By: Chris Herring

Over the past 30 years, cities across the United States have adopted quality-of-life ordinances aimed at policing social marginality. Scholars have documented zero-tolerance policing and emerging tactics of therapeutic policing in these efforts, but little attention has been paid to 911 calls and forms of third-party policing in governing public space and the poor. Drawing on an analysis of 3.9 million 911 and 311 call records and participant observation alongside police officers, social workers, and homeless men and women residing on the streets of San Francisco, this article elaborates a model of “complaint-oriented policing” to explain additional causes and consequences of policing visible poverty. Situating the police within a broader bureaucratic field of poverty governance, I demonstrate how policing aimed at the poor can be initiated by callers, organizations, and government agencies, and how police officers manage these complaints in collaboration and conflict with health, welfare, and sanitation agencies. Expanding the conception of the criminalization of poverty, which is often centered on incarceration or arrest, the study reveals previously unforeseen consequences of move-along orders, citations, and threats that dispossess the poor of property, create barriers to services and jobs, and increase vulnerability to violence and crime.

American Sociological Review 1 –32

By Hyunjung Cheon, Kayla Freemon, Charles M. Katz

Legal socialization is the process by which individuals obtain their attitudes and beliefs about formal social control mechanisms such as the police, including how these are formed through domains of social life. These attitudes and subsequent beliefs toward the police, whether positive or negative, have been found to impact individuals' compliance with the law and cooperation with legal authorities. Despite research advancements on legal socialization, the theoretical hypotheses drawn from this perspective have not been tested in the Caribbean context, a high crime and violence setting where the police are often viewed as corrupt, untrustworthy, and ineffective. This study uses data from 4,293 youths to examine the effect of socializing agents (i.e., family, school, and peers) on youth perceptions of the police in three nations - Guyana, St. Kitts and Nevis, and St. Lucia - and whether these perceptions impact delinquency. We find that legal socialization domains and perceptions of the police are important factors that influence delinquency in the Caribbean. Implications are discussed in light of future research and policy.

island Studies Journal, 18 (1): 30-51, 2023.I Vol. 18

By David Garland

From the cover: The past 30 years have seen vast changes in our attitudes toward crime. More and more of us live in gated communities; prison popula­tions have skyrocketed; and issues such as racial profiling, community policing, and “zero- tolerance” policies dominate the headlines. How is it that our response to crime and our sense of criminal justice have come to be so dramatically reconfigured? David Garland charts the changes in crime and criminal jus­tice in America and Britain over the past twen­ty-five years, showing how they have been shaped by two underlying social forces: the dis­tinctive social organization of late modernity and the neoconservative politics that came to dominate the United States and the United Kingdom in the 1980s. Garland explains how the new policies of crime and punishment, welfare and security— and the changing class, race, and gender rela­tions that underpin them—are linked to the fundamental problems of governing contempo­rary societies, as states, corporations, and pri­vate citizens grapple with a volatile economy and a culture that combines expanded person­al freedom with relaxed social controls. It is the risky, unfixed character of modern life that underlies our accelerating concern with con­trol and crime control in particular. It is not just crime that has changed; society has changed as well, and this transformation has reshaped criminological thought, public policy, and the cultural meaning of crime and crimi­nals. David Garland’s The Culture of Control offers a brilliant guide to this process and its still-reverberating consequences..

Chicago. University of Chicago Press. 2001. 304p.