Luke Street: Housing Policy, Conflict and the Creation of the Delinquent Area PDF
Preview Luke Street: Housing Policy, Conflict and the Creation of the Delinquent Area
LUKE STREET LUKE STREET Housing Policy, Conflict and the Creation of the Delinquent Area OWEN GILL M cOwen Gilll977 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1977 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without permission. First published 1977 by THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD London and Basingstoke Associated companies in Delhi Dublin Hong Kong]ohannesburg Lagos Melbourne New York Singapore and Tokyo ISBN 978-0-333-22059-7 ISBN 978-1-349-15829-4 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-15829-4 This book is sold subject to the standard conditions of the Net Book Agreement. The paperback edition of this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any fonn of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. For my Parents 'Paradoxically, as the rationalisation of urban life continues, boundaries enclose some lives more tightly, isolating and making them more alien and obscure, inspiring illusions about them, making them more vulnerable. Urban ethno graphers can explore spaces forgotten or given up for lost, replacing illusions with maps of social reality. By re discovering the lives of people in those spaces, by replacing stereotypes about them with descriptions that convey their vitality, dignity and humanity, ethnographers may restore some lost relationships in urban milieux, and in a modest way reduce the isolation.' Vic Walters, Dreadful Enclosures: Detoxifying an Urban Myth, 1972 CONTENTS Preface IX 1. The Creation of the Delinquent Area 1 2. The Decline of Luke Street 16 3. The Official Delinquents of Luke Street 42 4. External Definitions of the 'Delinquent Area' 55 5. Casey's: Some Introductory Sketches 75 6. The Boys on Casey's Corner 96 7. The Structure of Delinquent Incidents 122 8. Two Morality Plays 145 9. Luke Street in Court 168 10. Housing Policy and the Organisation of Possibility 182 Appendix: Some issues of research methodolog;y 190 Notes and References 197 LIST OF TABLES 2.1 Date of arrival of Luke Street families 23 2.2 Size of Luke Street families 23 2.3 Ages of young people moved to Luke Street 24 2.4 Housing department categorization of families 25 2.5 Housing officials' descriptions of Luke Street families 26,27,28 3.1 Family members with criminal record 44 3.2 Age of Luke Street offenders 45 3.3 Sex distribution of Luke Street offenders 45 3.4 Date of arrival compared with date of first offence of Luke Street residents born before 1945 (males) 46 3.5 Date of arrival compared with date of first offence of Luke Street residents born before 1945 (females) 4 7 3.6 Types of offence (males born before 1945) 49 3. 7 Types of offence (females born before 1945) 49 3.8 Types of offence (males born after 1945) 50 3.9 Types of offence (females born after 1945) 52 9.1 Legal sanctions imposed (males born before 1945) 169 9.2 Legal sanctions imposed (females born before 1945) 170 9.3 Legal sanctions imposed (males born after 1945) 171 9.4 Legal sanctions imposed (females born after 1945) 172 PREFACE The research on which this book is based started as an attempt to understand the lifestyle of a group of boys who regularly came into contact with the police and courts. In the five years since the project began my perspective has changed. I have been drawn into issues of housing policy, policing and urban stereotyping in an attempt to understand the production of the behaviour that comes to be officially registered as delinquent. The book is therefore as much, if not more, about how the policy-makers react to deviant minorities as it is about how the members of those minorities react to the wider world. Just as my perspective has changed so also has the antici pated readership of this book changed. I had originally intended to produce a monograph written for other academics. That is not now my purpose. I hope that the study will be relevant not only to sociologists but also to the people who play a part in the creation of the delinquent area- the town planners, the housing officials, the police, the social workers and the journalists. The project was completed between 19 7 1 and 19 75 , during which time I was employed in the department of sociology, Liverpool University. I am grateful for the help of a great many friends and colleagues-particularly Howard Parker, Mavis Penman, Phil Scratton, John Mays, Joey Wharton, Noel Boaden, Ken Roberts, David Lowson, Jim Essex, Clive Davies, Shaie Selzer and Geoff Pearson. I am also of course indebted to Bugsy and Tari, without whom the project would never have been finished, and to Dorothy Lewis, who changed scribblings into typescript. But naturally my biggest debt of gratitude is to the people of Luke Street, who must remain anonymous. All writers are apprehensive about their subjects' X PREFACE reaction to their work. Although the events described in this book will now appear past history to them I sincerely hope that none of them will think I have let them down or portrayed them dishonestly. December 197 6 OWEN GILL 1 THE CREATION OF THE DELINQUENT AREA The dominant perspective in post-war writing on delinquency has been that such activity is a subcultural response to the frustrations of working-class life. This perspective although producing insights has diverted attention from other factors in the organisation of urban life which are productive of delinquent behaviour. Most importantly the relationship between the power processes that locate particular families in particular areas and the eventual production of delinquent behaviour has been ignored. 1 The spatial organisation of urban life was one of the prime concerns of the early Chicago school. 2 Robert E. Park, the doyen of that illustrious group wrote in 1929: 'the metropolis is, it seems, a great sorting and sifting mechanism, which in ways that are not yet wholly understood infallibly selects out of the population as a whole the individuals best suited to live in a particular region or milieu.' 5 The Chicago school saw the processes of urban selection as intimately connected with the production of delinquency. Yet since that time 'ecological' and 'subcultural' approaches to delinquency have become more and more divorced in both American and British writing. The intention of this book is to re-examine the relationship between the urban process and delinquent behaviour. It looks at the phenomena of the delinquent area and how it is created in modern British urban society. By 'created' I mean not only the way areas which support high levels of delinquency come into existence. I also mean the way they are created in the minds of those people whose residential location is far removed from such places.
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