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Introduction
- NYU Press
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Introduction During the 1980s and early 1990s, the quality of everyday life in New York City underwent dramatic changes, suffering the twin scourges of rising crime and disorder. In 1991, the city’s crime rate peaked at its highest level ever, with more than two thousand homicides , and homeless encampments, panhandlers, and drug dealers became a normal part of the urban landscape. Then in a major shift, by the year 2000, homelessness was largely erased from public view, and crime had dropped to the lowest level in forty years. Somehow, the quality of daily life for millions of New Yorkers had been restored. There was, however, a darker side to this miraculous transformation. By 2004, homelessness reached its highest levels since the Great Depression , with both more than 100,000 New Yorkers relying on emergency shelter at some point during the year and new aggressive policing tactics , which resulted in the incarceration of tens of thousands of people for a wide variety of minor offenses such as drinking or urinating in public, blocking subway stairways, and sleeping in public parks. This transformation in the quality of life in New York and many other American cities was more than the creation of some new policing tactics or the construction of a new philosophy of the socially marginal. Rather, it was a melding of the two into a coherent new approach toward social control. This “quality-of-life” paradigm emerged as a set of concrete social control practices united by a political philosophy that explained the nature of homelessness and disorder as one of personal responsibility and established punitive methods for restoring social order and public civility. In the process, it changed the way that cities dealt with welfare reform, community development, and policing practices in general. The quality-of-life paradigm is a way of reorienting the efforts of city government away from directly improving the lives of the disenfranchised and toward restoring social order in the city’s public spaces. This 1 paradigm blames the current crisis on permissive social policies and calls for the implementation of a variety of punitive social control practices directed at minor incivilities as the way to restore neighborhood stability. While the previous paradigm of urban liberalism placed a premium on social tolerance, government planning, and rehabilitation, the new paradigm was driven by a concern with social intolerance, marketand volunteer-driven mechanisms of social change, and punitiveness. The quality-of-life agenda did more than just criminalize homeless people. It helped transform the way these cities addressed a whole range of social problems. Prostitution, graffiti, and young men hanging out on street corners, as well as panhandlers and squeegee men, were viewed as a source rather than a symptom of urban decline. The government’s response was to treat these groups as a major threat to public order and to place them at the center of new aggressive policing tactics and punitive social policies. Part of the innovation of “quality of life” is how it grouped and used punitive tactics rather than rehabilitative or structural reforms. Society at large usually is indifferent to the means that the police use to maintain order on the edges of society. The police have always treated those on the margins of society in a repressive manner. Vagrancy and loitering laws, roundups of drunks and prostitutes, and the meting out of street justice in the form of physical attacks and personal indignities in a hidden late-night world of alleys, park benches, and skid-row sidewalks have been routine elements of urban life since the creation of police forces more than 150 years ago. Yet the daily lives of social outcasts have rarely been the focus of social movements, political speeches, or popular culture. What made the criminalization of homelessness in the 1990s new was that it transcended this popular disinterest. That is, the public attitude toward the issue of homeless and socially marginal people changed from passive sympathy to active antagonism. In the process , much of the political landscape of urban America was transformed. This book is about the rise, dynamics, and consequences of a punitive approach to the urban social problems that developed in many American cities during the 1980s and 1990s. As homelessness, crime, and public disorder began to emerge as major social problems in the 1980s, local politicians, economic elites, and local community groups looked for new ways of restoring stability to the urban environment. As part of this process, a new philosophy of urban...