Scholars have shown how formal processes of legal exclusion coupled with ubiquitous criminal justice contact relegate the largely black poor targets of the carceral state to second-class citizenship. Building upon but departing from this work, we reveal how carceral expansion has not just produced new forms of second-class citizenship for poor black Americans, but an alternate citizenship category and a distinct form of political membership-what we call carceral citizenship. The criminal record does this work through a process we call translation, marking the conventional citizen and making them legible, as a carceral citizen, for governance through institutions of coercion and care. We delineate the features of carceral citizenship and discuss its implications for how we understand the role, force, and consequence of the state in the lives of the raced and criminalized poor.

Over the past three decades, scholars have documented the emergence of a new model of urban governance predicated on the spatial exclusion of visible poverty. In order to revitalise and recommodify the prime spaces of the urban core, municipal leaders enlist the police to coercively relocate homeless people to marginal spaces. Unfortunately, little is known about the policing of homelessness in those areas into which homeless people are exiled. To address this lacuna, this article employs an ethnographic analysis of police patrols in Los Angeles’ Skid Row district. The findings demonstrate that, contrary to the dominant framework of exclusion, policing in marginal space takes on a disciplinary model of ‘recovery management’ designed to coercively shepherd homeless people into rehabilitative programmes and ameliorate the individual pathologies deemed responsible for homelessness. The article thus provides an analysis of how, why and with what consequences the policing of homelessness varies over space.

Over the last four decades, the United States has witnessed a historic expansion of its criminal justice system. This article examines how street‐level criminalization transforms the cultural contexts of poor urban communities. Drawing on five years of fieldwork in Los Angeles’ Skid Row–the site of one of the most aggressive zero‐tolerance policing campaigns to date–the study finds that residents develop and deploy a particular cultural frame–“cop wisdom”–by which they render seemingly‐random police activity more legible, predictable, and manipulable. Armed with this interpretive schema, “copwise” residents engage in new forms of self‐presentation in public, movement through the daily round, and informal social control in order to deflect police scrutiny and forestall street stops. While these techniques allow residents to reduce unwanted police contact, this often comes at the expense of individual and collective well‐being by precluding social interaction, exacerbating stigma, and contributing to animosity in public space.

Academics, criminal justice professionals, and news outlets have warned that gang-associated youth use social media to taunt rivals and trade insults in ways that cause offline retaliation. But there is surprisingly little empirical research investigating how gang-associated youth deploy social media in gang conflicts. Criminal justice professionals routinely overstate the violent effects of social media challenges, which further exacerbates criminalization, racial stereotyping, and social inequality. Drawing from two years of ethnographic fieldwork on Chicago’s South Side, this study asks how gang-associated black youth use social media to challenge rivals. Bridging traditional theories of urban violence with emerging media scholarship, I argue that social media disrupt the key impression management practices associated with the “code of the street.” Specifically, gang-associated youth exploit social media to publicly invalidate the authenticity of their rivals’ performances of toughness, strength, and street masculinity. Challengers do so through “cross referencing,” “calling bluffs,” and “catching lacking.” Each strategy differs in its likelihood to catalyze physical retaliation, which is a function of the amount and depth of counter-evidence necessary to refute a given challenge. These findings carry important implications for addressing urban violence, gangs, and inequality in the social media age.

Background: Building on a broader sociological discourse around policing approaches towards vulnerable populations, increasing public health and human rights evidence points to policing practices as a key health determinant, particularly among street-based sex workers. Despite the importance of policing as a structural health determinant, few studies have sought to understand the factors that underlie and shape harmful policing practices towards sex workers. This study therefore aimed to explore the drivers for policing attitudes and practices towards street-based cisgender female sex workers. Methods: Drawing on ethnographic methods, 280 hours of observations with police patrol and 10 stakeholder interviews with senior police leadership in Baltimore City, USA were carried out to better understand the drivers for policing strategies towards cisgender female sex workers. Analysis was data-and theory-driven, drawing on the concepts of police culture and complementary criminological and sociological literature that aided exploration of the influence of the ecological and structural environment on policing practices. Results: Ecological factors at the structural (e.g., criminalization), organizational (e.g., violent crime control), community and individual level (e.g., stigmatizing attitudes) emerged as key to shaping individual police practices and attitudes towards cisgender female sex workers in this setting. Findings indicate senior police support for increased alignment with public health and human rights goals. However, the study highlights that interventions need to move beyond individual officer