Cover of Code of the Suburb
Code of the Suburb Inside the World of Young Middle-Class Drug Dealers
by Scott Jacques and Richard Wright
University of Chicago Press, 2015
Cloth: 978-0-226-16408-3 | Paper: 978-0-226-16411-3 | Electronic: 978-0-226-16425-0
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226164250.001.0001

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ABOUT THIS BOOKAUTHOR BIOGRAPHYREVIEWSTABLE OF CONTENTS

ABOUT THIS BOOK

When we think about young people dealing drugs, we tend to picture it happening on urban streets, in disadvantaged, crime-ridden neighborhoods. But drugs are used everywhere—even in upscale suburbs and top-tier high schools—and teenage users in the suburbs tend to buy drugs from their peers, dealers who have their own culture and code, distinct from their urban counterparts.
 
In Code of the Suburb, Scott Jacques and Richard Wright offer a fascinating ethnography of the culture of suburban drug dealers. Drawing on fieldwork among teens in a wealthy suburb of Atlanta, they carefully parse the complicated code that governs relationships among buyers, sellers, police, and other suburbanites. That code differs from the one followed by urban drug dealers in one crucial respect: whereas urban drug dealers see violent vengeance as crucial to status and security, the opposite is true for their suburban counterparts. As Jacques and Wright show, suburban drug dealers accord status to deliberate avoidance of conflict, which helps keep their drug markets more peaceful—and, consequently, less likely to be noticed by law enforcement.
 
Offering new insight into both the little-studied area of suburban drug dealing, and, by extension, the more familiar urban variety, Code of the Suburb will be of interest to scholars and policy makers alike.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Scott Jacques is assistant professor of criminal justice and criminology in the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies at Georgia State University. Richard Wright is professor of criminal justice and criminology in the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies at Georgia State University.

REVIEWS

“Long interested in the exotic ‘other,’ criminologists typically focus on trying to understand urban crime problems and neglect those occurring in boring, white suburbs. Yet, with its manicured lawns and American flags flying, suburbia is so obviously artificial that it surely is masking something worthy of the criminologist’s gaze. In this fascinating book, Jacques and Wright get behind the picket fences and gated communities and help us understand suburbia in an entirely new light. It is sure to become a classic in ‘suburban studies.’”
— Shadd Maruna, Dean and Professor, Rutgers School of Criminal Justice

“Code of the Suburb takes us into the world of young white suburban drug dealing and in doing so, provides a fascinating and powerful counterpoint to the devastation of the drug war in poor, minority communities. To readers familiar with that context, the absence of police and prisons—indeed, of virtually any negative consequences for selling and using drugs—is quite striking.”
— Alice Goffman, author of On the Run

“With the advent of self-report surveys in the 1940s and 1950s, social scientists learned that delinquent activity was fairly common among white, middle class, suburban youth. However, not much was ever made of the finding for our understanding of suburban life. In Code of the Suburb, Jacques and Wright explore drug dealing in a middle class suburb and in doing so shift our conceptual lens away from popular images captured in The Wire. Drawing on a series of rich qualitative interviews with thirty young suburban drug dealers, Jacques and Wright uncover surprising similarities between white, suburban, middle class dealers and their black, urban, lower class counterparts. But differences between the two groups are stark, especially regarding victimization, use of violence, and encounters with legal authorities such as the police. For social scientists studying race, class, and drug dealing, I strongly urge you to include this book on your must read list.”
— John H. Laub, University of Maryland, former director, National Institute of Justice

“If you think adolescent drug dealing invariably leads to trouble with the law, you should read this book. If you think drug dealing promotes violence, you should read this book. If you think drug dealing is for antisocial ‘losers,’ read this book. You will learn that selling drugs in suburbia confers social status, rarely involves legal risk or violence, and need not disrupt conventional academic and career paths. In a word, you will learn why so many American middle-class kids think drug selling is cool.”
— Richard Rosenfeld,, Founders Professor of Crimonology and Criminal Justice, University of Missouri-St. Louis

“Jacques and Wright’s Code of the Suburb provides a very up close and personal look into the lives of several adolescent drug dealers. These personal interviews allow the reader to understand and recognize the real reasons these youth proceed into drug dealing, along with evidence and theories provided by Jacques and Wright that further support these notions. This book describes a community that some of America would probably wish to ignore, as it could be viewed as a mere blemish on our perfectly constructed society. However, it is critical that we recognize and research all facets of our society to better our understanding of adolescents and what motivates them to harm or contribute to society.”
— Journal of Youth and Adolescence

“Code of the Suburb provides real-life evidence to support criminological concepts and theories such as the failure of informal social control, drift, and differential association. It addresses how racial factors play a role, and how female youths are missing in the big picture. . . . The authors provide here a good start to bridging the gap between the guesswork and reality of the middle-class drug economy. It is a particularly important book for social science researchers to grasp in amending the prevalent view of the dark figure of youth crime.”
— Criminal Law and Criminal Justice Books

“Jacques and Wright succeed at providing an intriguing description of an understudied population of drug dealers without resorting to embellishment or exaggeration. Their straightforward account of ‘suburban coolness’ is enriched with a theoretically informed comparative analysis drawing attention to differences between urban and suburban drug dealing and deftly exposing micro- and macro-level structural inequalities. The valuable contribution this book offers to social scientists and students interested in drugs and crime is apparent in the last chapter, but the first seven chapters provide the unique insights into middle-class drug dealing that make this contribution significant. . . . Few books offer insight on drug dealing in middle-class suburban environments. Code of the Suburb provides the contrast needed for a more in-depth understanding of the structural, social, and cultural distinctions between ‘the pursuit of coolness’ and ‘in search of respect.’”
— Contemporary Sociology

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgments


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226164250.003.0000


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226164250.003.0001
[coolness, drug selling, drug use, extra money, free drugs, lameness, peers, status]
Chapter 1 addresses how and why the participants began and persisted in their drug selling career. As teenagers, the dealers realize that they lack what they perceive as conventional success: a professional career that generates enough money to buy what they need and want. They compensate by aspiring to obtain and maintain a more immediately achievable kind of status--coolness, the opposite of which is lameness. Coolness and lameness derive from two traits: attractiveness and likeableness. People are perceived as cool to the extent they are attractive and likeable. In some subcultural circles, illicit drug use serves as evidence that someone is likeable and, if done with peers, provides the opportunity to exhibit likeable traits. Illicit drug use, however, can quickly become expensive. Therefore, some adolescents turn to drug selling as a way to obtain "free drugs." Drug selling also provides “extra cash” and a more central place among peers. (pages 5 - 24)


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226164250.003.0002
[drug deals , securing a supply, suburbia]
Chapter 2 addresses how the participants establish a connection to a supplier, get their hands on enough cash to make a bulk purchase, and conduct their transactions. In securing a supply, the dealers turned to friends, co-workers, or friends-of-friends. These suppliers were demographically and geographically similar to the dealers: white, middle-class, and living in suburbia. Dealers obtained the funds needed to purchase an initial supply of drugs from parents in the form of gifts (e.g., birthday money) or from working a part-time job; on occasion, dealers acquired drugs on credit from suppliers. Drug deals were conducted in private residences or in vehicles at public places such as strip mall parking lots. (pages 25 - 41)


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226164250.003.0003
[coolness, customers, drug deals]
Chapter 3 addresses how the participants establish a connection to customers, arrange and carry out transactions, and set prices. Customers sold to friends, friends-of-friends, and co-workers. Drug deals were made either inside private residences or inside vehicles at parking lots of public places; most sales were initiated with a cell phone call. The amount of drugs provided to a customer for a particular price depended on the dealer's perception of the buyer's coolness. Dealers "hooked up" cooler buyers with more drugs for their money, but ripped-off off lamer buyers by hiking the price or defrauding them. (pages 42 - 65)


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226164250.003.0004
[Deterrence, Drug deals, police, parents, legal sanctions, parental trouble]
Chapter 4 addresses how dealers feel about the possibility of trouble with police or parents, the certainty and severity of legal and parental sanctions, and how they tried to avoid these problems. Dealers were worried about police and the severity of legal sanctions, but believed that the chance of this happening was miniscule. Dealers also feared parental trouble, albeit less so, which was more common, but nonetheless rare. Parents often sought to ignore or minimize the problem by denying evidence or issuing markedly mild sanctions. Dealers engaged in a number of techniques designed to limit the likelihood of legal and parental trouble. Some of these techniques entailed limiting the frequency and size of drugs sales, meaning that these sanction threats had a restrictive deterrence effect. (pages 66 - 81)


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226164250.003.0005
[drug deals, fraud, prevention, robbery, theft , victimization, violence]
Chapter 5 addresses the kinds of victimizations experienced by the dealers, how and why they occurred, and what the dealers did to prevent them. As with legal and parental trouble, the dealers perceived the odds of serious victimization as being low but nonetheless took precautions to avoid such problems. Their prevention strategies included target hardening, hiding possessions, customer and supplier filtering, keeping business straight and minimizing the seriousness of frauds, avoiding credit, and paying down debts as quickly as possible. The kinds of victimizations experienced by dealers included fraud, unseen theft, and robbery. Fraud was by far the most common, followed by unseen theft. Robbery was rare; when it did occur, the violence was mild in nature, with bruising being the worst injury, though on a few occasions guns were used to threaten the dealers. (pages 82 - 97)


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226164250.003.0006
[avoidance, code of the suburb, conflict management, negotiation, retaliation, social control, toleration, victimization, violence]
Chapter 6 addresses how the dealers responded to being victimized. Most affronts were handled with peaceful forms of conflict management, namely toleration, avoidance, or negotiation. Far less common was sneaky retaliation, such as defrauding victimizers, stealing from them, or vandalizing their property. Each form of social control has its own benefits and costs; generally, however, dealers used non-violent forms of social control because they were taught and lived by a "code of the suburb" that militates against the use of retaliatory violence. Yet there were a few times that dealers reacted to victimization by threating or using physical force against the victimizer. Almost always, the threats were empty. When physical force occurred, it was of an almost trivial nature; weapons were not used by retaliators, and the worst injury they inflicted was minor bruising. (pages 98 - 121)


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226164250.003.0007
[desistance, drug dealing, legal trouble, victimization, parental trouble, turning point]
Chapter 7 addresses how legal and parental trouble as well as victimization served as positive turning points in the lives of dealers. Motivating this change is a desire to protect their short- and long-term identities and life prospects. Legal trouble was faced by just two dealers, and both immediately quit selling drugs. Serious victimization, such as being robbed or losing a large amount of money or drugs to fraud or theft, also served to spur the desistance process, though the effect was less immediate. Legal trouble and serious victimization were often accompanied by trouble with parents, which amplified their deterrent effect. However, experiencing parental trouble in and of itself did not move dealers to quit, perhaps because parents limited the severity of punishment. Some dealers did not experience any of these problems, but nevertheless terminated their selling after witnessing others fall prey to them, leading to a recalculation of the costs and benefits of drug dealing. (pages 122 - 136)


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226164250.003.0008
[African American, code of the street, coolness, drug selling, conventional status, suburb, urban, white]
The concluding chapter addresses how the suburban, middle-class, mostly white dealers featured in this book compare to the urban, lower-class, African American dealers who have been the focus of many prior studies. These two groups are both similar and different. Each, for example, pursues coolness via drug selling as a way to compensate for their current lack of conventional status and success. Yet they differ in the risks they face, their ways of handling conflict, and in their structural opportunities for conventional success. Put another way, the similarities explain why members of both groups sell drugs, whereas the differences explain why the middle-class, suburban sellers may be more easily persuaded to desist than their lower-class, urban counterparts. (pages 137 - 164)

Notes

References

Index

Book published by University of Chicago Press, 2015. Page maintained by BiblioVault.