Down, Out, and Under Arrest
Policing and Everyday Life in Skid Row
Down, Out, and Under Arrest
Policing and Everyday Life in Skid Row
Juliette, a woman he met during that time, has been stopped by police well over one hundred times, arrested upward of sixty times, and has given up more than a year of her life serving week-long jail sentences. Her most common crime? Simply sitting on the sidewalk—an arrestable offense in LA.
Why? What purpose did those arrests serve, for society or for Juliette? How did we reach a point where we’ve cut support for our poorest citizens, yet are spending ever more on policing and prisons? That’s the complicated, maddening story that Stuart tells in Down, Out and Under Arrest, a close-up look at the hows and whys of policing poverty in the contemporary United States. What emerges from Stuart’s years of fieldwork—not only with Skid Row residents, but with the police charged with managing them—is a tragedy built on mistakes and misplaced priorities more than on heroes and villains. He reveals a situation where a lot of people on both sides of this issue are genuinely trying to do the right thing, yet often come up short. Sometimes, in ways that do serious harm.
At a time when distrust between police and the residents of disadvantaged neighborhoods has never been higher, Stuart’s book helps us see where we’ve gone wrong, and what steps we could take to begin to change the lives of our poorest citizens—and ultimately our society itself—for the better.
352 pages | 13 halftones, 2 maps | 6 x 9 | © 2016
Political Science: Public Policy, Race and Politics
Sociology: Race, Ethnic, and Minority Relations, Urban and Rural Sociology
Reviews
Table of Contents
Map of Skid Row
Part I Fixing the Poor
1 The Rise of Therapeutic Policing
2 From Rabble Management to Recovery Management
Part II Becoming Copwise
3 Training for Survival
4 Cooling Off the Block
5 Policing the Police
Conclusion
Methodological Appendix: An Inconvenient Ethnography
Acknowledgments
Notes
References
Index
Awards
Choice Magazine: CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title Awards
Won
The University of Chicago Press: Gordon J. Laing Award
Won
American Society of Criminology: Michael J. Hindelang Award
Won
ASA Community and Urban Sociology Section: Robert E. Park Award
Won
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