Banished by Beckett

Banished by Beckett

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.

"Like a phoenix rising from the ashes, the practices of banishment have returnedIn this fascinating and important book, Katherine Beckett and Steve Herbert critically engage the renaissance of archaic forms of exclusion in contemporary society. The authors brilliantly demonstrate how this new arsenal of refurbished legal tools--off-limit orders, anti-loitering ordinances, park exclusion orders, civil gang injunctions, public housing trespass programs, SODAs, SOAPs, and ASBOs--increasingly delimit zones of exclusion from which so many of our fellow citizens are banished. This book is a must read for anyone interested in modern society and our current practices of social control." --Bernard E. Harcourt, Julius Kreeger Professor of Law and Political Science, University of Chicago "In a striking and original analysis, Beckett and Herbert provide an important case study of new barriers that exclude the poor and homeless from America's urban centers. Erected by municipal government and enforced by police, this new regulation of urban space produces a profound criminalization of poverty. Contributing as much to the study of social inequality as criminology, Banished offers an important lesson in how the formal apparatus of crime control has come to widely regulate the lives of America's urban poor." --Bruce Western, Professor of Sociology, Harvard University "In Banished, Katherine Beckett and Steve Herbert powerfully expose the shifting contours of urban social exclusion and marginalization at the street level. They highlight the manner in which banishment is enforced through novel control tools, "civility codes" and policing strategies of spatial exclusion from certain urban zones as well as the impact of such tactics on marginalized groups within the population. This is a story with broad ramifications and relevance beyond Seattle and deserves to be widely read by anyone interested in the fate of modern cities and the changing face of urban social control." --Adam Crawford, Professor of Criminology, University of Leeds "In drafting viable solutions to urban problems, academics and policymakers can learn much from Beckett and Herbert's case study... Beckett and Herbert have made an important contribution in helping us to understand that banishment is clearly not a step in the right direction." --Gwendolyn Dordick, Lecturer in the Department of Sociology, City College of New York "Banished is an important contribution to the literature on urban inequality, space and crime, and punishment as they percolate throughout various disciplines. It will be of particular interest to readers of crime and punishment, urban theory, social inequality and justice, and law and society. The range of perspectives in the book helps us appreciate the role of banishment in crime control and to understand how attempts to attack the victims and symptoms of social problems rather than their root causes only produces an increase in both." --Lucia Trimbur, Dept. of Sociology, John Jay College, & Dept. of Criminal Justice, The Graduate Center, CUNY "This is a book I would recommend for those interested in equality, civility and poverty as well as a more academic audience of teachers, graduate and undergraduate students. It is an enjoyable and informative read. ... In drafting viable solutions to urban problems, academics and policy makers can learn much from Beckett and Herbert's case study." --Contemporary Sociology

Katherine Beckett: 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) Steve Herbert: 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).

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780195395174
ISBN 10	0195395174
Title	Banished
Author	Katherine Beckett
Series	Studies In Crime And Public Policy
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Oxford University Press Inc
Year published	2009-11-26
Number of pages	216
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.