Dealing with disorder

Abstract

Over the past two decades, municipal governments across the United States have adopted novel social control techniques including off-limits orders, parks exclusion laws, and other applications of trespass law. These new tools are used to exclude the socially marginal from contested public spaces. These new social control techniques fuse criminal and civil legal authority and are touted as `alternatives' to arrest and incarceration. Ironically, these new techniques nonetheless increase the number of behaviors and people defined as criminal and subject to formal social control. This article describes these legal innovations and considers their origins and theoretical implications. We argue that recognition of law's constitutive effects helps to explain the origins and nature of the urban social control innovations described here.