Author: Bruce A. Jacobs
Publisher: UPNE
ISBN: 9781555533878
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 184

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Book Description
This starkly revealing book explores the crack cocaine trade from the candid perspectives of sellers themselves.

Author: Bruce A. Jacobs
Publisher: Northeastern University Press
ISBN: 1555538584
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 180

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Book Description
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.

Author: David Farber
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108425275
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
The crack cocaine years: from deviant globalization to the 'get money' culture of late twentieth-century America.

Author: Dimitri A. Bogazianos
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 0814787010
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 216

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Book Description
In 2010, President Barack Obama signed a law repealing one of the most controversial policies in American criminal justice history: the one hundred to one sentencing disparity between crack cocaine and powder whereby someone convicted of “simply” possessing five grams of crack—the equivalent of a few sugar packets—had been required by law to serve no less than five years in prison. In this highly original work, Dimitri A. Bogazianos draws on various sources to examine the profound symbolic consequences of America’s reliance on this punishment structure, tracing the rich cultural linkages between America’s War on Drugs, and the creative contributions of those directly affected by its destructive effects. Focusing primarily on lyrics that emerged in 1990s New York rap, which critiqued the music industry for being corrupt, unjust, and criminal, Bogazianos shows how many rappers began drawing parallels between the “rap game” and the “crack game." He argues that the symbolism of crack in rap’s stance towards its own commercialization represents a moral debate that is far bigger than hip hop culture, highlighting the degree to which crack cocaine—although a drug long in decline—has come to represent the entire paradoxical predicament of punishment in the U.S. today.

Author: Philippe I. Bourgois
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521017114
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 436

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Book Description
This new edition brings this study of inner-city life up to date.

Author: Michael Levine
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780985238629
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 492

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Book Description
In The Big White Lie, Michael Levine, former DEA agent and bestselling author of Deep Cover, leads the reader through a decade of undercover work. Levine's prose is fast-moving, highly readable, and hard-hitting. He tells how the beautiful South American "Queen of Cocaine" seduced the CIA into protecting her from prosecution as she sold drugs to Americans; how CIA-sponsored paramilitary ousted, tortured, and killed members of a pro-DEA Bolivian ruling party; and how the CIA created La Corporacion, the "General Motors of cocaine," which led directly to the current cocaine/crack epidemic. As a 25-year veteran agent for the DEA, Michael Levine worked deep-cover cases from Bangkok to Buenos Aires, and witnessed firsthand scandalous violations of drug laws by U.S. officials.

Author: Gary Webb
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
ISBN: 1609802020
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 817

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Book Description
Major Motion Picture based on Dark Alliance and starring Jeremy Renner, "Kill the Messenger," to be be released in Fall 2014 In August 1996, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Gary Webb stunned the world with a series of articles in the San Jose Mercury News reporting the results of his year-long investigation into the roots of the crack cocaine epidemic in America, specifically in Los Angeles. The series, titled “Dark Alliance,” revealed that for the better part of a decade, a Bay Area drug ring sold tons of cocaine to Los Angeles street gangs and funneled millions in drug profits to the CIA-backed Nicaraguan Contras. Gary Webb pushed his investigation even further in his book, Dark Alliance: The CIA, The Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion. Drawing from then newly declassified documents, undercover DEA audio and videotapes that had never been publicly released, federal court testimony, and interviews, Webb demonstrates how our government knowingly allowed massive amounts of drugs and money to change hands at the expense of our communities. Webb’s own stranger-than-fiction experience is also woven into the book. His excoriation by the media—not because of any wrongdoing on his part, but by an insidious process of innuendo and suggestion that in effect blamed Webb for the implications of the story—had been all but predicted. Webb was warned off doing a CIA expose by a former Associated Press journalist who lost his job when, years before, he had stumbled onto the germ of the “Dark Alliance” story. And though Internal investigations by both the CIA and the Justice Department eventually vindicated Webb, he had by then been pushed out of the Mercury News and gone to work for the California State Legislature Task Force on Government Oversight. He died in 2004.

Author: Pam Kelley
Publisher: The New Press
ISBN: 1620973286
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 222

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Book Description
“An ambitious look at the cost of urban gentrification.” —Atlanta-Journal Constitution “Kelley could have written a fine book about Charlotte’s drug trade in the ’80s and ’90s, filled with shoot-outs and flashy jewelry. What she accomplishes with Money Rock, however, is far more laudable.” —Charlotte Magazine “Pam Kelley knows a good story when she sees one—and Money Rock is a hell of a story. . . like a New South version of The Wire.” —Shelf Awareness Meet Money Rock—young, charismatic, and Charlotte’s flashiest coke dealer—in a riveting social history with echoes of Ghettoside and Random Family Meet Money Rock. He's young. He's charismatic. He's generous, often to a fault. He's one of Charlotte's most successful cocaine dealers, and that's what first prompted veteran reporter Pam Kelley to craft this riveting social history—by turns action-packed, uplifting, and tragic—of a striving African American family, swept up and transformed by the 1980s cocaine epidemic. The saga begins in 1963 when a budding civil rights activist named Carrie gives birth to Belton Lamont Platt, eventually known as Money Rock, in a newly integrated North Carolina hospital. Pam Kelley takes readers through a shootout that shocks the city, a botched FBI sting, and a trial with a judge known as "Maximum Bob." When the story concludes more than a half century later, Belton has redeemed himself. But three of his sons have met violent deaths and his oldest, fresh from prison, struggles to make a new life in a world where the odds are stacked against him. This gripping tale, populated with characters both big-hearted and flawed, shows how social forces and public policies—racism, segregation, the War on Drugs, mass incarceration—help shape individual destinies. Money Rock is a deeply American story, one that will leave readers reflecting on the near impossibility of making lasting change, in our lives and as a society, until we reckon with the sins of our past.

Author: Randol Contreras
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520273370
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 302

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Book Description
Randol Contreras came of age in the South Bronx during the 1980s, a time when the community was devastated by cuts in social services, a rise in arson and abandonment, and the rise of crack-cocaine. For this riveting book, he returns to the South Bronx with a sociological eye and provides an unprecedented insiderÕs look at the workings of a group of Dominican drug robbers. Known on the streets as ÒStickup Kids,Ó these men raided and brutally tortured drug dealers storing large amounts of heroin, cocaine, marijuana, and cash. As a participant observer, Randol Contreras offers both a personal and theoretical account for the rise of the Stickup Kids and their violence. He mainly focuses on the lives of neighborhood friends, who went from being crack dealers to drug robbers once their lucrative crack market opportunities disappeared. The result is a stunning, vivid, on-the-ground ethnographic description of a drug robberyÕs violence, the drug market high life, the criminal life course, and the eventual pain and suffering experienced by the casualties of the Crack Era. Provocative and eye-opening, The Stickup Kids urges us to explore the ravages of the drug trade through weaving history, biography, social structure, and drug market forces. It offers a revelatory explanation for drug market violence by masterfully uncovering the hidden social forces that produce violent and self-destructive individuals. Part memoir, part penetrating analysis, this book is engaging, personal, deeply informed, and entirely absorbing.

Author: William M. Adler
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 047203863X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 395

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Book Description
An exceptional work of investigative journalism, Land of Opportunity is a probing tale of blighted dreams and misguided ambition. "One of the most fascinating and unforgettable families in American literature . . . destined to become the most prominent tome in the modern inner-city street life genre".--Claude Brown, author of Manchild in the Promised Land. Land of Opportunity has been optioned by Boyz 'N the Hood director John Singleton for his next film.