos, only 7% of those who
arrived in the U.S. after 1980 were unionized in 1994–97, compared
to 16% of those who arrived before 1980. The latter � gure is only
slightly below the overall unionization rate of 19% for this sample.3 This
re� ects the distinctive employment patterns of newcomers, who are far
less likely to obtain jobs in unionized workplaces than their more set-
tled compatriots. Newcomers are virtually excluded from public sector
employment and generally relegated to the bottom of the labor market
where unions are, almost by de� nition, unlikely to exist.

The Myth of Immigrant Unorganizability

If, for historical reasons, immigrant workers are less likely to be union-
ized in contemporary L.A. than their native-born counterparts, what
are the prospects for organizing them today and in the future? The
conventional wisdom, widely accepted until very recently, is that immi-
grants are vulnerable, docile persons who are intensely fearful of any
confrontation with authority; who accept substandard wages and poor
working conditions because their standard of comparison is drawn from
their home countries; and who therefore are extremely unlikely to actively
seek unionization. For the undocumented, the assumption that immi-
grants lack real potential as union recruits is especially widespread. As
Hector Delgado reported in his case study of a successful union organ-
izing drive among undocumented Latino immigrants at an L.A. factory
that took place in the 1980s, “The unorganizability of undocumented
workers because of their legal status has become a ‘pseudofact.’” (Delgado
1993: 10, citing Merton 1959)

Because of their vulnerability to deportation, one might indeed expect
undocumented workers to be fearful about the risks involved in union
organizing, particularly when confrontations with state authority are

64 ruth milkman

likely. Yet Delgado found that this was far less of a problem than is
generally presumed. In the case he studied:

Undocumented workers’ fear of the “migra” did not make them more
diYcult to organize than native workers or immigrant workers with papers
employed in the same industries. Workers reported giving little thought to
their citizenship status and the possibility of an INS raid of the plant. . . .
A forklift driver at Camagua [pseudonym for the company] claimed that
he had never been afraid of the INS, adding, “I’ve never seen them here.
Only in Tijuana.” . . . [Another worker] said that he had a better chance
of ‘getting hit by a car’—and he didn’t worry about either. . . . In response
to the prospect of deportation, Camagua’s workers responded that if
deported they would have simply returned (in some cases, “after a short
vacation”). Julia Real [ pseudonym], a sewer, commented, “They’re not
going to kill you! The worse [sic] thing they [the INS] can do is send me
home, and I’ll come back.” (Delgado 1993, pp. 61, 63)

Recent eVorts to tighten restrictions on immigration and renewed ini-
tiatives to deport the undocumented may have altered the climate in
the years since Delgado did his � eldwork. Yet the � ndings of his pio-
neering study are con� rmed by developments in the 1990s, when Latino
immigrants, many of them undocumented, emerged as the central pro-
tagonists of the new unionism in L.A. and elsewhere. Indeed, among
the dozens of union organizers Kent Wong and I interviewed in the
course of our � eldwork over the past several years, not one endorsed
the once-conventional wisdom that immigrants were more diYcult to
recruit than natives (see the examples in Milkman and Wong 2000b).

On the contrary, despite the large numbers of undocumented immi-
grants among them, there is survey evidence, albeit fragmentary, sug-
gesting that foreign-born workers’—especially Latinos’—attitudes are
actually more favorable toward unions than are those of native-born
workers. (DeFreitas 1993) “It’s not true that immigrants are hard to
organize,” a northern California hotel union organizer told a researcher.
“They are more supportive of unions than native workers.” (Wells 2000)
One reason for this may be that many recent immigrants—especially
those from Central America—have some positive experiences of union-
ism in their home countries. Although there is no systematic evidence
on this point, it is striking that many of the new rank-and-� le immi-
grant union leaders have a history of union activism and/or left-wing
political ties in their native lands. (Acuña 1996: chapter 8 cites several
examples) And although many immigrant workers are from rural back-
grounds, a substantial number arrive in the U.S. far better acquainted
with the idioms of unionism and class politics than their native-born

immigrant organizing in los angeles 65

counterparts. Among the workers involved in the L.A. Justice for Janitors
campaign, for example, organizers reported “a high level of class con-
sciousness,” as well as a willingness to take the risks involved in organ-
izing that was shaped by experiences back home. “There, if you were
for a union, they killed you,” one organizer noted in discussing the role
of Salvadorans in this eVort. “Here, you lose a job for $4.25 an hour.”
(Milkman and Wong 2000b: 24)

The fact that immigrant workers rely so heavily on ethnic social net-
works for such basic survival needs as housing, jobs, and various other
forms of social and � nancial assistance, may also make them easier to
recruit into the labor movement than native-born workers. Southern
California is famous for its highly atomized social arrangements and
weak sense of community, but that reputation is based entirely on the
“Anglo” experience. In contrast, L.A.’s working-class immigrants have
vibrant ethnic networks and communities rooted in extended kinship
ties as well as the shared experience of migration from particular com-
munities in their countries of origin. The intricate web of social con-
nections among immigrants can be a key resource in building labor
solidarity, particularly if unions can identify and recruit key actors in
kin and community networks.

Yet another factor that may enhance the appeal of unionism is the
shared ordeal of immigration itself and the persistently high level of
stigmatization foreign-born workers are forced to endure in their adopted
home. The sense of being under siege in a hostile environment, rather
than generating passivity and fear as the conventional wisdom assumes,
may actually foster solidarity. In this context, if labor unions extend a
helping hand to immigrant workers, oVering economic and political
resources that can be utilized to ameliorate the conditions of daily life,
they may be received far more enthusiastically than by native-born work-
ers who do not feel so entirely excluded from access to other opportu-
nities for improving their economic situation.

For all these reasons, immigrant workers have proven ready recruits
to labor unionism in recent years, and the once-ubiquitous assumption
that they are unorganizable seems to be dying. Indeed, the New York
Times, the nation’s newspaper of record, attributed the success of a 1999
strike at a Washington state meatpacking plant, where 90% of the work-
ers were foreign-born, to “the receptivity that many immigrants feel
toward union activity and their growing con� dence that . . . the poten-
tial bene� ts of pressing for better wages and working conditions out-
weigh any risks.” (Verhovek 1999) Similarly, the Times’ account of the
historic 1999 union victory at the Fieldcrest Cannon textile plant in

66 ruth milkman

Kannapolis, North Carolina—where over the past quarter-century sev-
eral previous eVorts to unionize that plant had failed—presented the
success as due in part to “growing numbers of immigrants in the work
force who tend to be more likely to support unionization.” (Firestone
1999) And many unionists today endorse the view that workplaces with
large concentrations of immigrants—especially Latinos—are among the
most promising organizing targets. An L.A. janitors’ union activist put
it forcefully: “We Latino workers are a bomb waiting to explode!”
(Waldinger et al. 1998: 117)

Immigrant Organizing and the New Labor Movement in L.A.

Latino immigrants are the economic lifeblood of the sprawling metro-
polis that is contemporary L.A. Fully a third of the labor force is
foreign-born (compared to about 10% nationally), and the proportion
is far higher in blue-collar industrial and service jobs. (see Lopez and
Feliciano 2000) The new arrivals who poured into southern California
over the past few decades, mostly from Mexico and Central America,
have been rapidly incorporated into the increasingly deregulated and
deunionized regional economy. Latino immigrants are the core of con-
temporary L.A.’s burgeoning low-wage, nonunion workforce, much like
the native-born migrant “homeseekers” that Carey McWilliams described
for an earlier era. Employers, although often skeptical initially, quickly
became enamoured of the new immigrants’ apparent willingness to
work hard, at long hours, for minimal (sometimes subminimal) pay. In
contrast, L.A.’s organized labor movement, which suVered steep mem-
bership declines in the 1970s and 1980s, initially was hostile toward
the newcomers who were arriving in vast numbers during precisely
those years, fearing that they would undercut hard-won wages and labor
standards.

As the numbers of immigrants grew, however, and as they became
the bulk of the workforce in industry after industry, union leaders slowly
began to change their views. Necessity being the mother of invention,
over the years L.A. became a national laboratory for a series of exper-
iments in immigrant unionization. The International Ladies’ Garment
Workers’ Union (ILGWU) was the � rst to explore this terrain, begin-
ning in the late 1970s, and although its eVorts yielded few lasting results
in terms of union membership, it served as a crucial training ground
for the new generation of local Latino labor leaders who would go on
to lead a rich variety of immigrant organizing eVorts in later years.
(Milkman and Wong 2000b: 3)

immigrant organizing in los angeles 67

The real breakthrough in organizing L.A.’s foreign-born workers on
a signi� cant scale, however, came more than a decade later, with the
1990 strike victory of the Justice for Janitors ( JfJ) campaign. This was
a successful eVort by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU)
to recapture its old base in building services, in this case janitors clean-
ing large oYce buildings. During the late 1970s the SEIU had about
5000 of L.A.’s private sector janitors among its members, but by the
mid-1980s the � gure had fallen to only 1800, even as the number of
janitors in the city had grown. As wages and conditions deteriorated
with deunionization, native-born workers left janitorial work in droves
and were quickly replaced by recently arrived Latino immigrants. These
were the workers the SEIU successfully recruited in the late 1980s, cul-
minating in the 1990 strike. As a result of JfJ’s triumph, by 1990 the
SEIU had more than recouped its janitorial membership in the city,
which now stood at 8000.

This was the largest private sector immigrant organizing victory since
the United Farm Workers’ successes in the 1970s. It has since become
the gold standard for immigrant organizing, not only in L.A. but nation-
ally. (It is even the focus of a feature � lm by British director Ken Loach,
Bread and Roses, which premiered in L.A. to an audience of janitors on
the tenth anniversary of the 1990 strike victory.) It dramatically demon-
strated not only the potential for galvanizing immigrant workers into a
militant, solidaristic force for labor movement revitalization, but also the
critical role of union leadership in that process. The JfJ campaign com-
bined grassroots rank-and-� le mobilization, on the one hand, with care-
ful strategic planning on the part of experienced union leaders with
access to extensive � nancial resources as well as expertise, on the other.
It would not have succeeded without both elements. (Milkman and
Wong 2001)

The L.A. campaign was part of a national JfJ organizing drive spear-
headed by then-SEIU president John Sweeney (who became president
of the AFL-CIO as part of the “New Voice” leadership slate in 1995),
but L.A.’s eVort proved to be the most successful anywhere in the U.S.
The organizers deliberately avoided the traditional NLRB electoral sys-
tem in favor of an innovative approach that combined careful research
into the power structure of the industry, strategic planning, and mili-
tant, media-savvy rank-and-� le mobilization tactics, (see Waldinger et al.
1998, Savage 1998 for details)

The JfJ eVort not only showed that immigrants could organize suc-
cessfully on a large scale, but also, and equally important, that their
initial organizing successes could be sustained. Indeed, despite diYcult

68 ruth milkman

internal con� icts in the local union in the aftermath of the initial break-
through, the L.A. janitors went on over the course of the 1990s to con-
solidate their success, holding the line against the ever-restless building
owners and oYce cleaning companies, winning a series of contract
improvements, and keeping union members active, informed, and involved
in the internal life of the union. (Fisk et al. 2000)

In April 2000 the L.A. janitors launched another spectacularly suc-
cessful strike to improve their wages and to narrow geographical pay
diVerentials. As they had done ten years earlier, the SEIU not only
mobilized rank-and-� le janitors on a huge, highly visible scale, but also
used the occasion to skillfully expose and critique the social inequality
and ethnic polarization that is so deeply embedded in contemporary
L.A. In the context of a period of unprecedented prosperity for the city
as a whole, the union’s demands for improved pay and conditions for
low-wage Latino immigrant workers whose daily labor involved cleaning
up after mostly native-born “Anglo” lawyers and other professionals in
the city’s glitzy oYce towers immediately captured the moral high ground,
and the strike won unprecedented public support. (see Meyerson 2000)

The janitors’ success remains unmatched in its scale and visibility,
but it is part of a larger set of pathbreaking unionization eVorts that
emerged in the 1990s among L.A.’s vast immigrant workforce. Two
years after the janitors’ 1990 breakthrough, a � ve-month strike by thou-
sands of Mexican immigrant drywall hangers (workers who install the
sheetrock panels that make up the interior walls of modern buildings)
halted residential construction throughout southern California. (see
Milkman and Wong 2000a) This yielded a union contract that doubled
drywallers’ wages in the region and brought 2400 previously nonunion
Mexican immigrant workers into the Carpenters’ Union. One impor-
tant element in the campaign was the legal assistance coordinated by
the California Immigrant Workers’ Association (CIWA), an AFL-CIO
sponsored organization founded in 1989 (but abandoned not long after
this strike) that was staVed by a group of talented labor and immigra-
tion activists and attorneys. Although the aftermath of the drywallers’
campaign was far more problematic than in the case of the janitors,
with the Carpenters’ union failing to sustain the market share it had
won at the time of the strike settlement and also leaving the internal
structure of the union untransformed, this example too shows the poten-
tial for organizing success among Latino immigrants when rank-and-� le
militancy and experienced union leadership are coordinated. (Milkman
and Wong 2001)

And there are others. The L.A. local of the Hotel Employees and

immigrant organizing in los angeles 69

Restaurant Employees (HERE) union, although it has yet to achieve an
organizing victory comparable in size to those of the janitors and dry-
wallers, has been highly eVective in smaller-scale recruitment among
immigrants. It is now headed by Maria Elena Durazo, who rose to
power in 1989 after a challenge to an old-line union bureaucracy that,
among other things, had refused to translate the union contract or union
meetings into Spanish. Under her leadership, L.A.’s HERE local has
become a leader in “internal organizing,” that is, activating its existing
membership to both strengthen the union where it is already entrenched
and to organize new workplaces. (see Milkman and Wong 2000b: 11–22)

Even in manufacturing, often seen as a hopeless sector in which to
organize, given its vulnerability to capital mobility, there have been
some successful unionization eVorts among L.A.’s immigrant workers.
The largest involved 1200 Latino wheel workers who launched a wild-
cat strike at the L.A. American Racing Equipment factory in July 1990,
leading to a union victory in a representation election held later that
year, and in 1991 to a union contract. This was a rank-and-� le initi-
ated campaign and the resulting local union, International Association
of Machinists Local 1910 (named for the year the Mexican Revolution
began) remains vibrant and highly independent, and has won signi� cant
contract improvements over the years since the strike. (see Zabin 2000)

All these initiatives notwithstanding, the story here is still one of poten-
tial rather than actual transformation. Even the 90,000 new union mem-
bers (most of them low-wage immigrants) recruited in 1999 are a drop
in the bucket, hardly likely to turn the tide of union decline.4 After all,
L.A. is the nation’s second largest metropolis with a labor force of over
six million, a third of them foreign-born, and in the private sector over
90% of workers remain outside the union fold, as we saw earlier. And
while a few unions, most importantly SEIU and HERE, have devel-
oped tremendous dynamism, the rest remain staid fortresses of labor
bureaucracy and do hardly any organizing at all. Still, the recent exper-
iments that have occurred in L.A. have assumed importance beyond
that suggested by the numbers of workers and unions involved, for at
least two reasons.

The � rst reason involves timing. The janitors, drywallers, and American
Racing successes all antedate—but by only a few years—the 1995 coup
in the AFL-CIO, which brought former SEIU President John Sweeney,
who had overseen the JfJ campaign, to the helm of the federation.
Sweeney and his “New Voice” leadership slate came to power with a
commitment to making organizing central to the labor movement once

70 ruth milkman

again, as the SEIU itself had done under his leadership in the years
immediately preceding. The displays of militancy in L.A. during the
period just before Sweeney’s ascent and his intimate familiarity with the
case of the JfJ campaign there in particular therefore have generated
considerable attention at the highest levels of the U.S. labor movement
(Cleeland 1999). Even the Los Angeles Manufacturing Action Project,
an eVort to develop industry-wide organizing strategies for L.A.’s vast
manufacturing sector, although it was never fully funded and was aban-
doned entirely in 1997, only three years after its oYcial establishment,
continues to be an important reference point in discussions among the
hopeful architects of new labor. (Delgado 2000) While historically L.A.,
with its notorious reputation as a company town, was barely on the
radar screen for the national labor movement, in recent years it has
captured the imagination of the many progressive unionists who ally
themselves with labor’s revitalization eVorts in the Sweeney era.

The second reason the immigrant unionization breakthroughs of the
1990s are of greater signi� cance than their modest scale would other-
wise warrant is that they have so radically transformed L.A.’s political
scene, in which labor is now a formidable presence. The L.A. County
Federation of Labor—headed since 1996 by Miguel Contreras, a for-
mer farmworkers’ organizer widely respected in the Latino community—
has become a key power broker thanks to its repeated mobilization of
newly enfranchised Latino immigrant voters. The County Fed has been
extraordinarily successful in translating its aYliates’ past organizing suc-
cesses into political power, and in a virtuous circle, that political lever-
age in turn has become a resource helping to foster further organizing.

Ironically, California’s passage of Proposition 187 in 1994, which
involved a variety of restrictions on immigrant rights, led to a surge in
naturalization among the eligible foreign-born population, producing
thousands and thousands of new citizens with the right to vote. The
Latino proportion of all California voters doubled over the four years
that followed Prop. 187, reaching 12% in 1998. (Pyle et al. 1998) And
because the proposition had been sponsored by Republican Governor
Pete Wilson, the new voters tended to gravitate toward the Democrats.
These developments, combined with the longstanding political apathy
on the part of L.A.’s native-born citizenry, created an opportunity for
Latinos to become a signi� cant electoral force, and the County Fed has
nearly single-handedly turned that opportunity into a palpable reality.
As veteran L.A. political journalist Harold Meyerson (2000) recently
noted:

immigrant organizing in los angeles 71

Since Contreras assumed its leadership in 1996, the federation has inter-
vened in 17 district races—all hotly contested, at all levels of government—
and has prevailed in 16 of them. . . . [There is] a new order in the political
� rmament of Latino California. The janitors, in tandem with the hotel
workers, have supplanted the United Farm Workers as the political pow-
erhouse and moral beacon of local Latino politics.

In 1996, � ve of the six County Fed-backed Democratic candidates
for the state legislature won their races, helped by $160,000 in union
campaign contributions. (Rodriguez 1998) The following year the County
Fed orchestrated a whole series of political victories: in a head-on con-
frontation with Republican Mayor Richard Riordan, labor candidates
won a majority of seats on the elected city charter reform commission;
the City Council passed a union-backed “living wage” law; and former
SEIU oYcial Gil Cedillo was elected to a state assembly seat. The most
impressive Latino-labor electoral showing of all came in June 1998,
when labor—again led by the L.A. County Fed—mobilized successfully
to defeat Proposition 226, a ballot measure designed to curtail the use
of union dues for political purposes. The measure was defeated by a
narrow 53 to 47 margin, and might well have passed if not for the fact
that 75% of Latinos voted against it, according to exit polls. (Pyle
et al. 1998)

L.A. labor has parlayed its political clout, in turn, into leverage in
ongoing worker organizing eVorts. The April 2000 janitors strike once
again provides the shining example. The SEIU launched the strike with
oYcial endorsements from 48 local elected oYcials, and by the end had
won support from politicians across the board—including members of
both houses of the state legislature, the entire city council (some mem-
bers of which were arrested for civil disobedience in support of the
strike), and even Republican mayor Richard Riordan. The strike became
a litmus test of loyalty to the formidable County Fed. for L.A.’s politi-
cians, and above all for aspiring Latino politicians, for whom “to have
been missing in action, or deemed insuYciently pro-janitors, would have
amounted to political suicide.” (Meyerson 2000)

Labor’s accumulating political in� uence has also been translated into
organizing breakthroughs in other arenas in the past few years. For
example, in a political quid pro quo, Riordan recently appointed Contreras
to the Airport Commission, a useful point of leverage in the ongoing
“Respect at LAX” campaign which has made considerable headway in
its eVorts to win union recognition for baggage handlers and other air-
port service workers. Another example is the City Council’s worker-
retention ordinance, which protects workers’ jobs when a new contractor

72 ruth milkman

takes over work directly under contract to the city, and which was
extended in 1999 to cover recipients of economic development grants
as well. (Meyerson 1999) Thus by the late 1990s organized labor had
not only become “the 800–pound gorilla in local politics,” as the Los
Angeles Times reported (Schuster 1998), but also had managed to create
eVective links between its newfound political power and the continuing
uphill struggle to build its organizing capacity—the most critical task in
labor revitalization.

Conclusion

As the L.A. examples illustrate, immigrant workers, undocumented
or not, are highly receptive to organizing eVorts. The major impedi-
ment is not a lack of interest in unions on their part, but rather, the
still relatively limited eVorts to tap that interest on the part of the labor
movement—itself reinforced by the intensely anti-labor environment
which makes organizing workers of any type extremely diYcult in the
contemporary U.S. But since 1995, the new AFL-CIO leadership has
signaled a strong commitment to recruiting new members and has poured
unprecedented resources into the eVort. Such leadership support from
the top is an absolutely critical ingredient in the innovative unionism
that has emerged in the 1990s. (Voss and Sherman 2001) And the AFL-
CIO’s historic announcement in February 2000 of a new immigrant
worker policy initiative, calling for blanket amnesty for undocumented
immigrants and an end to sanctions against employers who hire them,
is a bold step that should help foster new organizing among immigrants
in particular. (Greenhouse 2000)

Yet what has been achieved so far remains fragile, and the obstacles
to further progress are formidable. The AFL-CIO’s aYliated unions
vary widely in the extent to which they are willing to embrace the
national leadership’s new initiatives, and while it can reward compli-
ance, the Sweeney administration cannot force it on the many aYliates
that remain captives of the old guard. For all the sterling examples of
new immigrant organizing strategies oVered by unions like the SEIU
and HERE, there are at least as many cases of campaigns that failed
due to union ineptitude, a lack of strategic leadership, or unrelenting
employer opposition. (see Milkman and Wong 2001) Moreover, many
unions still are not seriously undertaking new organizing at all. Even
those that are successfully recruiting immigrant workers often fail to
move on to the next step, namely transforming their internal organi-
zational and leadership structure in such a way as to fully incorporate

immigrant organizing in los angeles 73

immigrant workers and their speci� c concerns. This is a critical task if
immigrant unionism is to have any lasting signi� cance—and is often as
diYcult as new organizing itself.

If the labor movement is to survive into the new century, however,
it has little choice but to take on these tasks. To be sure, the odds are
very heavily stacked against unions in confrontations with employers in
this historical period. If JfJ and some of the other examples mentioned
here show that winning is possible, even in such an unlikely venue as
L.A., once a redoubt of vicious anti-unionism, no one can argue that
it is easy. Ironically, however, the surge of low-wage Latino immigra-
tion that was generally presumed to be a threat to organized labor until
quite recently, may be one of the few trump cards that could help New
Labor beat the odds.

Notes

1. Note that the 1998 � gures in this paragraph are taken from a diVerent data series
(part of the U.S. Current Population Survey) and are not strictly comparable to the
1951–87 data cited above. (In 1988, 16.4 percent of L.A. workers were union members,
in the CPS data series—whereas the California state data found a 19.6% unionization
rate for 1987.) Like the 1951–87 data, however, the � gures cited here include only union
members, and not workers covered by union contracts who are non-members. Obviously
these 1998 data do not include the 90,000 new union members recruited by L.A. area
unions in 1999. For details about the 1998 data, see Hirsch and Macpherson 1999.

2. Thanks to Roger Waldinger for providing access to this special merged data set.
Because the local sample sizes for each year in the CPS are very small, the merged
four-year set is especially valuable. Even here however the numbers of observations are
quite small, so these data should be interpreted with caution. In the merged data set,
n = 1194 for the � ve-county L.A. workforce (including L.A., Orange, San Bernardino,
Riverside, and Ventura Counties), and for union members in the � ve counties, n = 232.
For further discussion and analysis of this data set see Waldinger and Der-Martiosian
2000.

3. This � gure is higher than those cited earlier because the sample includes not only
union members but workers who are covered by union contracts under agency shop
and other such arrangements, even though they are not union members. The data cited
above from Hirsch and Macpherson are for union members only, as mentioned in note 1
above.

4. Moreover, 74,000 of the 90,000 new members recruited in 1999 were public sector
home health care workers who became SEIU members after an eleven-year campaign
that mainly involved lobbying and other political eVorts to make unionization legally
feasible. (See Greenhouse 1999 and Cobb 1999)

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76 ruth milkman

immigrant organizing in los angeles 7

C
al

if
or

n
ia

L
os

A
n
ge

le
s

01525304045

Percent Unionized

Y
ea

5102035

19
51

19
53

19
55

19
57

19
59

19
61

19
63

19
65

19
67

19
69

19
71

19
73

19
75

19
77

19
79

19
81

19
83

19
85

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87

F
ig

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98

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78 ruth milkman

60
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)

immigrant organizing in los angeles 79

W
U

M
m

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du

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on

10
%

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th

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38

H
os

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17

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94
–9

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80 ruth milkman

O
th

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ck

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1%

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s
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m
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lo

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it
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B
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it
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%

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immigrant organizing in los angeles 81

W
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80

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v.02
Chapter 2

The lives that matter in US cities

Black Lives Matter. That this even needs pointing out is telling about twenty-first
century America. The grievances have been accumulating over decades, but it took yet
another uprising to put them once again on the public agenda as an appeal to justice,
equality and accountability. In a democratic country like the United States, such an
appeal does not have to take the destructive form as it did – twice – in Ferguson in
2014. The fact that it did showed whose lives did not matter and whose voices did not
count. The fact that it did, however, also showed those lives do matter.

Ferguson uprising began on 10 August 2014, the day after a white police officer,
Darren Wilson, shot several times and killed an unarmed black teenager, Michael
Brown. It lasted about two weeks, and was repressed by police officers equipped with
military-grade weapons, the National Guard referring to the protestors as ‘enemy
forces’, and the declaration of a state of emergency – an extreme measure that was
also taken in April 2015 during the Baltimore uprisings triggered by another black life
lost during police custody.1 Another week of uprising followed in November after a
grand jury decided not to indict Wilson, and protests of a smaller scale took place on
the anniversary of Brown’s killing.

Violence visited upon black lives by white police officers has long been a trigger for
revolt – Cincinnati in 2001, Los Angeles in 1992, Miami in 1980, and others during the
turbulent 1960s.2 It would be a mistake, however, to see these as isolated or random
instances of brutality committed by some bad cops. As Ferguson, and others before
and after, showed, rage builds up over time through systematic – not occasional –
oppression of certain groups and their exclusion from the rights and privileges enjoyed
by others. Racist police officers do exist and do horrible things, but as we will see with
Ferguson, Los Angeles, Cincinnati and Baltimore, urban uprisings cannot be explained
away by a focus on the individual perpetrators of violence. In other words, the sources
of urban rage are structural rather than individual. This may be getting a bit too
abstract, so perhaps it is time we paid a visit to Ferguson, an inner-suburb of the City
of St. Louis, Missouri.

Who loves Ferguson?

If you arrived in Ferguson by South Florissant Road, you would probably find it difficult
to match it to the image that made Ferguson’s name both nationally and
internationally. Ferguson, you would see, has its wine bar, cigar lounge, local brewery
and Italian bakery, all conveniently located along this commercial road – not quite the
image of a run-down city devastated by riots, more of a quaint suburban community.
You might think, as I did, that either they fixed everything up very quickly, or else it
was just a big fuss over nothing, all the while wondering where the black citizens of
Ferguson were.

Walking north on South Florissant, you would start seeing signs of the incidents once
you have passed the building that house both Ferguson’s Police Department and its
Municipal Court. Signs of damage, however, are not many. There are few boarded up
businesses, and one of these is a law firm that specialises in traffic law. Once we have
understood the workings of the police department and the municipal court, we will
see that this was not a random choice.

Across the street from the police department and the municipal court is a curious store
called ‘I Love Ferguson’, black letters and a red heart instead of ‘love’. This is where
you buy you ‘I Love Ferguson’ memorabilia – hats, t-shirts, coffee mugs and signs that
you also see displayed on many of the shop fronts on South Florissant Road. If you are
a foreigner, a push-pin marks your country on the world map hanging above the
guestbook. As the lady keeping the store explains, the store was set up after the
uprisings, and the revenue it generates goes to businesses that suffered damage
during the incidents. When asked why people revolted, her smile gives way to a
concerned look, and she says, nodding with her chin, ‘well, they put all the Section 8
housing there’.

There are, it turns out, two Fergusons, and the other one is further east. This second
Ferguson feels more contained and compact, and it is clearly separated from the first
one by West Florissant Avenue, a commercial strip that bore the brunt during the
uprisings. The houses in this part of Ferguson are of two kinds: single family houses
and apartment complexes. The gardens are well kept, houses are maintained; you can
see it is not a particularly wealthy neighbourhood, but not a run-down one either. The
area with the apartment complexes is where Michael Brown was killed. It is one of the
most concentrated areas of poverty in the region, because these apartment complexes

are home to Section 8 renters, recipients of rent aid vouchers who are by definition
poor. Northwinds Apartments, where Brown lived, has 438 housing units, and it is one
of the largest in the region. It is followed by Park Ridge with 336 units. There is also
Canfield Green Apartments, Versailles Apartments and Oakmont Townhomes, all
concentrated in this eastern tip of Ferguson, where the population is practically all
black.

The Section 8 voucher system allows people to chose where they want to live by
providing rent subsidies rather than units in designated projects. In theory, this system
could reduce segregation and concentration of poverty by increasing the options
available to the poor by allowing them to rent in the private housing market. In
practice, however, voucher users get concentrated in certain areas because of four
reasons. First, the federal government sets an upper limit for rent, which limits the
areas for the use of vouchers. Better areas have higher rents, which prevents the use
of vouchers in these areas and pushes Section 8 renters to less desirable
neighbourhoods where rents are lower. Second, housing provision for vouchers is
limited as landlords do not want to deal with poor tenants and the bureaucracy that
comes with the voucher system. Third, landlords who are willing to have Section

renters offer units in poorer areas, which aggravates the problem of concentrated
poverty. And finally, zoning laws that deliberately limit rental housing, as we find in St.
Louis and elsewhere, further limit opportunities for these tenants. The majority of
Section 8 renters are thus highly concentrated and segregated in low-income
neighbourhoods like this eastern tip of Ferguson.3

St. Louis is among the most segregated metropolitan areas in the United States, not
least because of its history of racially segregative public policies, ranging from zoning
decisions to public housing projects. Although blacks were the majority in its inner city
neighbourhoods for decades, the suburban colour line began to shift after 1970.
Whites, who had already left the inner city, started fleeing the inner suburbs as well.
This process, bluntly referred to as ‘ghetto spillover’ by a local observer in 1981,
changed the population dynamics in inner suburbs such as Ferguson. Until the mid-
1960s, Ferguson was a ‘sundown town’: blacks came in during the day to work as
housekeepers and nannies, but were banned from the city after dark. The city even
barricaded through streets and made sure most of the others dead-ended before
reaching Kinloch to the west, a neighbouring all-black suburb, then quite exceptional in
St. Louis.4

But the demographics of Ferguson changed in the following decades. While the black
population went up from 25% in 1990 to 67% in 2010, the white population went
down from 74% to 29% – a change, as we will see, that has not been reflected in the
city’s administration and police force. Increasing poverty that hit other metropolitan
areas hit St. Louis and its suburbs as well, and Ferguson saw its poor population double
from 2000 to 2012. One in four Ferguson residents lived below the poverty line in 2012.
This suburbanisation of poverty was not unique to St. Louis. During the 2000s,
suburban poverty not only increased, but also concentrated in certain neighbourhoods
in almost every major US metropolitan area. This partly had to do with the dismantling
of public housing projects and the shift to the voucher system.5 Coupled with a trend
in inner-city revival and gentrification, as we will see with Cincinnati below, these shifts
pushed inner-city poor out to the suburbs.

Ferguson’s economic problems reflect broader transformations that negatively affect
American society. One of these transformations, as we have seen in the previous
chapter, is rising inequalities. American post-war growth and reductions in equality
came to an end in the mid-1970s. Since then inequality in the US rose steadily; wealth
concentrated more at the top, while poverty engulfed even greater proportions of the
population. From 2000 to 2010, 15 million more people fell below the poverty line,
bringing the proportion of Americans living in poverty to over 15%. In 2012, one in six
Americans lived below the poverty line, one in four American children were in poverty,
and six million people had no cash income, relying exclusively on charity and food
stamps.6

The largest number of the poor is still white. But poverty disproportionately affects
certain non-white minorities, who were particularly hard hit by the economic
transformations of the past four decades. Nearly half of black children who began their
lives in middle-class families in the late 1960s, just before the economy started its
downward shift, ended up in the bottom fifth as adults. The rate was 16% for white
children.7 The increasing income inequality of the past decades also led to increased
polarisation and residential isolation. Black-white segregation is still high for historical
reasons and the persistence of discrimination in the housing market.8

One particular aspect of this growing poverty is geographical: American poverty is
expanding and moving from inner-city to suburbs. In 2000, most of the poor lived in
the country’s major cities. By 2008, suburbs had overtaken cities and become ‘home to
the largest and fastest-growing poor population in the country’, housing almost one-

third of America’s poor. In other words, suburbs, rather than cities, have absorbed the
growing number of poor since 2000. St. Louis was no exception. Between 2000 and
2008, the share of population living below the poverty line went down from 24.6% to
22.9% in the cities of St. Louis metropolitan area, but it went up from 7.9% to 9.6% in
its suburbs. In 2000, St. Louis metropolitan area was second (after Atlanta) nation-
wide in the share of metropolitan poor living in the suburbs with 69% of its poor in
suburbs. In 2008, the ranking remained the same, but St. Louis’s share of metropolitan
poor living in suburbs went up from 69 to 75%. In 2008, in other words, three-quarters
of its metropolitan poor lived in suburbs.9 Inner-city revival projects displaced the poor,
while housing vouchers concentrated poor families in already segregated areas like the
apartment complexes in the second Ferguson. This new geography of American
poverty is not merely a product of private prejudice or preference, but of public
policies, from the local to the federal. Ferguson, then, is not some aberrant case, but a
product of policy choices that have been transforming the economy and cities in the
past decades.10

This broader context allows us to understand why we have two Fergusons. When he
was stopped by a white police officer, Michael Brown was walking back to Northwinds,
one of the Section 8 apartment complexes in the area. Northwinds is owned by the
Maine-based Eagle Point Companies since 2005. As the president of the company said,
there is ‘a lot of turnover’, and that some of their residents cannot pay the rent.11 An
investigation of law enforcement practices in Ferguson may explain why they could not
afford the rent, or, even if they could, why they would be tempted to leave. No-one, it
seems, loves Ferguson in this part of the city, not enough at least to display a sign of
affection. There is not a single ‘I love Ferguson’ sign in the second Ferguson, but plenty
that reads ‘We must stop killing each other’. Let us see how law was enforced in
Ferguson, the self-affirmed ‘community of choice’.

Getting blood from a turnip

– Municipal Court gross revenue for calendar year 2012 passed the
$2,000,000 mark for the first time in history, reaching $2,066,050 (not
including red light photo enforcement).
– Awesome! Thanks!
Email exchange between Ferguson’s Police Chief and City Manager, 2013

Failure to perform can result in disciplinary action not just a bad
evaluation.

Ferguson Captain of the Patrol Division to patrol supervisors, 2012

The Department of Justice (DoJ) report following the investigation of Ferguson police
department and municipal court was quite categorical: ‘Ferguson’s law enforcement
practices are shaped by the City’s focus on revenue rather than by public safety
needs’.12 This emphasis on revenue generation led to unconstitutional policing and
irregular practices at the municipal court, both of which reflected and exacerbated
racial stereotypes and discrimination. The investigation found that the police and court
disproportionately targeted blacks. The uprising of 2014 was not a reaction to an
isolated incident; it was a response to years of institutionalised racism, oppression and
exploitation. The City of Ferguson had put in place a ‘business model’ that used the
police and the municipal court to generate revenue by preying on blacks, who were
also less likely to be able to pay extravagant fines.

‘How can you get blood from a turnip?’, asked one member of the Ferguson police
questioned by the DoJ. Another said it would have been better for public safety to
allow residents use their limited income to fix equipment violations (such as a broken
taillight) rather than force them to pay fines to the city, which will eventually lead to
an arrest warrant and still leave the equipment unfixed. But such views were not
shared by the majority of police officers, and certainly not by the senior management.
A culture of ‘productivity’ prevailed over Ferguson’s police department and municipal
court, a culture so internalised that it dissociated law enforcement from public safety,
and turned it into the city’s second largest source of revenue.

In this context, the number of citations issued by police officers became indicators of
their productivity, and played an important role in officer evaluations and promotions.
Indeed, every month the municipal court provided the police department with a list of
the number of tickets issued by each officer. Officers wrote up to six, eight, and in one
instance fourteen, citations during a single encounter. What had been happening in
Ferguson for years went beyond occasional abuse by some bad apples. It was a
systematic and deliberate exploitation of the poor and black population through the
coordinated efforts of the city’s police department and municipal court, pushed by the
city management. Here is how it worked.

Municipal fines and fees are the second largest source of income for Ferguson. Over
the years, the city has been increasing their part in the budget, pressuring the police
and court staff to deliver, whose performance it closely monitored. In the five years
leading up to the uprisings, the share of fines and fees in Ferguson’s municipal revenue
went up from 8% to over 13%. In the year before the uprisings, the court generated
more than $2.5 million through municipal fines and fees.13 Once this pattern was
exposed by the uprisings, however, the revenue from this source was cut in half, and
its share in the city’s revenue went down to 6%.14

The DoJ investigation found that the city officials routinely urged the police chief to
generate more revenue. In March 2000, for example, the city’s finance director
contacted the police chief to express his concern about the expected sales tax shortfall
and to ask him to offset this through fines. ‘Unless ticket writing ramps up significantly
before the end of the year’, he wrote, ‘it will be hard to significantly raise collections
next year’. The police chief responded that the city would see an increase in fines and
that he could target the $1.5 million forecast once more officers were hired. He also
said he was considering a different shift schedule to have more officers on the street
to increase traffic enforcement. Shortly after this exchange, the Ferguson police
switched to a 12-hour shift schedule, which is less conducive to community policing,
but more effective in generating revenue through enforcement. This was not an
isolated incident. In the year leading up to the uprisings, in March 2013, the finance
director wrote the following to the City Manager: ‘Court fees are anticipated to rise
about 7.5%. I did ask the [police] Chief if he thought the PD [police department] could
deliver 10% increase. He indicated they could try’.

Data also shows certain municipal charges applied almost exclusively to blacks. The
five most common charges brought against blacks were also the ones that gave the
widest discretion to police officers: Manner of Walking in Roadway, Failure to Comply,
Resisting Arrest, Peace Disturbance, and Failure to Obey. Between 2011 and 2013,
blacks accounted for 95% of Manner of Walking in Roadway charges, and 94% of
Failure to Comply charges. A similar pattern emerged in speeding charges as well. The
DoJ investigation showed that when citations were issued based on the officer’s visual
assessment, rather than on radar readings, blacks were disproportionately charged.

This racial bias was accompanied by illegal police practices. Ferguson police officers
stopped, searched, arrested and used force in ways that went beyond their legal
authority. They targeted blacks, and when citizens cited their rights or asked for a

cause, they responded by retaliation, fining or arresting them for talking back. One
typical example of this was traffic stops. Ferguson police officers routinely asked for
identification from all passengers, and if they refused, they cited and arrested them
under the municipal Failure to Comply charge. This is unconstitutional. Passengers are
in their right to refuse to provide identification, and this is protected under the Fourth
Amendment. Talking back to officers or recording their activities are protected by the
First Amendment. Even verbal expressions of disrespect, including the use of foul
language, cannot constitutionally be a basis for arrest. Yet, Ferguson police officers
regularly used arrest to retaliate against disrespect, usually charged as Failure to
Comply, Disorderly Conduct, Interference with Officer or Resisting Arrest. Such
constitutional violations were also evident during the protests outside Ferguson police
department in February 2015 to mark the sixth month of Michael Brown’s death.
Peaceful protesters were menaced by jail, one man recording arrests and another in a
wheelchair live-streaming the events from the sidewalk were threatened that they
would be arrested for Manner of Walking.

The DoJ investigation also revealed a pattern of excessive force use. Ferguson police
officers routinely used excessive force in violation of the Fourth Amendment, again
disproportionately targeting blacks – about 90% of the cases involved blacks. The DoJ’s
conclusion was that use of excessive force by Ferguson police officers was racially
biased, punitive and retaliatory rather than necessary (for example to counter a
physical threat). Ferguson police regularly used Tasers and dogs against unarmed
individuals, people with mental problems, and even juvenile students. In a 2011
incident, a mentally troubled man claiming to be god died after officers Tasered him
multiple times. In another, during the year leading up to the uprisings, a 14-year old
black student was Tasered and arrested in the classroom after refusing to leave after
an argument with a fellow student. Taser use was routine, including on people in
handcuffs. Dogs were also used unnecessarily, deployed even to bite unarmed children.
And Ferguson police dogs bit only blacks – not a single incident reported a police dog
biting a white person.

There is also evidence of police harassment in the area with the apartment complexes.
For example, a few months before the uprisings, in December 2013, police officers
stopped and searched people in this area with no reasonable suspicion. This was not
an isolated incident, but, as the DoJ report put it, part of a ‘consistent … pattern of
suspicionless, legally unsupportable stops’ that targeted blacks. The following month,
in the same area, the police arrested a young black man at the home of his girlfriend’s

grandparents for trespassing, even though the young man was there upon invitation.
When he resisted arrest, seven officers repeatedly hit and Tasered him, causing
significant injuries. ‘Partly as a consequence of City and FPD [Ferguson Police
Department] priorities’, the DoJ report stated, ‘many officers appear to see some
residents, especially those who live in Ferguson’s predominantly African-American
neighbourhoods, less as constituents to be protected than as potential offenders and
sources of revenue’.

There are several examples in the report, but perhaps this one shows best the legally
arbitrary, racially targeted and revenue-driven nature of policing in Ferguson. In the
summer of 2012, an officer pulled up behind a 32-year old black man’s car. The man
had just finished a game of basketball in a public park, and was cooling off in his
parked car. The officer asked him for his social security number and identification.
Then, pointing at the presence of children in the public park, he accused the man of
being a paedophile, and ordered him out for a search. The man cited his constitutional
rights, which led to his arrest. The officer then charged him with eight violations of
Ferguson’s municipal code, including one for making a false declaration (he said his
name was ‘Mike’, whereas it was ‘Michael’ really), one for not wearing a seat belt, one
for having an expired driver’s licence, and one for not having one.

To put it bluntly, Ferguson police preyed upon blacks to generate revenue for the city
until one incident went awry with the killing of Michael Brown. The police, however,
was only one part of Ferguson’s revenue generating mechanism. Officers might issue
as many citations as they could, but there has to be something else to force people to
pay fines and fees. This was the role of Ferguson’s municipal court.

The court as cash machine

Each month we are setting new all-time records in fines and forfeitures.
Ferguson City Manager, January 2013

Ferguson municipal court did not act as a neutral arbiter of the law, but as a cash
machine. It used its judicial authority to collect outstanding fees, and worked in a way
that particularly harmed blacks, violating, the Fourth Amendment’s requirements of
due process and equal projection. Thus, rather than promoting public safety, it
undermined, just like Ferguson’s police did, the legitimacy of law enforcement,
creating a deep mistrust among black citizens.

Ferguson municipal court is in the same building as the police station. It operates as
part of the police department, and is supervised by the Chief of Police, to whom the
court staff directly reports. The judge, court clerk, prosecuting attorney and assistant
court clerks were all white at the time of the DoJ investigation. The residents of
Ferguson are not involved in the election of court staff. The judge is nominated by the
City Manager and appointed by the City Council. It is a two-year position subject to
reappointment, and judge Ronald Brockmeyer worked as Ferguson’s municipal judge
for eleven years until he had to resign following the DoJ investigation. The Court Clerk,
supervised by the Police Chief, has broad authority according to Ferguson’s municipal
code. As the DoJ investigation found, she played the most significant role and
exercised wide discretion in the everyday workings of the court. One area where she
used her authority and discretion was discarding charges brought against friends. She
had to resign over racist emails revealed by the investigation, including one with a
photo of Ronald Reagan feeding a baby chimpanzee. The caption read ‘Rare photo of
Ronald Reagan babysitting Barack Obama in early 1962’.

The court, like the police, worked in a legally arbitrary, racially targeted and revenue-
driven way. On the one hand, it routinely helped many city officials – including the
judge, court clerk and several high-ranking police officers – and their friends by
removing their fines and fees. On the other, the court fined blacks more heavily than
others. For example, the 53 Failure to Obey charges brought during 2013 not only
involved a majority of blacks (44), but also resulted in higher fines for them: an
average of $206, whereas others had an average of $147 for the same offense.

In order to force people to pay fines and fees, the court issued arrest warrants. These
warrants, however, were not issued for public safety concerns, but to secure collection.
They were the court’s routine response to pending fine payments and missed court
appearances. This city of 21,000 issued warrants for the arrest of 9,000 people for
33,000 offenses in 2013 alone. This would amount to 25 arrest warrants a day if the
court worked every single day during the year. The municipal judge, however, only
worked a grand total of twelve hours per month. The rate of arrest warrants
impressed even Ferguson police officers, who called it ‘staggering’ in internal emails.
With so many arrest warrants to go around, police officers regularly made unlawful
stops, not because of a reasonable suspicion, but to catch individuals with pending
arrest warrants. As noted, the police deliberately and disproportionately targeted
blacks: 85% of vehicle stops and practically all pedestrian stops involved blacks. Blacks

also accounted for 90% of citations, 93% of arrests, 92% of cases with arrest warrants,
about 90% of cases of use of force, and all police dog bites.

Most of the arrest warrants issued by Ferguson municipal court originated from minor
violations for which jail time is far too severe a penalty (parking infractions, traffic
tickets, or housing code violations). But because Ferguson used its court to generate
revenue, minor violations resulted in arrests, jail time, and payments that well
exceeded the original fine. The following case of a black woman shows how minor
infractions turn into crippling debts and unduly harsh penalties. This woman parked
her car illegally in 2007, and received two citations, a $151 fine, plus fees. Because of
financial difficulties and periods of homelessness, she missed court dates and fine
payments, which led the court to charge her with seven Failure to Appear offenses
over the years. The court also issued an arrest warrant, and new fines and fees for
each failure to appear offense. Thus, what started in 2007 as a minor parking infraction
led over the years to her arrest twice, six days in jail, and a debilitating debt despite
the considerable amount she had already paid. As of December 2014, she had already
paid the city $550, but still owed $541.

Moreover, Ferguson municipal court often did not provide clear and accurate
information about the charges and obligations. There is also evidence that Ferguson
police officers frequently provided incorrect information about the date and time of
court sessions to the people they cited, potentially leading to additional charges and
fines under Failure to Appear, as well as an arrest warrant. The court issued arrest
warrants when a second court date was missed, but did not confirm that the notice of
the second court date had been safely received by those concerned. Indeed, in many
cases individuals did not even know if an arrest warrant was issued against them since
the court had stopped sending warrant notices in 2012 to save money on the cost of
warrant cards and postage.

Although Ferguson city officials blamed lack of responsibility for certain groups of the
population, the DoJ investigation found strong evidence of racial bias among Ferguson
police and court staff. Indeed, even the lack of personal responsibility explanation
used by city officials reflected such racial bias and stereotypes, which was also evident
in emails between senior police officers and court staff that included overtly racist
jokes about blacks associated with laziness, irresponsibility and criminality.

Ferguson police is authorised to issue citations under both the municipal code and
state law. Most charges, however, are filed as municipal offenses, because pursuing
municipal rather than state charges benefits Ferguson financially. The city has a
comprehensive municipal code that leaves few areas of civic life untouched – housing,
height and removal of grass and weeds, use of city’s trash service, animal control.
walking. Compared to other municipalities in the region, its fines are high, ‘at or near
the top of the list’, as the city’s finance director noted approvingly in a 2011 report. For
example, a parking fine in Ferguson was $102 whereas it ranged between $5 to $100 in
others; Weeds/Tall Grass charge was as low as $5 in one municipality, whereas
Ferguson set it between $77 to $102. Ferguson charges $375 for Failing to Provide
Proof of Insurance, more than twice the average fine for this offense in the region’s 70
municipalities. This allowed Ferguson to collect $286,000 in fines for this offense in
2013 alone, exceeding all but the Failure to Appear fines.

These high fees, coupled with Ferguson police officers’ routine practice of issuing
multiple citations in a single encounter, amount to sums that people in poverty cannot
pay. In order to resolve a municipal code violation, the offender must have the means
to hire an attorney and pay fines. Even for a simple speeding ticket, the defendant
must pay $50-$100 to the attorney, and $150-$200 to the municipality in fines and
court fees.15 These are not negligible amounts, especially for the poor. The situation is
aggravated by the Ferguson municipal court’s tendency to inflate fines and charge, for
example, $302 for Manner of Walking, $427 for Peace Disturbance, $531 for High
Grass and Weeds, $777 for Resisting Arrest, $792 for Failure to Obey, and $527 for
Failure to Comply. These are colossal amounts especially for people living in poverty,
and way too high for minor violations.

Between July 2010 and June 2014, about 90,000 citations and summonses were issued
for Ferguson municipal code violations – 22,500 citations and summonses a year in a
city with a population of 21,000. In 2014, during the year leading up to the uprisings,
nearly 50% more citations were issued compared to those issued during 2010. This
suggests a deliberate attempt to generate more revenue through fines and fees, which
is also indicated in email exchanges between city officials (as we have seen, the share
of fines and fees revenue in Ferguson’s municipal budget has constantly increased over
the years). The DoJ investigation established that this upsurge was not driven by a rise
in serious crime; indeed, serious crime (assault, stealing, driving while intoxicated) has
remained constant or declined in Ferguson over the last ten years. There was a similar
rise in municipal court cases: 16,178 new cases were filed, and 8,727 were resolved

during the fiscal year 2009. During the year leading up to the uprisings, the number of
new cases had gone up by 50% to 24,256, and the cases resolved to 10,975.

The judge, you may think, must have been working really hard. But municipal court
judges are part-time positions, and the judge does not need to be a resident of the
municipality. Municipal judges may hold positions in multiple jurisdictions, as
Ferguson’s did. The court holds three or four sessions each month, each lasting no
more than three hours. It is not uncommon for the court to see as many as 500 people
in a single sessions, and given that police officers issue as many citations as they
possibly can, usually 1,200 to 1,500 offenses are considered in each three-hour period
(which may even, as it has in the past, go over 2,000 offenses in one sitting). The
court’s efficiency did not escape the City Manager, who noted in January 2013 that
‘each month we are setting new all-time records in fines and forfeitures’.

The handpicked judge was under pressure to generate revenue for the municipality,
and he delivered with great zeal, which made him keep his office since his first
appointment in 2003. As the city’s finance director reported to the city council in 2011,
judge Brockmeyer had been ‘successful in significantly increasing court collections over
the years’ – though it turns out he was less successful with his finances and owed over
$170,000 to the government in unpaid taxes.16 His productivity was due partly to the
creation of additional fees, which were deemed abusive and possibly unlawful by the
DoJ. He also managed to see hundreds of cases in a single three-hour session, as we
saw above.

These dubious practices did not go unnoticed. In 2012, a member of the city council
wrote to other city officials to oppose reappointing the judge. The judge was so
efficient because he did not listen to the testimony, did not review the reports or the
criminal history of the defendants, and also did not let all the relevant witnesses testify.
Although a change of judge would probably result in less revenue, the member of the
city council argued, it was more important to handle the cases properly and fairly.
Proper and fair, however, were not among the priorities of the City Manager, who
stated that Ferguson could not afford any decrease in its revenue from the court, and
urged for the judge to be reappointed, which he was.

The revolting Ferguson residents were well aware that their actions were disrupting
the city’s business model based on the exploitation and criminalisation of black people.
DeAndre Smith, a black resident of Ferguson, was admittedly present during the

incidents that led to the looting and burning of QuikTrip – a convenience store that
later became a gathering point for protestors. Two days into the uprisings, in an
interview on television, he said: ‘This is how they eat here. This is how they receive
money. The businesses, the taxes, police stopping people, giving them tickets, taking
them to court, locking them up […] So, when you stop their flow of income. When you
stop their whole … everything … their business’.17

At the site of QuikTrip where Smith was interviewed, there is a writing on the burnt
out shell of a gas pump. It lists several uprisings, starting with ‘Spain 36’ and ending
with ‘Ferguson 14’. Brixton, Paris and Cairo are on the list, so are ‘Watts 65’, ‘L.A. 92’,
and ‘Cincy 01’. We saw that racist, oppressive and abusive law enforcement practices
in Ferguson were not occasional incidents, but part of the regular workings of the city.
Let us now take a look at urban uprisings in Los Angeles, Cincinnati and Baltimore to
see that Ferguson uprisings were not aberrational, but a justified response to urban
rage. The sources of resentment that led to Ferguson uprisings were also behind those
of Los Angeles, Cincinnati and Baltimore, although Ferguson’s business model remains
unique among those. As long as these sources of resentment remain unaddressed, the
incidents in these cities suggest, recurrent uprisings will be part of our urban futures.

Careful police work

This is not some orgy of violence. This is careful police work.
Defence attorney in the 1992 Rodney King beating trial

There’s a black person up our street and we say ‘Hi’ like he’s a normal person.

A resident of Simi Valley, home of Rodney King beating trial, 1992

One warm summer night, on 1 August 1988, officers from the Los Angeles Police
Department (LAPD) stormed two buildings in the area known as South Central,
searching for drugs. While helicopters hovered over the area, the 88 police officers on
the ground were engaged in a demolition job in the apartments: they punched holes in
the walls, destroyed furniture and appliances, hammered toilets, poured bleach over
cloths, and emptied refrigerators. Some even left their graffiti that read ‘LAPD rules’.
The damage to the apartments was so great that the operation left ten adults and 12
minors homeless, who were offered help by the Red Cross. Residents from the two
buildings and others from the neighbourhood were rounded up, humiliated, insulted
by racist epithets, punched, kicked and choked by police officers, though none was

charged with a crime. The result of this massive raid was the successful seizure of less
than six ounces of marijuana and less than an ounce of cocaine, plus $4 million in court
fees and damages paid to the residents, property owners, and to those rounded up
during the operation.18

South Central was the epicentre of 1992 Los Angeles uprising. In terms of its
geographical extent, ethnic diversity, violence and destruction, Los Angeles uprising
remains the most devastating in US urban history. Like the Watts uprising of 1965 in
the same area, the 1992 uprising took place at a time of economic difficulties and in a
context marked by racism, involuntary segregation and police brutality. Watts and
other uprisings of the 1960s had all occurred at times of economic recession.19 The
1992 Los Angeles uprising took place during the worst recession southern California
had experienced since the 1930s. Income inequality and proportion of the poor
increased steadily in Los Angeles between the 1965 and 1992 uprisings. In 1990, one in
four young black man in South Central was unemployed.

The context was set by policy decisions. The federal government’s economic policies
since the early 1980s contributed to increasing unemployment. Dismantling of social
safety nets, attacks on anti-discrimination and affirmative action agendas meant more
hardship for the poor and racialised minorities. Cutting the funds for community-based
organisations had devastating effects in places like South Central since these
organisations worked with disadvantaged populations in inner cities. On top of all
these, increasing reliance on the criminal justice system doubled the prison population
in a decade from 1980 to 1990. The racialised poor were hit by every single one of
these policy decisions. Wealth continued to concentrate at the top, while the poor saw
their prospects shrink, and became increasingly subject to aggressive policing and
incarceration. Mass incarceration further reduced the prospects for the racialised poor.
As a 2014 report put it, the United States saw a ‘historically unprecedented and
internationally unique’ growth in incarceration rates since the mid-1970s. By 2010
figures, more than half the prison population was black or Hispanic.20

Economic difficulties do not automatically lead to unrest, but when they are
compounded by discrimination and police brutality in everyday urban life, eventually
something has got to give. As one of the participants in 1965 Watts uprising put it:
‘We’ve been holding out for a long time, a long time; giving the white man a chance’.21
The 1992 Los Angeles uprising showed, however, that this was not just an issue of
black and white. Unlike the incidents on 1965, which were confined to the Watts area

of Los Angeles where the majority of the city’s black population was pushed to live, the
1992 uprising covered a much larger area, expanding especially north from South
Central to Hollywood. Unlike Watts, the participants in the 1992 uprising were not
overwhelmingly black. Latinos, who had been at the receiving end of Los Angeles
police’s discriminatory practices, also participated widely. Not everyone had the same
purpose; the participants’ motivations ranged from outrage at the Rodney King verdict,
which triggered the incidents, to simple opportunism, from resentment built up by
discrimination to securing necessities for their families.

The Los Angeles uprising started on 29 April 1992 following the announcement of the
not-guilty verdict in the trial of four white police officers. They were filmed beating
Rodney King, an unarmed black man aged 25, in the early hours of 3 March 1991. The
video showed King lying on the ground after a car chase, twenty-three LAPD officers at
the scene, and four of them beating him with batons and kicks. After 56 baton blows,
six kicks, and two shots of Taser, King is left with injuries ‘of a minor nature’ according
to the report of the Sergeant involved in the beating. King’s skull and cheekbone were
fractured, lip split, face partly paralysed, one eye socket shattered and one leg broken.
Three surgeons had to operate for five hours on his battered body.

Broadcast the next day, the video – which President Bush called ‘sickening’ – became a
national and international sensation, and led to the trial of the four police officers. The
trial should have taken place in Los Angeles County with a jury selected from there,
because that is where the incident took place. The defence asked for a change of
venue, but this was denied by the trial judge Bernard Kamins. After the California
Court of Appeals replaced Judge Kamins with Judge Stanley Weisberg, the new judge
changed the trial venue to Simi Valley in Ventura County, arguing that this would avoid
unfair treatment of the police officers due to adverse publicity around the incident.
Home of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, Simi Valley, and Ventura County in
general, was known for its conservative politics and strong law and order stance. With
its overwhelming white majority – 80% white and only 2% black – Simi Valley was
home to a large number of LAPD officers and retirees. Indeed, about one fourth of
LAPD officers lived in Simi Valley.22

In the end, there was not a single black person among the twelve members of the jury,
which was made up of six white men, four white, one Hispanic and one Asian women.
Eight of the jury members had either served in the army, or had spouses who had
served in the military. Three had relatives in the police. Five of them were gun owners,

of which two were National Rifle Association members. Where many saw a repeated
beating of a black man offering no resistance, the jury saw a black man threatening
police officers who only hit him in self-defence. The defence attorneys had broken the
video down into stills, and used them for raising questions about restraining suspects.
Thus, the repeated beating of King was reduced to disjointed stills to be analysed in
isolation by restraint experts. This strategy allowed the defence to argue that what the
jury had before their eyes was ‘not some orgy of violence [but] careful police work’.
The jury was convinced, and they acquitted the police officers.

Following the announcement of the verdict, incidents started in the South Central area
in the late afternoon of 29 April. This is also when the barbaric beatings of Reginald
Denny, a white truck driver, and Fidel Lopez, a construction worker from Guatemala,
occurred. Despite the contentious nature and publicity of the trial, the LAPD had not
taken any precautions, and was unable to respond effectively once the unrest started.
The incidents only intensified the following day, moving north towards Hollywood.
Koreatown was on the way, but police forces were deployed to protect downtown Los
Angeles, Beverly Hills and West Hollywood. This left Koreatown and South Central
without protection, which would prove disastrous for Korean businesses.

Less than two weeks after the Rodney King beating, Latasha Harlins, a black teenager,
was murdered by a Korean shopkeeper, who shot her in the back of the head while she
was walking away from her store after an altercation over a cartoon of orange juice.
The shopkeeper was convicted of voluntary manslaughter, but was only sentenced to
five years of probation and some community service. The demographic transformation
of South Central had already put blacks, Latinos and Koreans in competition over
housing and jobs.23 Both the murder and what many felt was an unfairly light sentence
further strained the relations between blacks and Koreans, making Korean businesses,
not least the one where Harlins was murdered, targets of choice during the incidents.

The incidents continued with increasing intensity, which first led to the deployment of
the National Guard, then of army troops. California Governor Wilson declared a state
of emergency, Mayor Bradley imposed a curfew, and on 2 May, President Bush
declared Los Angeles a disaster area. Thus ended one of the most devastating urban
uprisings in American history, leaving in its wake 53 people dead and more than 2,000
injured. The number of arrestees went over 10,000, about half of whom were Latino
and 38% black. These figures almost doubled those of Watts uprising that had started
in the same area in 1965, leaving 34 people dead and about a thousand injured. Let us

now take a closer look to Watts in 1965 to see how it differed or resembled the 1992
uprising.

From ‘monkeys in the zoo’ to ‘gorillas in the mist’

One person threw a rock and then, like monkeys in the zoo, others
started throwing rocks.

William Parker, LAPD Police Chief, on the Watts uprisings, 1965

…right out of ‘Gorillas in the Mist’.
Police officer Powell, shortly before the King beating, 1992

Unlike in 1992, Watts area in 1965 was predominantly black. Nearby industrial jobs
and public transit access to downtown had made Watts relatively attractive earlier, but
by 1965 both were gone. After the war, many factories closed or moved out, and many
black workers were laid off. The construction of the elevated north-south Harbor
Freeway (Interstate 110) in the 1950s separated the rundown Watts area to the east
and the slightly better-off areas to the west (including South Central).24 Thus, Watts
became separated by this physical barrier from the rest of the city, and the
disappearance of job and public transit left little chance for upward mobility for its
residents.

The barriers that confined blacks to Watts were not only physical. In a state-wide
referendum held a year before the uprising, two-thirds of California voters supported
Proposition 14. Led by the real estate sector, Proposition 14 was a response to the
Rumford Fair Housing Act passed in 1963, which prohibited discrimination in the
private housing market. Promoted with the slogan ‘A man’s home is his castle’,
Proposition 14 nullified the Rumford Fair Housing Act by amending the California
Constitution, and turned discrimination into a constitutional right. Property owners
had the right to refuse selling or renting property to people not only on the basis of
their race but on any basis.25 Watts was already home to more than 80% of the black
population of Los Angeles. Proposition 14 meant they were stuck there.

Unlike the other uprisings we study in this book, the Watts uprising of 1965 did not
follow from dramatic incident. It was triggered by police action, like the majority of
urban uprisings, but a trivial one compared to them. There was no beating, as in Los
Angeles 1992, or killing, as in Cincinnati 2001, Ferguson 2014 or Baltimore 2015. The

uprising in Watts followed an arrest for drunken driving, and there was no evidence of
excessive force use. Blacks in Los Angeles, however, had been victims of police
brutality for such a long time that a minor arrest quickly turned into full-scale uprising.

Unlike in 1992, the Watts uprising led to an official inquiry by the so-called McCone
Commission, led by John A. McCone, a prominent businessman and former director of
the CIA. The findings of the commission were widely discredited by social science
research at the time. When the archives related to the inquiry became public, further
research revealed that the commission had come to conclusions about matters on
which no research was done, and had deliberately neglected unsavoury evidence
collected during the investigation.26 The McCone Commission report had explained the
uprising though the so-called ‘riffraff theory’, an example of the pathological
framework we discussed in the introduction. Contrary to the commission’s assertions,
however, researchers found that the participants in the Watts uprising were not a
marginal group of deviants and criminals – the riffraff. They were representative of,
not marginal to, the black population of Los Angeles. Their actions were popular even
among blacks who had not participated in the uprising. These findings were supported
by the records of the hearings and testimonies in the commission’s archives, but they
did not find their way into the official report on the Watts uprising.

What was common to both 1965 and 1992 uprisings in Los Angeles (and also to those
later in Cincinnati, Ferguson and Baltimore) was where they started. All of these urban
uprisings erupted in areas home to poor and racially defined groups who
disproportionately found themselves on the receiving end of police brutality and
harassment. By the time of the 1992 uprising, the Watts district had equal black and
Hispanic populations, as well as a small minority of Asians. Central American were
newcomers to the area in 1992 just as blacks were earlier. Jewish ghetto merchants
were replaced by Koreans. But the area still remained a poor neighbourhood of racially
defined groups, and was subject to racially biased police practices. The racial bias in
policing, however, was not a matter of a few rogue police officers. Just like Ferguson,
there was a well-documented pattern of racially biased police violence, ranging from
patrol officers all the way up to police chiefs.

The context leading up to the 1992 uprising shows the discriminatory, systematic and
targeted nature of police violence in Los Angeles. Several reports demonstrate Los
Angeles police officers regularly using excessive force, in particular against blacks and
Latinos. Although complaints were discouraged (as it happened, for example, when

King’s brother tried to file one) or covered by supervisors, the city of Los Angeles still
had to pay millions of dollars to settle complaints and lawsuits by the victims of LAPD
abuse, a pattern we will also see with Baltimore later on. Blacks and Latinos suffered
disproportionately. One particular issue was the use of choke holds by the police,
which claimed 18 lives during the 1980s. Sixteen of those victims were black, a
disproportionality explained by the LAPD Police Chief Daryl Gates in a most peculiar
manner. It was probably because, he argued, their ‘veins and arteries do not open up
as fast as on normal people’. Gates was the controversial police chief of Los Angeles
from 1978 until he was forced to resign in 1992 following the uprising. The legacy of
his paramilitary style of policing included the creation of SWAT teams in the 1960s, and
Operation Hammer starting in 1987. The latter turned South Central and East Los
Angeles into occupied territories saturated by police forces operating with a war
mentality, produced the police raid that opens the previous section, and largely
contributed to the growing resentment that ended up erupting in 1992.27

When placed within this context, even the Rodney King beating does not look
exceptional; what set it apart was that it was caught on video. King’s beating was part
of a broader pattern of police abuse in Los Angeles. Like Ferguson’s police department,
LAPD’s practices showed racial bias, and its officers, like Ferguson’s, did not refrain
from using excessive force and racial epithets. A commission investigation found, for
example, that two of the officers who beat King had sent a computer message shortly
before the incident about a domestic dispute of a black couple, referring to it as
something ‘right out of “Gorillas in the Mist”’. After the beating, one of them – officer
Powell, who alone struck King over 40 times – sent a message stating he hadn’t
‘beaten anyone this bad in a long time’. Powell had a history of violence that was well
known in the LAPD. The same officers accompanied King to the hospital, where they
openly joked and bragged about the beating, as the nurses reported.28

The commission investigation revealed that the use of excessive force, aggravated by
racism, was a deeply entrenched problem within the LAPD. A significant number of
LAPD police officers had a well-known pattern of violence, who were not only not
disciplined, but rewarded with positive evaluations and promotions. Racist remarks
were recurrent in the messages officers sent, which was not monitored and sanctioned
by their supervisors. Indeed, the commission found that the supervisors themselves
frequently made racist remarks. Racist abuse, however, went beyond messages within
the department. There was also evidence of verbal harassment of blacks and Latinos,
who were frequently subjected to humiliating practices and unnecessary use of force,

as well as to dog attacks. Just like in Ferguson, dogs were frequently used in minority
neighbourhoods, particularly in South Central where the uprising started. Between
1986-1989, 71% of all LAPD dog searches, 70% of all arrests using dogs and 70% of all
reported police dog bites took place in South Central. The commission also heard
complaints about LAPD officers having dogs attack minority youth already in custody
or not calling the dogs off even after the suspect was restrained.

Another report by Amnesty International supported these findings.29 There was clear
evidence that LAPD officers used excessive force for years, mostly in black and Latino
neighbourhoods, leading to serious injuries and death. The use of force by officers
reached such levels that Amnesty International claimed it amounted at times to
torture. The findings were not all that different then from now: use of force that
exceeded guidelines and not justified by circumstances, shooting victims several times
even after they had been disabled, use of Tasers, setting dogs on unnamed or
surrendered suspects, even on those in custody – practices all concentrated in black
and Latino neighbourhoods. Dogs were deployed predominantly in areas with large
minority populations, and among dog-bite victims, less than 2% were identified as
white, whereas 70% were Latino, and 20% were black.

A similar pattern of targeted police violence was also an important factor behind the
2014 Ferguson uprising, as we saw, but also behind those of Cincinnati in 2001 (the
largest urban unrest since the 1992 Los Angeles uprising) and the 2015 uprising in
Baltimore. Let us now take a look at these two cities to see what else related or
differentiated them from Ferguson and Los Angeles.

From feast to famine

Plastic baggies in hand, the recipients headed back out into the cold –
four blocks, and a world away, from the bright lights of Main.

Michelle Cottle on post-riot Cincinnati, 2001

You go feast to famine in a matter of blocks.
David Bramble, developer in Baltimore, 2015

The Main Street with its bright lights is the one in Over-the-Rhine (OTR)
neighbourhood, the epicentre of 2001 uprisings in Cincinnati. It runs parallel to Vine,
another street with vibrant commercial activity four blocks to the east. The shops here

speak to the extent and nature of the city’s attempt to transform the area, starting
from 12th Street. If you walk north on Vine Street from 12th, you find, for example, a
fancy pet food store, a ‘movement studio’ (aka ‘gym’), or a company specialised in
‘brainstorming and business coaching’, in addition to your regular cafés, trattorias and
restaurants. Once you have passed Kroger supermarket and hit 15th Street, however,
the pretty shops and refurbished historical houses give way to boarded up stores and
derelict buildings. The contrast reaches its starkest with a food bank located
somewhere between Vine and Main streets. You have gone from feast to famine in a
matter of blocks.

OTR had a mostly white population of about 30,000 in the 1950s, which went down to
about 7,500, mainly black, by the turn of the century. OTR first attracted black
residents from the adjacent West End, a historically black neighbourhood. After the
war, like many other inner city black neighbourhoods at the time, West End became
the target of urban renewal projects. The old housing stock was razed and Interstate
75 tore right through it, resulting in the displacement of its residents, some to the
neighbouring OTR. The displacement process now at work in OTR is more subtle.
Although no bulldozers are involved, the forces of change are strong, and we must first
understand the profit potential of this area to get a sense of the stakes.

Downtown Cincinnati is bordered by Interstate 71 to the east, Interstate 75 to the
west, the Ohio River and Kentucky state border to the south. This leaves only north for
downtown Cincinnati to expand, which is where OTR is. So this ‘pocket of poverty’ long
forgotten by the city is now among Cincinnati’s most valuable land. The economic
potential of OTR was recognised in the 1980s, which led to its designation as a historic
district in 1983. The neighbourhood has since been the object of fierce struggles
between developers and community activists, notably the Over-the-Rhine People’s
Movement. Perhaps the struggle over the area can be illustrated by this 1996
Cincinnati Enquirer headline reporting the murder of Buddy Gray, the influential leader
of the People’s Movement: ‘Over-the-Rhine now up for grabs’.

At the time of the 2001 uprising, three-quarter of OTR residents were black, most
living below the poverty line. About one third of the housing units in the area were
vacant. It was, however, a time of economic revival as the city had been investing for a
decade in this area. It had refurbished the Main Street entertainment district with jazz
clubs and art galleries, and managed to attract wealthier white populations. The
patrons of the new facilities had to be protected, so the city also invested in measures

to have more police presence and vigilance in the area. In a city already marked with
racism and in an area with sharp inequalities, this increased vigilance quickly
translated into police harassment of black youth. What was seen as a revival by the
city officials and the new patrons of the area was seen as an assault by the residents.30

Cecil Thomas, a black Cincinnati police officer, observed a pattern of aggressive
policing emerge during the 1990s. In his expert report for the 2001 case on racial
discrimination in Cincinnati police, Thomas wrote that blacks were disproportionately
subject to arbitrary searches, undue detention, improper use of handcuffs, use of force
and guns, as well as retaliation if they asked badge numbers and names of police
officers. They were also disproportionately subject to discretionary offenses such as
jaywalking, just like in Ferguson. Aggressive policing, even when it violated civil rights,
was rewarded by the city, rather than supervised and disciplined. The case was settled
by a court-supervised collaborative agreement between the citizens, the city of
Cincinnati, and the Fraternal Order of Police to reform police practices and improve
police-community relations.31

In addition to the more serious allegations of disproportionate use of excessive or
deadly force against blacks, Cincinnati police officers were also accused of routine
harassment, targeting blacks for multiple traffic citations, like in Ferguson. This was
one of the important factors in the eruption of simmering anger when Timothy
Thomas, a 19-year old black man, was shot and killed by a white police officer after a
chase in an OTR alley, shortly after 2am on Saturday, 7 April 2001. Thomas was
unarmed, had no history of violent crime, but had 14 outstanding warrants, 12 of
which were for traffic violations. He was the fifteenth black man killed by Cincinnati
police in the previous six years, and the fourth in the previous six months, including
the high-profile death of Roger Owensby, Jr., an unarmed black man who died of
asphyxiation in police custody on 7 November 2000. Already a month before Thomas’s
death, the American Civil Liberties Union and the Cincinnati Black United Front had
filed the federal lawsuit mentioned above against racial bias in Cincinnati policing.

Thus, the tension created by the prospect of displacement and the resentment over
the perceived occupation of OTR by a police eager to protect the visitors from the
residents reached a critical point. Yet, the incidents did not start immediately. On 9
April, Thomas’s mother, joined by protestors, confronted the mayor in the City Hall
and asked for an explanation, but received none. The uprising started then, lasted
three days, and ended with the declaration of a curfew on 12 April. Although social

workers in the area who had also been through the urban uprisings of the 1960s
thought the 2001 incidents were more like ‘episodes of youthful vandalism or a minor
civil disturbance’, and did not really call for a curfew, the mayor likened the situation in
OTR to Beirut, which by all counts was a stretch of the imagination.32

As community activist Thomas Dutton observed, although uprisings are readily
lamented as unreasonable violence, violence takes many forms. In Cincinnati, the
problem was not merely police-community relations, but many inter-related forms of
violence that have been affecting black inner city residents for a long time. Unlike the
episodic violence of the uprising, these other forms of violence – unemployment,
poverty, displacement, police harassment and brutality – were systematic. As City
Councilwoman Alicia Reece put it: ‘This situation has been festering for over five years.
It is a time bomb that has exploded’. At the time of the uprising, Cincinnati was the
most segregated city in the country, and OTR was its poorest neighbourhood with
about 77% of its residents black (Cincinnati was 43% black). The city invested in OTR to
turn it into a marketable area, but the investment led to the displacement of existing
OTR residents, who were not provided with alternatives.33

After the incidents, the mayor asked the Department of Justice to review Cincinnati
Police Department’s use of force. The preliminary findings of the investigation were
outlined in an October 2001 letter.34 There was evidence of excessive use of force by
Cincinnati police officers, regarding, in particular, the use of chemical irritants and dogs.
Police officers used chemical irritants at close range, sprayed them up people’s noses
or down their throats, and emptied entire canisters on single individuals. The canine
unit used a ‘find and bite’ – rather than ‘find and bark’ – policy. The use of force was
under-reported, and police officers were too willing to draw their guns and point them
at citizens even for minor traffic violations. Finally, as we have already seen with
Ferguson and Los Angeles police departments, there were concerns about the
complaints procedure, which discouraged the filing of complaints and prevented
effective monitoring.

Even the mayor admitted that ‘the protest shows there is a huge outcry in the
community about legitimate frustrations between police and African-American
residents’.35 The day after the mayor uttered these words, Cincinnati police provided
one more reason to be frustrated. On 14 April, following Timothy Thomas’s funeral,
hundreds marched peacefully through OTR. Suddenly, however, two police cars
stopped, eight police officers, six from Cincinnati’s SWAT team, got out with shotguns

to shoulders, and fired, unprovoked and without warning, on the crowd with beanbag
rounds. Four people, two of them children, were injured. Cincinnati Police Chief
defended the officers, who, he said, were ‘damn good people’. The injured thought
otherwise.

‘We cannot deny’, the mayor had said the previous day, ‘that we have a serious racial
divide’. At the time the Cincinnati police force was three-quarters white. But urban
rage still erupted in cities where blacks were in majority in the police and the
government, as the most recent uprising in Baltimore showed. On 12 April 2015,
Freddie Gray, a 25-year old black man, was arrested for no apparent reason and put to
a police van in Sandtown-Winchester, one of the most deprived neighbourhoods in the
already quite deprived and 96% black West Baltimore area. Gray was conscious when
he entered the van, but when he came out, less than an hour later, his spinal cord was
nearly severed. He died in hospital a week later. The six officers involved in his arrest,
three of them black, were later indicted on charges including second-degree murder.

Staring from 18 April, peaceful protests were organised for about a week. There was
some escalation of violence during a downtown protest on 25 April, but it was only in
the evening of 27 April, soon after Gray’s funeral, that rage erupted in the streets of
West Baltimore. The next day the mayor declared a curfew, and a 2,500-strong
National Guard arrived. Incidents continued the following day, but calm returned
gradually. The curfew was lifted on 3 May, and the National Guard withdrew the
following day.

We saw with our earlier examples that urban uprisings are triggered not by some
isolated police action, but by police practices that have long become routinized.
Baltimore 2015 was no exception. The police action that cost Gray his life was part of
an established pattern of police brutality. An investigation by Baltimore Sun revealed
that between 2011-2014, the city had to pay about $6 million in settlements to more
than 100 victims of police violence, most often blacks, including a 26-year old pregnant
woman and an 87-year old grandmother. Injuries inflicted by police officers ranged
from broken bones to organ failure, and led to death in some cases.

Serious injuries during police van rides were not unprecedented either. Baltimore
police had an established practice of going for ‘a rough ride’ – driving to harm
handcuffed but unbuckled detainees in the back of the police van – which had already
left several people paralysed by fracturing their necks.36 Just like we saw with the

police departments of Ferguson, Los Angeles and Cincinnati, Baltimore police
department has a long history of brutality and misconduct. Until Baltimore Sun’s
investigation in 2014, the city did not even keep track of its police officers who faced
multiple lawsuits because of brutality, and police officers with a history of violence
were promoted, and some even became supervisors.

What sets Baltimore apart from our other examples is that blacks hold prominent
positions in city government and police department. The city is 63% black, the mayor is
black, her police chief is black, the majority of the city council, including its president,
is black, the top prosecutor is blacks, and practically half the police force is black too.
This suggests that class, not just ‘race’, plays an important role. As we saw in the
introduction, our era of urban rage is marked by sharp inequalities unmatched since
the nineteenth-century, and cities are places where inequalities are at their starkest
and most obvious.

Sandtown, where Freddie Gray grew up, is a neighbourhood with a long history of
problems including mass unemployment, poverty, vacant buildings and crime. More
than one third of the houses are abandoned, more than one third of the residents do
not have a high school diploma, more than 20% of working-age residents are
unemployed (twice the city average), and more than a third of the families live below
the poverty line. Gray suffered lead poisoning – another unflattering feature of the
area – as a little boy, leading to educational problems later on.

Sandtown, like rest of West Baltimore where it is located, is a racially segregated
neighbourhood. Baltimore has a long history of racial segregation. It was the first
American city to legalise it in 1911 through a racially restrictive zoning law. Racial
segregation and concentrated poverty still mark Baltimore’s urban landscape. West
Baltimore residents are excluded from the privileges enjoyed by others, such as
waterfront homes, restaurants and bars – or simply good schools, jobs, a safe
environment and a living wage. There are, as a Washington Post article suggested,
‘two Baltimores, one affluent and predominantly white, the other impoverished and
largely black’. As David Bramble, a black developer, put it, it is possible to go from
‘feast to famine in a matter of blocks’ in Baltimore, just like in parts of Cincinnati.37

Material difficulties were aggravated by heavy-handed policing that targeted poor and
stigmatised neighbourhoods. In Baltimore, the seeds of rage that erupted after Gray’s
death were partly sowed during the previous mayor Martin O’Malley’s term marked by

the targeting of poor and black neighbourhoods with a zero-tolerance approach.
Hundreds of thousands were arrested, though not necessarily charged, even for minor
offenses such as loitering and littering – referred to as ‘quality of life’ arrests. This
policy got so out of control that in a single year the Baltimore police arrested
practically one in six people in the city: in 2005, more than 100,000 arrests were made
in this city of about 640,000. More than 23,000 were released without charges, which
means that the police arrested 23,000 Baltimore residents for nothing. This policy of
mass arrest was eventually challenged with a lawsuit filed in 2006, and Baltimore
agreed to pay a $870,000 settlement.38

The effects of this policy on the poor and black population of the city have been
devastating. Arrest records make it very difficult to get a job or qualify for housing.
Moreover, this mass arrest policy turned residents of areas like Sandtown into criminal
suspects in the eyes of the police, who, just like in Ferguson, were under pressure to
perform. Targeting stigmatised areas with aggressive policing – just like in Watts,
South Central, Over-the-Rhine, the ‘second’ Ferguson – created only more resentment
among residents who already had to face economic hardship and discrimination.
Arbitrary arrests and brutality did not help. Even the police officers who arrested
Freddie Gray could not provide an account suggesting Gray was involved in any
wrongdoing. Why did he run then when he saw the police? Perhaps he knew better,
as Timothy Thomas of Over-the-Rhine did, although it ended badly for both. As
Thomas’s mother had said at the time: ‘They keep asking me why did my son run. If
you are an African male, you will run’.39

As the differences between the two Los Angeles uprisings show, exclusion and
oppression are not uniquely black experiences, although blacks in the United States
have always had to face unique challenges. The Baltimore uprising suggests that class
plays an important role as well. Urban uprisings are marked by ‘race’, class and rage, as
Mike Davis observed after Los Angeles burned in 1992. The context for the uprisings in
each case we explored was prepared by inequalities, poverty, and aggressive and
targeted policing. These were, we saw, results of policy choices that hit racially
stigmatised groups hardest, rather than outcomes of inevitable trends, cultural
peculiarities, or individual pathologies.

This brings us to a central argument of this book. Urban rage builds up from systematic
exclusion and oppression, which go beyond police violence and expand to all areas of
urban life, including housing, employment, social encounters and political worth.

Urban uprisings, then, are not signs of individual flaws or cultural traits, but
manifestations of grievances that expose such problems and defy the normalised
workings of the established order. If the examples of Ferguson, Los Angeles, Cincinnati
and Baltimore have not sufficed to dispel doubts about this, or if this looks like an
American eccentricity, perhaps examples from across the Atlantic may help.

Notes

1 Joanna Walters (2015) ‘Troops referred to Ferguson protestors as “enemy forces”,
emails show’, The Guardian, 17 April
2 We will see that most of the publicised incidents involve black males. This should not
make us neglect, however, the grievances of black girls and women. In Cincinnati, for
example, activists talked about police officers routinely raping black women. A New
York Times article recently reported on this problem when a former Oklahama City
police officer was found guilty of raping black women, targeting those with criminal
backgrounds so that their stories would not be believed. See Dave Philipps (2015)
‘Former Oklahoma City Police Officer Found Guilty of Rapes, New York Times, 10
December 2015. As Treva B. Lindsey observes, ‘Black women and girls occupied a
marginal space in most discussion about Black violability, despite being on the
frontlines of protests against anti-Black state violence occurring across the nation’. See
Lindsey (2015) ‘Post-Ferguson: A “herstorical” approach to black violability’, Feminist
Studies 41(1); page 235.
3 Molly W. Metzger (2014) Section 8 in the St. Louis Region: Local Opportunities to
Expand Housing Choice (Washington University in St. Louis: Center for Social
Development)
4 Colin Gordon (2008) Mapping Decline: St. Louis and the Fate of the American City
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press); Richard Rothstein (2014) The Making
of Ferguson: Public Policies at the Root of Its Troubles (Washington, DC: Economic
Policy Institute)
5 Elizabeth Kneebone (2014) ‘Ferguson, Mo. Emblematic of growing suburban poverty’,
Brookings Institute blog, 15 August, http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/the-
avenue/posts/2014/08/15-ferguson-suburban-poverty
6 Sasha Abramsky (2013) The American Way of Poverty: How the Other Half Still Lives
(New York: Nation Books)
7 Peter Edelman (2012) So Rich, So Poor: Why It’s So Hard to End Poverty in America
(New York: The New Press)
8 Sean F Reardon and Kendra Bischoff (2011) ‘Growth in the residential segregation of
families by income, 1970-2009’, report prepared for Project US2010; John R Logan and
Brian Stults (2011) ‘The persistence of segregation in the metropolis: new findings
from the 2010 census’, census brief prepared for Project US2010
9 Elizabeth Kneebone and Emily Garr (2010) The Suburbanization of Poverty: Trends in
Metropolitan America, 2000 to 2008 (Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program).

10 Rothstein (2014) The Making of Ferguson.
11 http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/metro/why-did-the-michael-brown-shooting-
happen-here/article_678334ce-500a-5689-8658-f548207cf253.html
12 Unless otherwise stated, this section is based on this report: Department of Justice,
Investigation of the Ferguson Police Department, United States Department of Justice,
Civil Rights Division, 4 March 2015. The epigraphs are from this report, pages 13 and
12 respectively.
13 City of Ferguson, Missouri, Comprehensive Annual Financial Report for the Year
Ended June 30, 2014.
14 City of Ferguson, Missouri, Annual Operating Budget, Fiscal Year 2015-2016.
15 ArchCity Defenders (2014) Municipal Courts White Paper (St. Louis).
16 Jon Swaine (2015) ‘Ferguson judge behind aggressive fines policy owes $170,000 in
unpaid taxes’, The Guardian, 6 March
17 http://fox2now.com/2014/08/11/video-protester-justifies-the-looting-in-ferguson/
18 ‘$3-million settlement accepted in police raid’, Los Angeles Times, 6 February 1990;
‘The raid that still haunts L.A.’, Los Angeles Times, 14 March 2001; Mike Davis (1992)
City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (New York: Vintage)
19 Janet Abu-Lughod (2007) Race, Space, and Riots in Chicago, New York, and Los
Angeles (Oxford: Oxford University Press); Mike Davis (1993) ‘Uprising and repression
in L.A.’, in R. Gooding-Williams (ed.) (1993) Reading Rodney King/Reading Urban
Uprising (New York: Routledge); pp 142-54; Paul Ong and Evelyn Blumenberg (AAAA)
‘Income and racial inequality in Los Angeles’, in A. Scott (ed.) The City: Los Angeles and
Urban Theory at the End of the Twentieth Century (Berkeley: University of California
Press); pp 311-35.
20 Melvin L. Oliver et al. (1993) ‘Anatomy of a rebellion: a political-economic analysis’,
in R. Gooding-Williams (ed.) (1993) Reading Rodney King/Reading Urban Uprising (New
York: Routledge); pp 117-41; Jeremy Travis, Bruce Western and Steve Redburn (eds)
(2014) The Growth of Incarceration in the United States (Washington, D.C.: National
Research Council); page 2
21 Cited in Robert M. Fogelson (1970) ‘Violence and grievances: reflections on the
1960s’, The Journal of Social Forces 26(1); page 157.
22 Michael Omi and Howard Winant (1993) ‘The Los Angeles “race riot” and
contemporary U.S. politics’, in R. Gooding-Williams (ed.) (1993) Reading Rodney
King/Reading Urban Uprising (New York: Routledge); pp 97-114
23 Oliver et al. (1993) ‘Anatomy of a rebellion’.
24 Abu-Lughod (2007) Race, Space, and Riots.

25 David B. Oppenheimer (2010) ‘California’s anti-discrimination legislation.,
Proposition 14, and the constitutional protection of minority rights’, Golden Gate
University Law Review 40: 117-127
26 Robert M. Fogelson (1967) ‘White on black: a critique of the McCone Commission
report on the Los Angeles riots’, Political Science Quarterly 82(3): 337-67; Violence in
the City – An End or A Beginning? A Report by the Governor’s Commission on the Los
Angeles Riots, 2 December 1965 (the ‘McCone Report’).
27 Mike Davis (1992) City of Quartz.
28 Report of the Independent Commission on the Los Angeles Police Department, 1991
(the ‘Christopher Commission report’).
29 Amnesty International (1992) Torture, Ill-Treatment and Excessive Force by Police in
Los Angeles, California (New York: Amnesty International)
30 Michelle Cottle (2001) ‘Did integration cause the Cincinnati riots?’, The New Republic,
7 May: 26-9
31 Expert report of Cecil L. Thomas, United States District Court, Southern District of
Ohio, Western Division, Case No. C-1-99-317; Cottle, 2001.
32 Alice Skirtz (2012) Econocide: Elimination of the Urban Poor (Washington, DC: NASW
Press).
33 Thomas A. Dutton (2001) ‘”Violence”: in Cincinnati’, The Nation, 18 June; ‘Appeals
for peace in Ohio after two days of protests, New York Times, 12 April 2001.
34 Preliminary technical assistance recommendations to improve the Cincinnati
Division of Police, Letter from Steven H. Rosenbaum, Chief, Special Litigation Section,
Department of Justice, 23 October 2001.
35 ‘Curfew restores calm’, The Cincinnati Enquirer, 13 April 2001.
36 ‘Undue force’, The Baltimore Sun, 28 September 2014; ‘Freddie Gary not the first to
come out of Baltimore police van with serious injuries’, The Baltimore Sun, 23 April
2015.
37 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/04/28/these-two-maps-
show-the-shocking-inequality-in-baltimore/; ‘Baltimore leaders agree: city has a race
problem’, The Baltimore Sun, 14 March 2015.
38 ‘As Baltimore mayor, critics say, O’Malley’s police tactics sowed distrust’, The
Washington Post, 25 April 2015; ‘Arrests for minor crimes spur resentment in some
Baltimore neighborhoods’, The Baltimore Sun, 23 August 2015.
39 ‘Appeals for peace in Ohio after two days of protests, New York Times, 12 April 2001;
‘Why Freddie Gray ran’, The Baltimore Sun, 25 April 2015.

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