Dealing with disorder
| Author | Steve Herbert,Katherine Beckett |
| DOI | 10.1177/1362480607085792 |
| Published date | 01 February 2008 |
| Date | 01 February 2008 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Dealing with disorder
Social control in the post-industrial city
KATHERINE BECKETT AND STEVE HERBERT
University of Washington, USA
Abstract
Over the past two decades, municipal governments across the
United States have adopted novel social control techniques
including off-limits orders, parks exclusion laws, and other
applications of trespass law. These new tools are used to exclude the
socially marginal from contested public spaces. These new social
control techniques fuse criminal and civil legal authority and are
touted as ‘alternatives’ to arrest and incarceration. Ironically, these
new techniques nonetheless increase the number of behaviors and
people defined as criminal and subject to formal social control. This
article describes these legal innovations and considers their origins
and theoretical implications. We argue that recognition of law’s
constitutive effects helps to explain the origins and nature of the
urban social control innovations described here.
Key Words
broken windows policing •neoliberalism •spatial governmentality •
urban social control
Recent developments in urban social control have been the subject of much
commentary. Geographers, sociologists, criminologists, and others have
called attention to new architectural forms of socio-spatial exclusion as well
as to the popularity of ‘broken windows’ policing and the ‘civility’ laws that
are ostensibly aimed at enhancing order and security. Although there is sig-
nificant variation in the extent to which these techniques are employed, it is
clear that municipal governments across the United States are implementing
new legal tools aimed at cleaning up contested urban spaces (see Davis,
Theoretical Criminology
© 2008 SAGE Publications
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Vol. 12(1): 5–30; 1362–4806
DOI: 10.1177/1362480607085792
5
1992; Kelling and Coles, 1996; Duneier, 1999; Parenti, 1999; Sanchez,
2001; American Prosecutors Research Institute (APRI), 2004; Murphy and
Venkatesh, 2006; National Coalition for the Homeless, 2006).1
Some academic work seeks to legitimate these developments, defining
them as defensible extensions of criminal law aimed at keeping public
spaces crime- and nuisance-free (Kelling and Coles, 1996; Felson, 2002).
More critical analyses have generally been situated in one of two theoreti-
cal frameworks. Political-economic accounts attribute the intensification of
urban social control efforts to the ascendance of neoliberal global capital-
ism and the transformation of the urban economy that has accompanied
this reconfiguration of political power and social policy (Davis, 1992;
Parenti, 1999; Smith, 2001; Gibson, 2003; Mitchell, 2003). Other analysts
employ a Foucauldian framework that conceptualizes the new urban social
control techniques as novel forms of governance and highlights the differ-
ences in logic that arguably distinguish newer, ‘post-disciplinary’ techniques
from modernist mechanisms of control (see Simon, 1993a; Ewick, 1998;
Merry, 2001; Sanchez, 2001).
This article extends these literatures in two ways. First, we describe a
number of new techniques that are increasingly employed by municipalities
across the country. Although the techniques upon which we focus build
upon the civility codes, these new social control practices rest upon a com-
plex mixture of civil, administrative, and criminal legal authority, and have
been touted by proponents as alternatives to arrest and incarceration. They
work nonetheless to expand the number of behaviors subject to investiga-
tion, arrest, and incarceration. These new techniques include off-limits
orders and the creation of zones of exclusion, parks exclusion laws, and
new applications of trespass law. We argue that these developments are sig-
nificant for many reasons: they enhance and extend the segregative effects
of architectural modes of exclusion as well as the ‘civility’ laws, undermine
constitutional rights and due process, disperse and extend state surveillance
throughout the urban environment, and contribute to the expansion of
modernist institutions of control.
After describing some of the newest additions to US cities’ social control
arsenal, we consider their theoretical origins and implications. We suggest
that the political-economic perspective provides a compelling account of the
attractions of intensified urban social control efforts to urban developers
and officials, and enumerate the insights afforded by the Foucauldian
perspective on postmodern forms of governance. We also argue, however,
that recognition of law’s constitutive power is crucial for comprehending
the particular form the new techniques have taken. By emphasizing law’s
unintended and contradictory effects, the constitutive perspective enables
us to appreciate how the Supreme Court’s invalidation of the traditional
vagrancy and loitering statutes fueled and shaped the quest for legal alter-
natives to them.
This article unfolds in four parts. In the first section, we describe recent
developments in urban social control, including the rise of what Mike Davis
Theoretical Criminology 12(1)6
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