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BOOK REVIEW

Banished: The New Social Control in Urban America

Reviewed by Wm. Thomas Hill*

BOOK REVIEWED: Katherine Beckett and Steve Herbert, Banished:
The New Social Control in Urban America. New York: Oxford UP,
2010
Banished: The New Social Control in Urban America by Katherine Beckett
and Steve Herbert examines the way trespass laws have been enacted to authorize
law enforcement officers to give people trespass admonishments. A trespassadmonishment restricts a person from entering a particular area or district for a
specific period of time usually anywhere from three months to a year. If theperson violates their trespass admonishment, they can be arrested and taken
before a judge. The judge may then issue a trespass exclusion which means thatthe person is permanently banned from that area. Violation of a trespass exclusion could mean time in prison. Essentially, police officers are free to decide who
is suitable to be in a specific urban community. The argument for trespass
exclusions rests on the argument that “the world is fairly neatly divided between
the orderly and the clearly identifiable disorderly” (Beckett and Herbert 105), andfurthermore that the police are qualified to judge this distinction.
While Beckett and Herbert’s focus is Seattle, Washington, they are quick topoint out that this and similar policies have spread throughout most of the major
cities in the United States. Vagrancy laws were abolished in the United States in
the 1960s. They were, in fact, declared unconstitutional by the United States
Supreme Court. However, much the same as Jim Crow laws were enacted throughout the southern states to prevent Afro-American people from voting in spite of
their constitutional right to do so, trespass laws have been enacted to exclude
certain people from occupying public space. As Bernard Harcourt has pointed* Professor, Department of English Literature, Sophia University, Tokyo, Japan.

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out, this “new order-maintenance approach to criminal justice . . . merged in
1980s and 1990s” (2). Since the early 1980s, metropolitan areas from Boston and
New York to Los Angeles and from Seattle to Miami have gotten around theconstitutionality issue by reframing the narrative. Rather than excluding people
because they are homeless, these new trespass laws exclude them for being at therisk of engaging in illicit activities such as purchasing and selling drugs or engaging
in prostitution.
This notion of determining those who are “at the risk of” committing offences arises out of what has become popularly known as the “Broken Window
Policy” originally outlined in “The Police and Neighborhood Safety” published in
Atlantic Monthly in 1982 by James Wilson and George Kelling and later expanded
on in Fixing Broken Windows by George Kelling and Catherine Coles which will
be referred to later in this review. Beckett and Herbert explain broken windows asfollows:
For Wilson and Kelling, broken windows symbolize a neighborhood that
does not care about itself. In places where symbols of disorder accumulate,residents become more fearful. They withdraw from public space andbecome increasingly unable to exercise informal social control. According
to Wilson and Kelling, this serves as a cue for those interested in committing
criminal acts; they lack fear of detection in places where disorder is evident.
Crime thereby becomes more common. Residents withdraw even further,and a cycle of deterioration is set in motion. It is therefore necessary to fix
broken windows quickly to prevent this cycle from ever commencing. (32)
In the context of social control, “to ‘fix’ broken windows means, in large part, using
the police’s coercive power to remove undesirable people from public space” (33) inorder to make public space more visually appealing. The police officer administering an exclusion order does not have to explain in specific terms the basis upon which
he or she handed out the exclusion order. This new maintenance-order approachgives the officer great flexibility in exercising his or her authority.
The Introduction defends Beckett and Herbert’s use of the term “banished”
in the title and throughout the text as opposed to admonished or excluded. They
argue that especially exclusion orders are a return to the ancient European tradition of banishing undesirables. This reviewer was rather uncomfortable with thiscomparison as it seems to me that the circumstances were entirely different in
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ancient Europe and the reasons for banishment were usually quite different as
well. They go on to argue that the difficulties of the last ten years are a logicaloutcome of gentrification and the sharp rise in unemployment and homelessness
in the 1980s. Those homeless who were unable to find employment in the 1980s
and 1990s, were unemployable by 2000 due in large part to drug abuse, mental
illness, and years of unemployment so that the skills that they possessed during
their years of employment had become lost.
The distribution of admonishment orders permits officers to do searches andseizures without a warrant on people found in violation of such orders. When aperson is given an admonishment order, his or her name goes into a database.
When someone is suspected of being in violation of such an order, that person canbe stopped, searched, and arrested at any time. Whether or not the person isarrested is entirely up to the officer on the scene. Over half of urban Seattle is an
exclusion area. Included are government offices where social services of various
kinds can be applied for, medical facilities, and parks and recreation areas. The
message is clear. If you want to use public services, walk carefully and quickly towhere you are going. Do your business. Then get out.
Chapter 1 examines the gradual development of banishment as a practice. It
examines the gutting of social programs, including affordable and public housing
and aid to the needy during the Reagan administration together with the sharp risein unemployment and homelessness. The statistics that they cite for the Reagan/
Bush years are staggering. Nearly half of the homeless during that dark period
were children in the care of one or both parents. This is not a diatribe against
Reagan. They never mention his name. Nevertheless, at least half of Chapter 1 isan elementary overview of the results of the economic policies practiced during
the 80s in contrast to the more Keynesian policies of his predecessors.
The chapter goes on to discuss the broadening of what are called civility
codes used to keep the homeless moving farther and farther away from the publiceye. Generally when we think of civility codes, we think of public drunkenness,
urinating in public, spitting on the sidewalk. But these policies were broadened
during the 1980s. As Beckett and Herbert explain, “The civility codes legitimatedby the broken windows philosophy criminalized such behaviors as sitting or
lying on a sidewalk, engaging in aggressive panhandling, or sleeping in parks” (24).
They weren’t being arrested for being homeless; they were being arrested forbeing in violation of a civility code. The police are not required to explain
specifically what the violation is under the civility code, so there is rarely any
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record that the constitutional ban against vagrancy laws has been effectively
violated.
Chapter 2 examines the way admonishment and exclusion orders take away
the rights of individuals as full citizens. In a very real sense it puts the homelessunder the jurisdiction of another set of laws in between the laws that ordinary
citizens live by and rules of the street that those who live on the street are forcedby circumstances to live under. Most of us live under the laws of the State. Thoseon the street live under the rules of survival on the street, whether it be panhandling or finding conspicuously unsavory ways of finding food and shelter.
When these two laws come into conflict, the police step in with a third set oflaws/civic violations (read: admonishments and exclusions) that the homeless arealso forced to live under. This tertiary set of laws is enforced by police who
exercise a de facto judicial authority, separating homeless people from their rights
of citizenship.
The hazy nature of these tertiary set of laws makes them open to abuse.
Homeless people sitting around in the car that they live in may be threatened witharrest for “the intent to commit a crime” if they don’t move along. Actual arrest
would make it harder for these same people to find work and turn their lives
around thus they are induced to move along. It is important to remember thatmany of these people—an estimated two-thirds of them—had a job before 2001.
The same can be said of the homeless during the 1980s. But suddenly they
become the unwashed outsiders and the homeless and the public’s whole perception of them changed. They become fearful and suspicious of them. It is true ofcourse that many homeless were taken in by family and friends thus escaping
many of these stares of mistrust. But removing the truly homeless in this way
and labeling them broken windows loses sight of their humanity. It’s reminiscentof Naomi Klein’s discussion of the Paz government in Bolivia where she writes of“the economic erasure of whole sectors of workers; their jobs were soon lost, andthey ended up warehoused in the shantytowns and slums surrounding La Paz”
(153). There they have to fend for themselves without any means of protecting
and feeding their families.
One of the strongest contributions of this book is that it reveals the way inwhich admonishments have gradually taken over the role of dealing with the poor
while at the same time job training and job placement programs have been cut asfunds for these programs have been repeatedly cut back first by the Reagan
administration and then again in the first year of George W. Bush’s administra122

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tion.
As an adjunct to these admonishments Seattle has created SODA and SOAP
off-limits orders. SODA is an acronym for Stay Out of Drug Areas and SOAP isan acronym for Stay Out of Areas of Prostitution. These orders were originallyhanded down only to those who had been found guilty and/or served time forthese crimes and were generally a part of their probation or parole agreement.
Increasingly however, these orders have been handed out to those who have been
convicted of other entirely unrelated crimes if the judge or police suspects that theperson might be tempted to engage in these crimes. Since violations of theseorders are not in themselves crimes but rather violations of probation or parole,violation of these orders results in serving time in prison for the original unrelated
crime.
Trespass exclusion laws enable property owners (read: public businesses)
to bind together in an agreement to exclude “undesirable” people from theirproperties. These property owners sign an agreement with the police whichauthorizes the police to act as their agents in enforcing exclusion laws on theirproperties. But as Beckett and Herbert reiterate, trespass admonishments arealso used in public areas. “In Seattle, for example, people are also trespassadmonished from libraries and recreation centers, the public transportation system, college campuses, hospitals and religious institutions, social service agencies, and commercial establishments” (50). As the reader can see from this list,
rehabilitation is neither a goal nor even a concern:
Thus, by simultaneously defining these exclusions as civil and their violations as criminal, city authorities significantly expand their capacity toregulate those considered disorderly. The legal hybridity that characterizes
these tools thus strongly reinforces the extent to which Seattle officials turnto criminalization as a solution to the problems and people defined as
disorderly. This hybridity also makes these social control tools more difficult to challenge in the courts. Indeed, the popularity of the new tools is toa large extent the consequence of their ease of use and their imperviousness
to challenge. (58)The message is simply to move along. Stay out of urban areas. Oh, and thesuburban areas . . . that’s becoming increasingly gated. As Setha Low points out
in one of her studies of gated communities, the disparity between those in the123

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upper 20% income bracket and those in the lower 80% widened enormously
during the 1980s creating a two-class system of haves and have-nots. Together
with this there has developed a wave of distrust among the “haves” toward those
who are not well defined within in the system (388-89). So just keep moving.
In an examination of the growth of the US prison system since the early-mid
1980s, Beckett and Herbert point out that those who refuse to move on largely fill
our massive and growing prison system. Bernard Harcourt, in his study, points
out what might be considered a bitter irony. He writes, “Ironically the continued
popularity of order-maintenance policing is due, in large part, to the dramatic risein incarceration. Broken windows policing presents itself as the only viable
alternative to three-strikes and mandatory sentencing laws” (5). Fearful of imprisonment, many do leave the urban areas for the rural areas, where as Yvonne
Vissing has pointed out, “there are far more homeless people in small-town
America than we ever imagined” (11). Fuelled largely by deregulation followedby unskilled labor jobs moving overseas since the early 1980s coupled with theloss of low-cost housing, homelessness is problem all over the United States, notsimply in urban areas.
Chapter 3 looks at a number of statistics regarding those convicted of trespass exclusion laws. It examines racial distribution. It looks at the specific typesof arrest. It looks at the areas that are covered in the exclusion orders (notsurprisingly, most of the downtown area). It tallies the reasons officers gave forgiving out the admonishments. Officers failed to provide any reason at all in 60 %of the admonishments, but Beckett and Herbert tallied the ones in which a reason
was given.
Those given admonishments are predominantly white simply because in
Seattle most people are white. Only 8% are Afro-American. Of those given
admonishments in Seattle, 41.1% were Afro-American in spite of the fact thatthey represent only 8% of the overall population (Table 3.1 p. 68).
Chapter 4 examines interviews with police and correctional officers in orderto analyze why trespass admonishments and exclusions have become so popular.
One response was that because Seattle has become such a tourist attraction as a
post-industrialist city, there has been much political pressure on the police department to do something about disorder and incivility. Handing out exclusion
orders shows the business community that they are doing something. But it alsobroadens the power of police officers to monitor, search, and if necessary detain
people that they wish to exclude from public space. Imprisonment is meted out
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to those who refuse to move on. Most either move on or remain in seclusion in
their own small sectors of the community where other banished people live . . .
that is, until gentrification and more inclusive exclusion orders force them to moveon even farther.
The chapter ends by discussing the high cost of incarcerating such people
creating in essence debtor’s prisons which do nothing to deal with the mental
illnesses and drug addictions that many of these people suffer from. It also gives
them a criminal record making them even more unemployable when they get out.
Chapter 5 consists of numerous interviews with those that have been given
trespass admonishments and exclusions. In many ways this chapter struck me as
the weakest chapter in the book. The authors frequently struck me as acrobaticin their credulity and in their effort to be sympathetic in supporting those theyinterviewed. They overlooked responses that often seemed evasive or openly
deceptive. But to their credit, they do record them for our perusal.
Beckett and Herbert say of their interviews, “Our interviews . . . indicatethat banishment is best understood as a punishment in and of itself. It functions
as a pathway to criminal justice intervention, rather than an alternative to it”(104). This strikes this reviewer as the main issue facing all those interviewed.
Rather than training the unemployed for some work, broken windows philosophy merely pushes the unemployed further into the shadows or incarcerates
them. This merely exacerbates the problem.
The final chapter, Chapter 6, begins by addressing the futility of trying tofight the use of trespass laws in the court system. The ambiguity and vaguenessof the laws makes them very difficult to fight. There is also the fact that the
courts and the police like the system because—since admonishments are civil
violations and not officially classified as laws—no attorneys are necessary and it
is fast and simple to deal with:
Banishment works to help achieve what one Seattle judge referred to as“damage control.” As the judge explained, “You want to minimize the effectthat disorder has on people, whether it be the victims or the neighborhood—and the neighborhood is a victim—or others that this may affect.
And so sometimes we may have to impose sentences just for that purpose
alone. We don’t get to some of the underlying things. So, many times the
exclusions are just damage control.” (145)125

BOOK REVIEWThe chapter then goes on to examine alternatives to the trespass law program.
They look at the use of what are called therapeutic courts. But here again in
Seattle, therapeutic courts are held within the judicial system meaning that mentally ill subjects will be dealt with within the criminal justice system (which isover-burdened and ill-equipped to deal with such problems) rather than the social
service network. They look at the housing first model. As Beckett and Herbert
explain:
The housing first model holds that individuals must possess steady andsecure housing before they can address any other problems that may (ormay not) beset them. In other words, the problem of homelessness must be
addressed prior to any other social service intervention aimed at improving
the situation of the socially marginalized. (143-44)
This is rather hard to argue with. It is rather difficult to find a job, find social
services, or find medical attention (either physical or psychological) when one isbeing pushed farther and farther away from the sources of those opportunities
and resources. The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) thatwas started in 1965 under President Johnson to provide homes and shelter forthese people was essentially gutted under Reagan and hundreds of thousands
found themselves on the street. It was beefed up under Clinton, but then immediately gutted again under Bush who at one point proposed eliminating it altogether. Obama has done little substantial to put it back on its feet again.
Many celebrate this new maintenance-order approach to criminal justice.
Malcolm Gladwell in The Tipping Point celebrates it, writing, “If a window isbroken and left unrepaired, people walking by will conclude that no one cares andno one is in charge. Soon, more windows will be broken, and the sense of anarchy
will spread from the building to the street on which it faces, sending a signal thatanything goes” (141). This would seem to imply that the answer to the problem
would be simply to repair the window before the problem starts. Gladwell
continues:
This is an epidemic theory of crime. It says that crime is contagious—justas a fashion trend is contagious—that it can start with a broken window andspread to an entire community. The Tipping Point in this epidemic, though,isn’t a particular kind of person. . . . It’s something physical like graffiti.
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The impetus to engage in a certain kind of behavior is not coming from acertain kind of person but from a feature of the environment. (141-42)
This is contradictory because broken windows theory does not simply deal withbroken windows or physical objects. Beckett and Herbert argue that broken
windows theory is deeply flawed from the beginning because it deals with people
that it treats like things. It deals with outward appearance. It does not deal withpeople as people. It deals with images of disorder that it wants to prettify andmake orderly. This is probably the most important contribution that Banishedmakes to the discussion of how the various states need to think about and deal
with the poor and the homeless. In Fixing Broken Windows George Kelling and
Catherine Coles argue that they are being unfairly accused by the press of wanting
to force the homeless out of urban areas without providing them anywhere to go.
They write, “How we get from enforcing laws against disorderly behavior toreading people out of the human race, or casting them aside, is a rather tortuous bitof logic” (39). Unfortunately, loitering and sleeping in public places are considered broken windows by the Seattle Police Department and people are arrested
for it on a daily basis.
Kelling and Coles argue that homeless people with psychological and substance abuse problems should get psychological help but they provide no answer
for how they should get this help. They seem to be saying, look, we created atheory. The way Seattle, San Francisco, and Baltimore are interpreting and using
it isn’t our fault. It also isn’t our fault that Reagan and Bush both gutted HUD
thus expanding this horrendous problem. While at the same time attempting to
distance themselves from speaking of homeless people as all bad, both The Tipping Point and Fixing Broken Windows speak of homeless people in broad generalterms as the problem, sleeping in public and begging for money. Kelling and Coles
point out that there are homeless shelters for these people, but homeless shelters
in New York,* Cincinnati, Baltimore, Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles and inpractically every major city are notoriously violent places. There is not enoughfunding to keep them safe at night. Most homeless avoid them.
Beckett and Herbert present a strong argument against broken windows theory,
but unfortunately they are able to provide no serious workable solutions. They
* Between 1981 and 1989, homelessness tripled in the United States. During theinitial burst of homelessness New York tried to deal with the situation by segregating
men and boys from women, girls, and babies. They had separate facilities and were
not allowed to mix in their separate shelters (see Susser).
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point to the fact that the government needs to do more to provide job training andjob placement. They do not make it clear where the funds to do so might comefrom however. Even Kelling and Coles admit that broken windows theory raises
serious questions of constitutionality and individual rights (21). Still, the police
and the courts love the ease with which they are able to deal with disorder under
this new order-maintenance approach and they are not likely to change it any timesoon. And, as has pointed out above, HUD is powerless to help these people, so
as far as housing for these people is concerned the picture is bleak indeed.

Works Cited
Gladwell, Malcolm. The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Bid Difference. New York:
Little, 2000.
Harcourt, Bernard E. Illusion of Order: The False Promise of Broken Windows Policing. Cambridge:
Harvard UP, 2001.
Kelling, George L., and James Q. Wilson. “The Police and Neighborhood Safety.” Atlantic Monthly
Mar. 1982: 29-38.
Kelling, George L., and Catherine M. Coles. Fixing Broken Windows: Restoring Order and Reducing
Crime in Our Communities. New York: Simon, 1996.
Klein, Naomi. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. New York: Henry Holt, 2007.
Low, Setha. “The Edge and the Center: Gated Communities and the Discourse of Urban Fear.” Setha M.
Low and Denise Lawrence-Zuniga, eds. The Anthropology of Space and Place: Locating Culture.
Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2010, 387-407.
Susser, Ida. “Creating Family Forms: The Exclusion of Men and Teenage Boys from Families in the New
York City Shelter System, 1987-1991.” Setha M. Low, ed. Theorizing the City: The New Urban
Anthropology Reader. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2005, 67-82.
Vissing, Yvonne V. Out of Sight Out of Mind: Homeless Children and Families in Small-Town America.
Lexington, KY: U of Kentucky P, 1996.

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