Description: 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.Brief description:
Scott Jacques is associate professor of criminal justice and criminology in the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies at Georgia State University. He is coauthor of Code of the Suburb, published by the University of Chicago Press.
Review Quotes: "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"