‘This is home for us’: questioning banishment from the ground up

摘要

Banishment is an increasingly common tool for urban social control. In Seattle and other cities, new tools give the police stronger authority to create and enforce zones of exclusion. Deployed most commonly in neighborhoods populated by homeless people and members of other disadvantaged populations, banishment orders seek to coerce individuals to relocate. As an attempt to reduce crime and disorder, however, we suggest that banishment fails. We demonstrate this by drawing on interviews with forty-one Seattle residents who live with at least one exclusion order to ascertain how their strong connections to place make compliance with banishment an oppressive burden. Even if banishment increases the authority of the police, and thereby helps them to respond to public concern about ‘disorder’, it makes everyday life more perilous for the socially-marginalized. This suggests that banishment's increased popularity deserves robust contestation.