No abstract

This article assesses whether the kinder, gentler rhetoric through which the disproportionately white opiate crisis has been framed has been accompanied by changes in drug sentencing policy and drug law enforcement that mirror this sympathetic discourse. Toward these ends, state-level drug sentencing policies enacted from 2010 to 2016 as well as recent trends in drug law enforcement and drug-related imprisonment are analyzed. The legislative findings show that policymakers are not singling out opiate violations for particularly lenient treatment. Instead, it is the user/dealer distinction that animates recent shifts in drug policy: While state lawmakers are re-thinking their approach to drug possession, they are more likely to have enhanced penalties for drug distribution than to have reduced them. In addition, although significant racial disparities in arrests and incarceration persist, the main change that has occurred is a decline in the black share of arrests and imprisonments. The discussion explores possible explanations for these unexpected findings, including the possibility that political dynamics help explain the decline of the drug war in many urban areas and, as a result, the diminution of racial disparities in it.

Landlords’ decisions significantly shape the housing outcomes of poor and stigmatized renters. Despite this important gatekeeping role, studies of antidiscrimination law have not thoroughly examined how private market actors respond to reform efforts or how private property rights potentially enable them to evade regulation. This study draws on ethnographic data gathered between late 2015 and early 2018 to examine how and why Seattle landlords opposed an ordinance regulating the use of criminal records in rental housing. The findings indicate that landlords’ opposition stems from their expectation that property protects owners’ ability to control their exposure to risk. Yet conceptions of property and risk perception alone cannot explain how landlords can evade regulation. Toward this end, I show how private property rights facilitate adaptation by which landlords can legally circumvent the intent of the law. The study highlights the value of a sociolegal framework of property in action, which incorporates cultural notions of ownership, legal rights, and the regulatory and market environments that shape owners’ discretion. I suggest that greater attention to risk discourse and property rights will deepen our understanding of the limits of antidiscrimination law and the ability of private market actors to adapt to, and resist, legal reform efforts.

Prevailing theories of poverty governance emphasize how political and economic constraints associated with urban neoliberalism have led to the retraction of protective welfare commitments and an increased criminalization of poverty. While research on this “disciplinary turn” has been generative, it tells us little about countervailing trends or how institutional responses to poverty change over time. Addressing these gaps, this article offers a case study of the emergence and acceptance by the business community of a supportive Housing First and harm reduction initiative called JustCARE—a distinct technique of poverty governance not readily explicable within existing theoretical frameworks. By situating JustCARE within a wider strategic action field of poverty governance, we reveal the macro-, meso-, and micro-level dynamics that together facilitated its inception, growth, and eventual embrace by members of the formerly hostile business establishment. Specifically, we underscore how two exogenous shocks (COVID-19 and the Black Lives Matter [BLM] uprisings) enabled a well-positioned advocacy organization to articulate and implement a non-punitive homelessness response alternative. We conclude that field-based scholarship centering “theoretically deviant” cases can reveal how the contradictions and failures of neoliberal poverty management can generate unique opportunities for meaningful institutional change.