Down, Out, and Under Arrest

"An intimate, multifaceted portrait of the police, residents and activists in their own voices. Down, Out, and Under Arrest adds new insights and much-needed complexity to the current debates on policing in the poorest urban areas of the U.S. It is a vivid and insightful five-year study of Los Angeles's Skid Row that contradicts much of the conventional wisdom about policing and the urban poor."

-- "Shelf Awareness"
"Down, Out, and Under Arrest is a trenchant ethnographic account of how big city police harass and 'manage' some of the most desperate people of the urban environment, but equally important, how these impoverished denizens--including residents of SRO hotels, skid row, and homeless settlements--wisely manage the police in their everyday lives, powerfully revealing the enormous human toll of the 'neoliberal state.' This is a timely work of importance that deserves to be read by a wide audience."-- "Elijah Anderson, author of Code of the Street and The Cosmopolitan Canopy"
"For Stuart, therapeutic policing legitimates punitive treatment of the worst-off without making them or anyone else better off. Or rather, turning the police into social workers--and they make 'abysmal social workers, ' we are told--benefits not the street dwellers but the developers who can now make a profit in the domesticated neighborhood. Down, Out, and Under Arrest is thus a well-supported critique of therapeutic policing and, by extension, of similar paternalistic efforts to help the poor by hassling them into good behavior. . . . Fascinating."-- "LA Times"
"In this exemplary ethnography of a Los Angeles neighborhood, we see the effects of community and institutional framing on the policing of poverty, on social service delivery, and on everyday resistance. . . . Stuart's book is vital in analyzing the far-reaching effects of neighborhood framing and the policing of poverty. Down, Out, and Under Arrest should be read widely, but especially by those interested in urban neighborhoods, policing, non-profits, poverty, culture, and social movements."-- "Social Forces"
"Stuart's Down, Out, and Under Arrest describes a segment of reality that is virtually unknown to Americans--how policing is reshaping the experiences of extreme urban poverty. The challenges of everyday life in Skid Row are revealed in sharp relief in his compelling narrative. Indeed, Stuart's insightful account, based on years of field research, is replete with original findings. This well written book is a must-read not only for students and scholars of urban poverty, but for the general public as well."-- "William Julius Wilson, author of The Truly Disadvantaged"