Preview

Prime logo Prime members: New to Audible?
Get 2 free audiobooks during trial.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
Premium Plus auto-renews for $14.95/mo after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

The Suburban Crisis

By: Matthew D. Lassiter
Narrated by: Tom Beyer
Try for $0.00

$14.95/month after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Buy for $25.79

Buy for $25.79

Pay using card ending in
By confirming your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and Amazon's Privacy Notice. Taxes where applicable.

Publisher's summary

Since the 1950s, the American war on drugs has positioned white middle-class youth as sympathetic victims of illegal drug markets who need rehabilitation instead of incarceration. The Suburban Crisis traces how politicians, the media, and grassroots political activists crusaded to protect white families from perceived threats while criminalizing and incarcerating urban minorities, and how a troubling legacy of racial injustice continues to inform the war on drugs today.

In this incisive political history, Matthew Lassiter shows how the category of the "white middle-class victim" has been as central to the politics and culture of the drug war as racial stereotypes like the "foreign trafficker," "urban pusher," and "predatory ghetto addict." He describes how the futile mission to safeguard and control white suburban youth shaped the enactment of the nation's first mandatory-minimum drug laws in the 1950s, and how soaring marijuana arrests of white Americans led to demands to refocus on "real criminals" in inner cities.

The Suburban Crisis reveals how the escalating drug war merged punitive law enforcement and coercive public health into a discriminatory system for the social control of teenagers and young adults, and how liberal and conservative lawmakers alike pursued an agenda of racialized criminalization.

©2023 Princeton University Press (P)2023 Tantor
activate_Holiday_promo_in_buybox_DT_T2

What listeners say about The Suburban Crisis

Average customer ratings

Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.