Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City

by Matthew Desmond

Throughout the twentieth century, as America modernized and its police force grew, citizens were instructed to clear the scene, to line up behind the yellow tape. The right to pursue and punish wrongdoers would come to rest with the state alone. But in the 1960s antiwar protesters began bleeding from standard-issue batons, citizens were speaking out against police brutality in minority communities, stories of entrenched corruption were being broadcast, Watts was burning, and violent crime was increasing. Facing this gust of changes, Americans began growing disenchanted with the criminal justice system. The coup de grâce was delivered in 1974 when Robert Martinson reviewed 231 relevant studies and concluded in the pages of The Public Interest that “with few and isolated exceptions, the rehabilitative efforts that have been reported so far have had no appreciable effect on recidivism.” “Nothing works,” politicians and criminologists sighed. Its authority compromised, the justice system responded schizophrenically, at once giving the police more power and resources while also bringing non-police actors into the business of crime control. On the rise and character of third-party policing, see Matthew Desmond and Nicol Valdez, “Unpolicing the Urban Poor: Consequences of Third Party Policing on Inner-City Women,” American Sociological Review 78 (2013): 117–41; David Garland, The Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order in Contemporary Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Pr...