The mandatory, state-subsidized treatment opened up by drug courts and other jail and prison diversion programs have massively expanded the numbers of the nation's poor and working class who are labeled addicts and sent to rehab, making drug rehabilitation a primary site for the re-socialization and control of the poor. Drawing on ethnographic and interview data, this article examines the institutional form at the center of this process: the 'strong-arm' rehabilitation facilities most closely tied to drug courts, probation, and parole. The therapeutic community tradition's long-standing practices of moral reform through intensive behavior modification are now mobilized by the state on a large scale, transformed into a 'fuzzy edge' of the criminal justice system which resocializes far more intensively than most forms of incarceration. We understand the 'medicalization' represented by strong-arm rehab not as a reprieve from judgment, but instead as a process of translation and amplification. Translated by staff into therapeutic, moral, and finally cultural versions, the biochemical 'diagnosis' of pathology comes to serve as a neutral, medicalized front behind which the systemic injuries of race and class disappear. Instead, the strongarm process amplifies the taint of addiction into a new biologization of poverty and race.

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An early morning at Bryant Salvage, a Vietnamese recycling business, finds a variety of San Francisco's scavengers converging to sell their findings. Vehicle after vehicle enters the yard to be weighed on the huge floor scale before dumping its load in the back; ancient pick‐up trucks with wooden walls, carefully loaded laundry carts, canary Cadillacs stuffed to overflow with computer paper, the shopping carts of homeless men, a 1950s ambulance carrying newspaper, and even the occasional gleaming new truck. The homeless men unload their towers of bottles and cardboard while young Latino van recyclers shout jokes across them. Middle aged Vietnamese women in jeans and padded jackets buzz around on forklifts or push around great tubs full of bottles and cans, stopping occasionally to help elderly people with their laundry carts. The van recyclers repeatedly honk their horns at the homeless guys to get out of the way. The homeless recyclers, silently methodical in their work, rarely respond.

This article describes an anomalous social space within the field of homelessness in San Francisco, that of "pro" recyclers, homeless men who spend much of their time collecting recyclables for redemption. Unlike the panhandlers, broken shelter-dwellers and small-time hustlers of San Francisco's Tenderloin and other skid row zones, the recyclers orient much of their existence around work. By working within a unique economic niche provided by the state-supported recycling industry, and by drawing on support from sympathetic residents and advocates, the recyclers create an unusual homeless subculture which, as they themselves argue, has more than a little in common with the hobo jungles of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. To interrogate the sociological (and political) implications of this case study I use Loïc Wacquant's eloquent manifesto against sociological "neo-romanticism." While agreeing with some of Wacquant's analysis, I argue that his emphasis on the moralism of contemporary urban ethnographers blinds him to the very real concerns with morality and ethics among poor people themselves. The recyclers' concerns with mutual respect and the pleasures of labor represent, I believe, not post hoc justifications of desperate survival strategies, but a dogged, often passionate collective effort to create a truly different experience and understanding of homelessness itself.In what must surely be one of the most widely-discussed book reviews in the history of American sociology, Loïc Wacquant has made the case that increasing attention to work and "mainstream" cultural orientation in US ethnographies of poverty represents a new "neo-romantic" sociology (Wacquant 2002). Where the ("romantic") ethnographers of the sixties and seventies enjoyed deviance, he argues, those of today inflate and romanticize those aspects of the poor-their mainstream aspirations, their law-abiding behavior, and their conventional morality-which illustrate how similar they are to the putatively less-