Abstract
While much criminal justice research focuses on crime in urban communities, this book focusses on suburban drug selling. Employing an ethnographic approach, the authors Jacques and Wright share in-depth information derived from detailed interviews with the reader, providing a deep understanding of the suburban drug culture in one suburban community. Scott Jacques is an assistant professor of criminal justice and criminology at Georgia State University and Richard Wright is a professor of criminology there. Both authors have other publications that examine drug offending and interviews of criminals, and each has published in top-tier journals.
While the book title is clearly referencing Elijah Anderson’s (1999) Code of the Street, it examines a very different group of youth. In their clear and simple style of writing, Jacques and Wright present an inside look at middle-class young adults who sell drugs to be cool, to support their own drug habits, or to earn a little bit of extra spending money. Through interviews with 30 individuals aged 18–23 years who grew up in a middle-class suburb of Georgia, the authors guide the reader through a journey of middle-class values where most drug sellers interviewed had good relationships with their law-abiding parents, had jobs (albeit often low-paying ones), owned cars, and stayed in school, aspiring to one day have a good career and desisting their drug selling.
The authors immediately immerse the reader into an explanation from the sellers themselves as to why they sell drugs in the first chapter entitled the “Pursuit of Coolness,” emphasizing the importance of reputation and perceived coolness. Chapters 2 and 3 delve into detail about the process of drug selling in suburbia in terms of the players, their suppliers, the consumers, and how and where the transactions typically occur. They also shed light on sellers’ techniques for stashing their stashes, to whom the sellers are most likely to give better deals and why, and how they deal with a lack of supply when that invariably occurs.
In Chapter 4, the authors focus on how risk is perceived related to parents and the law. Parents of the subjects interviewed for this book minimize their suspicions and accept excuses, inadvertently allowing the drug selling and using to persist, sometimes despite considerable evidence and weak explanations. Chapter 5 explains victimization and how the drug sellers aim to minimize any harm that might come to them, being part of illegal dealings, and cognizant of possible risks they were taking on by selling. Chapter 6 discusses how the drug sellers deal with their victimizations, breaking their responses into five possibilities: tolerating, avoiding, negotiating, paying back sneakily, or in rare extreme cases, hitting back. Sneaky payback could involve unnoticed theft, vandalism, or fraud (shorting the customer who victimized them in the past). The authors repeatedly note that the drug sellers in this suburban town are opposed to violence, as the wider culture in which they live is as well.
In Chapter 7, two individuals interviewed discuss their arrests. The narrative reveals how race and money played roles in the dismissals of their cases. In the first case, the arrested young man’s attorney got the vehicle search where the marijuana was found thrown out as an illegal search, while in the second case, the district attorney dismissed the case perhaps because the defendants in that case stood out as not worth the court’s time, though the initial charge was five counts of drug trafficking (later reduced to intent to distribute before being dismissed). The subsection is entitled “Punishment works” yet the offenders arrested suffered only the pains of the process and punishment by their parents, typically the loss of their drugs along with proceeds from their drug sales.
As revealed in the final chapter entitled “The Bigger Picture,” Jacques and Wright provide a much-needed comparison of urban and suburban drug selling. Their research reveals a number of similarities between suburban and urban areas, but the cultural and financial capital of the suburbanites is much greater, which leads to less risky behaviors overall on the part of the suburban sellers. For example, the sample interviewed for this research sell exclusively or primarily to friends or close acquaintances, hide drugs in their vehicles, taking care to consider quantity in case they get caught, and often hiding drugs in plain sight (fast-food bags in their messy vehicles). Suburban drug sellers also experience lower risks of victimization because of a wider cultural value that frowns upon violence in their suburban community, even among the sellers and their clientele. Suburban drug sellers may sell for money and status within a smaller subset of the community (their peers), but the risks and wider societal values influence their actions and the consequences arising therefrom.
This book presents a much-needed examination of a subculture often ignored by researchers, though the focus is narrow and may not be generalizable. Much more research is needed on crimes in places outside the city limits. While criminological theories and theories of victimology are often not directly referenced, criminology or victimology instructors could require students to view the data presented through the lens of a particular theory. So many theories could be applied, including rational choice theory, routine activities theory, strain theories, conflict theory, and cultural theories, to name a few.
I envision this book as the beginning of greater attention in the broader research paid to suburban (or even rural) areas. Studies like this one need to be replicated to determine the level of generalizability. If the individuals interviewed for this book can be productive members of society, then that adds further support for ending the war on drugs. Further research could follow-up on them and their pursuits, accomplishments, and setbacks.