Doctoral Dissertation Research: Regulating the destitute: A case study of how street people are regulated in an urban public space

New York University, New York NY

Investigators

Abstract

This project examines how a population of "street people" are policed and otherwise regulated as they live out their days, and many of their nights, in and around the Journal Square Transportation Center in Jersey City, New Jersey. The project takes aim at theories which claim that American criminal justice institutions function either to punitively contain the destitute and disorderly elements of the poor in racialized and isolated ghettos or, failing that aim, to ?warehouse? them in jails and prisons. This project proposes that street people are not being contained in racialized ghettos. And far from being isolated, the study hypothesizes that while there is a police station inside the transportation center and the spaces in and around the transportation center are under constant video surveillance, the police only occasionally make arrests of street people or attempt to remove them to another area. This is despite the fact that most of the street people who regularly spend time in Journal Square consistently engage in a range of deviant and criminal activities. Thus, this project asks: How can this situation exist in a society in which criminal justice institutions purportedly function to criminalize and quarantine the destitute and disorderly elements of the urban poor? Why are the police and other social control agents unwilling or unable to remove street people from the spaces in and around the transportation center or more effectively control their behavior? How does regulation in these spaces work if not in the ways that existing theories about the governance of the urban poor suggest? And what do the answers to these questions suggest about the nature and functions of social control in American cities today? This project aims to contribute to an understanding of how the urban poor in the United States are governed. The findings will be relevant to a broad range of audiences, including policy makers and practitioners who develop and institute policies in this area.