Cover of No Way Out
No Way Out Precarious Living in the Shadow of Poverty and Drug Dealing
by Waverly Duck
University of Chicago Press, 2015
Cloth: 978-0-226-29790-3 | Paper: 978-0-226-29806-1 | Electronic: 978-0-226-29823-8
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226298238.001.0001

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ABOUT THIS BOOKAUTHOR BIOGRAPHYREVIEWSTABLE OF CONTENTS

ABOUT THIS BOOK

In 2005 Waverly Duck was called to a town he calls Bristol Hill to serve as an expert witness in the sentencing of drug dealer Jonathan Wilson. Convicted as an accessory to the murder of a federal witness and that of a fellow drug dealer, Jonathan faced the death penalty, and Duck was there to provide evidence that the environment in which Jonathan had grown up mitigated the seriousness of his alleged crimes. Duck’s exploration led him to Jonathan’s church, his elementary, middle, and high schools, the juvenile facility where he had previously been incarcerated, his family and friends, other drug dealers, and residents who knew him or knew of him. After extensive ethnographic observations, Duck found himself seriously troubled and uncertain: Are Jonathan and others like him a danger to society? Or is it the converse—is society a danger to them?

Duck’s short stay in Bristol Hill quickly transformed into a long-term study—one that forms the core of No Way Out. This landmark book challenges the common misconception of urban ghettoes as chaotic places where drug dealing, street crime, and random violence make daily life dangerous for their residents. Through close observations of daily life in these neighborhoods, Duck shows how the prevailing social order ensures that residents can go about their lives in relative safety, despite the risks that are embedded in living amid the drug trade. In a neighborhood plagued by failing schools, chronic unemployment, punitive law enforcement, and high rates of incarceration, residents are knit together by long-term ties of kinship and friendship, and they base their actions on a profound sense of community fairness and accountability. Duck presents powerful case studies of individuals whose difficulties flow not from their values, or a lack thereof, but rather from the multiple obstacles they encounter on a daily basis.

No Way Out explores how ordinary people make sense of their lives within severe constraints and how they choose among unrewarding prospects, rather than freely acting upon their own values. What emerges is an important and revelatory new perspective on the culture of the urban poor.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Waverly Duck is assistant professor of sociology at the University of Pittsburgh.

REVIEWS

“Remarkably original. No Way Out is deeply infused with knowledge of the ethnographic literature that has identified today’s still acute policy issues in poor, urban, mostly black—and often crime-ridden—communities. To read this book is to be assaulted by the realities of Bristol Hill—and other places like it—and to become aware of the fine lines binding the heroic to the tragic in the lives of its people. No Way Out does what few other books of its kind do. It makes multiple contributions to the scholarship, while telling the stories of Bristol Hill in a way that is plain for anyone to understand.”
— Charles Lemert, senior fellow, Urban Ethnography Project, Yale University

“Original, thickly described, and well-written, No Way Out powerfully represents a world that outsiders rarely view up-close. Duck is the consummate urban ethnographer; he puts you there. Nothing short of brilliant—this book is a remarkable achievement, and will become an enduring contribution to the urban literature.”
— Elijah Anderson, author of Code of the Street and The Cosmopolitan Canopy

“With skill, sagacity, and sensitivity, Duck delves beneath the hype that dominates perceptions of neighborhoods with street-based drug markets and sheds new light on the residents of one such area with evocative depth and complexity. Through this lucid portrait of daily life forged under the unfathomably harsh conditions of poverty in America, we come to understand the individual and collective strategies people develop to bear the unbearable by creating a sense of order and community. Yet resilience and fortitude cannot conquer the powerful societal forces that keep generation after generation confined to these oppressive territories. No Way Out is a haunting, thought-provoking read that lingers long after we turn the final page.”
— Megan Comfort, author of Doing Time Together: Love and Family in the Shadow of the Prison

“Duck’s research undeniably enriches the urban sociology and delinquency literature. The distinction that he outlines between the cultural codes of a neighborhood and its inhabitants’ personal values is particularly interesting. Indeed, several examples of empirical research measure culture by interrogating individual beliefs, interpreting expected social practices as what people really want for themselves.”
— European Journal of Sociology

“No Way Out provides a sophisticated, nuanced, theoretical, and pragmatic understanding of lived experiences and social processes in a criminalized African American community. . . . It is a must-read for students of urban ethnography. Duck teaches us how to develop knowledge from multiple vantage points about the multiple realities that our participants live and experience; he teaches us to reflect critically on our positionality as knowledge producers, narrators, and theory creators; and he gives us a lesson in developing research with a purpose that is translational and aims to improve the conditions of the populations we study. . . . No Way Out gives us a solid way in. It teaches us to be nuanced and multidimensional about our research with marginalized populations, while giving us conceptual tools to continue to develop and build on as we move forward in our endeavor to understand justice, inequality, social process, and social change.”
— Contemporary Sociology

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226298238.004.0000
[interaction order, poverty, violence, social solidarity, collective efficacy]
This impoverished African American neighborhood is an orderly place, and the predictability of daily life creates a measure of security for residents. The interaction order is defined as a set of learned and situated practices that are recognized and understood by local residents and enable them to live in relative safety despite the risks that arise from the embedded drug trade. Their interactions are based on reciprocity, which involves a profound sense of fairness and accountability. By highlighting the voices and viewpoints of those who live in this community, I show that understanding the interaction order enables us to make sense of the life chances and constrained choices of people who live in this community. (pages 1 - 19)


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226298238.004.0001
[life history, crime and control, drug dealing, war on drugs, poverty, interaction order, race and ethnicity]
This ethnographic study began when I served as an expert witness in the legal defense of a drug dealer from Lyford Street whom I call Jonathan Wilson. I met Jonathan while he was in prison awaiting a death penalty hearing after being convicted of being an accessory to the murder of a federal witness and of murdering a rival drug dealer. Jonathan's life story is typical of boys and young men growing up in his neighborhood, so in what sense can he be seen as deviant? Do he and others like him represent a danger to society, or does the dominant white society and its interests pose a danger to them? (pages 20 - 35)


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226298238.004.0002
[open-air drug markets, at risk youth, poverty, interaction order, drug dealing careers, social determinants]
Drug dealing is a job. In this neighborhood, its practices spill over into and shape the interaction order. Drawing on interviews with and observations of current and former dealers, this chapter traces the arc of a drug dealing career. Systematic steps enable boys to move up and achieve dealer status: doing small favors for dealers and proving trustworthy; being initiated into the trade through juvenile arrest and passing the loyalty tests involved; showing that they know how to use money systematically; learning how to take orders; learning how to keep safe; and learning how to identify customers--which means looking for white people, who are the majority of the customers in this largely black area. Ironically, many of these skills are also requirements for success in the middle-class occupations from which these men are excluded. Tracing drug dealing careers sheds light on how the neighborhood is structured by drug dealing and, in turn, shapes the lives of boys and young men who grow up there. (pages 36 - 51)


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226298238.004.0003
[housing, segregation, section 8, public housing, white flight]
This chapter investigates how this place, once predominantly middle class and white, became impoverished, overwhelmingly black, and economically dependent on the drug trade. This chapter critiques the "broken windows" theory of intensive policing by reinterpreting broken windows, graffiti, and trash-filled vacant lots as functional and meaningful rather than as signs of neglect and disorder. In-depth interviews, historical records, and the architectural features of the space show that the Lyford Street neighborhood was designed for returning World War II veterans as a model middle-class and closed community on the edge of the urban area I call Bristol Hill. City planners regulated housing and neighborhood design to keep residents segregated. Then federal public housing policy mandated the mass relocation of thousands of Bristol Hill residents, many of whom settled in the Lyford Street neighborhood. Because of policy makers' limited understanding of how poverty works, well-intentioned policies, such as low-income public housing, neighborhood policing, the war on drugs, and welfare reform, have exacerbated the problems its residents face. (pages 52 - 65)


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226298238.004.0004
[gossip, snitching, collective efficacy, neighborhood solidarity, violence, poverty]
Gossip plays an important role in maintaining neighborhood solidarity on Lyford Street. This information-sharing system makes this neighborhood, with its embedded drug scene, more maneuverable. Snitching, by contrast, involves insiders going outside the community and giving the police a piece of information. Snitching and gossip are two distinct types of disclosure, each with its own local politics, and both play a significant role in the social organization of the neighborhood. Being connected to the information networks within this community allows people to live in relative safety. But the local interaction order collides with the criminal justice system when residents are asked to cooperate with police based on hearsay. The predictable patterns I discovered provide residents with the knowledge they need to stay safe in dangerous situations, but this understanding of life around them is obscured by outsiders' accounts. Those who are most concerned with the control of information are those who have the most to hide, especially drug dealers and street criminals, whose activities if reported could land them behind bars. (pages 66 - 81)


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226298238.004.0005
[murder, drug gangs, gang narratives, interaction order, community policing]
This chapter explores the factual gaps and fundamental contradictions between residents' and outsiders' narratives concerning incidents of violent crime, in this case a series of high-profile murders. It shows how residents understand interpersonal violence and under what conditions they are willing to cooperate with law enforcement. Cooperation is unlikely in many urban communities where the police's ability to solve cases is inconsistent at best and the risk of retaliation is high. Furthermore, if local residents consider a murder to be a justifiable homicide, cooperation is extremely unlikely, especially when those "in the know" have nothing to gain. On the other hand, when a murder is viewed as unjustified by the local moral code, individuals in the community are more likely to cooperate. Therefore, cooperation with a murder investigation depends on residents' understanding of the assailant's motivation, the informer's concern for personal safety, and the likelihood that the police will be able to solve the case. (pages 82 - 95)


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226298238.004.0006
[poverty, unemployment, criminal records, education, child support, incarceration, Black masculinity]
This chapter explores how poor and working-class African American men experience poverty. It examines the structural forces that push black men into poverty and keep them there despite their best efforts to make something of themselves. Many men in Bristol Hill are wage workers whose limited occupational skills reflect the failure of the segregated school system. They are part of the growing army of the underemployed and unemployed within the U.S. working class. The children of African Americans who migrated from the South for better opportunities, they have not risen into the middle class but, instead, have lost ground. The first-person accounts of six African American men presented in this chapter demonstrate the complex intersections of family dynamics, inadequate education, unemployment, debt, drug dealing, contact with law enforcement, imprisonment, and criminal records in their lives. Through these narratives, we gain a sense of how chronically debilitating their involvements with major social institutions have been. These men understand how poverty works, and policy makers could learn a lot from the critical analyses they offer. (pages 96 - 113)


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226298238.004.0007
[welfare reform, African American women, single mothers, sexuality, teen pregnancy, housing, African American families, urban poverty]
For single mothers, trouble paying bills is nothing new, but the high frequency of family-threatening sanctions is. Women are evicted, arrested, and imprisoned as they juggle the competing demands of employment and child care with chronically insufficient financial resources. The networks of kinship and friendship on which poor black women relied in the past are now overextended, leaving them in a precarious situation. This chapter presents an in-depth case study of Benita Taylor, an impoverished African American woman who had four children by two men before she turned 18. Benita exhibited great resourcefulness and resilience in her efforts to secure a better future for her children, but coping with one problem usually compounded others. For example, she had to drive to work even though she could not afford insurance or pay traffic fines, so a simple accident that was not her fault landed her in jail. Her story illustrates the precarious nature of daily life for black women coping with poverty. (pages 114 - 136)


DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226298238.004.0008
[interaction order, poverty, race and ethnicity, segregation, collective efficacy, public policy]
The final chapter draws together the themes explored in this book, considers its theoretical and methodological implications, and makes recommendations for public policy. Understanding the orderliness of daily life in this community life and the strategies that local residents use to stay safe amidst the drug trade would help agencies work more effectively with at-risk youth. Examining the local characteristics and interaction orders of impoverished neighborhoods requires us to reevaluate our assumptions about how to address poverty. Indeed, comprehending the orderly dynamics of urban spaces would enable us to understand multiple types of collective efficacy and shape public policies that work with instead of against the poor. (pages 137 - 142)

Bibliography

Index

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