Banished The New Social Control In Urban America

With rising urban poverty and decreased affordable housing, the homeless and other disorderly people continue to occupy public space in many American cities. Concerned about the alleged ill effects of visible homelessness, many cities embrace zero tolerance or broken window policing efforts to clear streets of unwanted people. Banished explores a new and consequential form of these policing tactics. In many American cities today, undesirable people are banned from occupying certain spaces. Once zoned out, they are subject to arrest if they return. In this way, the power of the police to monitor and arrest thousands of city dwellers is tremendously enhanced. This book uses Seattle as a case study to demonstrate how contemporary banishment works and to explore its consequences. Drawing upon an extensive body of data, Katherine Beckett and Steve Herbert chart the rise of banishment in Seattle and demonstrate its significance. Although the practice of banishment allows police and other criminal justice officials to say that they are responding to concerns about urban disorders, it is a highly questionable public policy. Banishment is expensive and does not reduce the underlying conditions that generate urban poverty. Interviews with the banished themselves reveal that exclusion makes their lives immeasurably more difficult, and their path to self-sufficiency more arduous. Banished provides an informed analysis of urban dynamics that are typically ignored in public policy discussions, even as they shape the life experiences of countless citizens.

KB: Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and the Law, Societies & Justice Program at the University of Washington in Seattle and author of (with Theodore Sasson). 2000, 2004. The Politics of Injustice: Crime and Punishment, 2E (Sage 2004) and Making Crime Pay: Law and Order in Contemporary American Politics (OUP 1997; sales hc: 1,188 pb: 2,271) SH: Professor in the Department of Geography and Law, Societies & Justice Program at the University of Washington in Seattle; author of Citizens, Cops, and Power: Recognizing the Limits of Community (Chicago , 2006) and Policing Space: Territoriality and the Los Angeles Police Department (Minnesota, 1997).