Dealing Crack / Edition 1

by Bruce A. Jacobs, James F. Jr. Short, James F. Short

Overview

During the 1980s, addiction to crack cocaine escalated at an alarming rate. As the demand for crack grew, so did the economic opportunities for entrepreneurial street dealers, who developed criminal underground networks for the supply and retail sale of the high-profit substance. While crack cocaine use has since plateaued and is on the decline, hard-core dealers persist in selling the increasingly unprofitable drug in a high-risk, competitive street market.

Bruce A. Jacobs bases his study on dangerous field research conducted in one of the most socially distressed and impoverished neighborhoods in St. Louis. Drawing on no-holds-barred interviews with active dealers, as well as on his own eyewitness observations of transactions and encounters with police, Jacobs captures the crack business as it actually operates on the streets.

He examines the underlying motivations for selling crack, describes the complex and intricate social organization of dealing, and explores how dealers protect transactions from law enforcement, undercover police, and criminal predators. Quoting extensively from his conversations with offenders, he conveys much of the fear and aura surrounding the process and lifestyle of crack cocaine dealing.

This provocative volume is appropriate for a variety of courses in criminal justice and social problems and gives general readers an inside look at one of America's most troubling problems.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781555533878
Publisher:	Northeastern University Press
Publication date:	04/29/1999
Series:	Northeastern Series in Criminal Behavior Series
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	172
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.25(h) x 0.41(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

Editorial Reviews

This book is a report on Jacobs's ethnographic fieldwork among crack dealers in one neighborhood in St. Louis. The chapter subjects include motivation and social organization of dealers, predators in street drug sales, police (and undercover officers), and dealing in the current declining market, as well as background on the crack epidemic and research methodology. A criminology professor at the University of Missouri, St. Louis, Jacobs writes about his fascinating experiences with insight. By interviewing and studying dealers in their natural settings, he also runs into risky situations with potentially dangerous felons and some unfriendly police. Highly recommended for scholars, students, and professionals in criminal justice (and the interested general public), both for the methodology and for the carefully gathered detail on one group of offenders. There have been a number of recent studies on the patterns of selling, purchasing, and using crack and cocaine, including a study on selling crack in Harlem (Philippe T. Bourgois, In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio, LJ 11/15/95). Jacobs's book is a valuable addition to that literature.--Mary Jane Brustman, SUNY at Albany Libs.

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