No Way Out: Precarious Living in the Shadow of Poverty and Drug Dealing by Waverly Duck

by Waverly Duck

In 2005 Waverly Duck was called to a town he calls Bristol Hill to serve as an expert witness in the sentencing of drug dealer Jonathan Wilson. Convicted as an accessory to the murder of a federal witness and that of a fellow drug dealer, Jonathan faced the death penalty, and Duck was there to provide evidence that the environment in which Jonathan had grown up mitigated the seriousness of his alleged crimes. Duck’s exploration led him to Jonathan’s church, his elementary, middle, and high schools, the juvenile facility where he had previously been incarcerated, his family and friends, other drug dealers, and residents who knew him or knew of him. After extensive ethnographic observations, Duck found himself seriously troubled and Are Jonathan and others like him a danger to society? Or is it the converse—is society a danger to them?Duck’s short stay in Bristol Hill quickly transformed into a long-term study—one that forms the core of No Way Out . This landmark book challenges the common misconception of urban ghettoes as chaotic places where drug dealing, street crime, and random violence make daily life dangerous for their residents. Through close observations of daily life in these neighborhoods, Duck shows how the prevailing social order ensures that residents can go about their lives in relative safety, despite the risks that are embedded in living amid the drug trade. In a neighborhood plagued by failing schools, chronic unemployment, punitive law enforcement, and high rates of incarceration, residents are knit together by long-term ties of kinship and friendship, and they base their actions on a profound sense of community fairness and accountability. Duck presents powerful case studies of individuals whose difficulties flow not from their values, or a lack thereof, but rather from the multiple obstacles they encounter on a daily basis.No Way Out explores how ordinary people make sense of their lives within severe constraints and how they choose among unrewarding prospects, rather than freely acting upon their own values. What emerges is an important and revelatory new perspective on the culture of the urban poor.

Genres: Nonfiction, Sociology

Hardcover

First published September 19, 2015

Reviews

[Rt · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was recommended in something I read about Alice Goffman’s On the Run, and I wouldn’t say it’s better, but it is certainly consistent/more focused on the non-drug-dealers in a neighborhood known for being a good place to buy drugs. As an African-American male, he was in a different position than Goffman; one thing that pops up several times is how some residents saw him as a potential mate for themselves or women they knew, given the disproportion between available heterosexual men and women in the neighborhood. Matthew Desmond’s Evicted is probably the best treatment of precarity among the poor, and it too is consistent with this book; what Duck emphasizes is the way that the poor African-Americans living in the neighborhood he studies have values that they can’t necessarily implement in their behavior, and make compromises in order to survive day-to-day. Heterosexual men and women wanted long-term relationships, for example, but men often couldn’t fulfill their assigned roles—and if they could, they were so in demand that they didn’t have to be faithful. Duck tells the story of one who reframed his masculine role as one of providing sex rather than money, even though he clearly had great emotional involvement with his two long-term partners; he wanted to be providing something that distinguished him as a man.

Like many other Americans, Duck says, residents of the neighborhood often view their situation as the product of individual bad choices rather than structures that make it nearly impossible for them to keep stable jobs/housing. One of the most notable structures is lots of fines for minor traffic offenses, leading to imprisonment—which can lead to job loss and eviction, meaning no way out of the poverty/ticketing cycle. Likewise, child support obligations set according to cost-sharing models rather than the father’s income made paying often impossible since, as Duck notes, poor women tend to have children with poor men. Duck characterizes the overall system as one in which collective punishment is imposed on the neighborhood through police and other institutions. Kin networks that in previous decades could take up some of the slack when an individual was stretched to the breaking point are increasingly tapped-out and often no longer able to respond with real help.

Duck also argues that, at least in the neighborhood he studied, what was described by outsiders as drug gang-related violence was often personal disputes/vengeance, given that the “gang” was really a bunch of boys and their uncles and fathers who’d grown up together in contexts where it was easy to get a police record and hard to get a job on the books. One notable fact: Duck says that the “broken windows” of the neighborhood weren’t at all accidental—drug dealers broke light bulbs in order to make it harder to see and chase them, and they maintained piles of trash in order to hide drugs and guns. Gym shoes hanging from electrical wires mark the boundaries of dealers’ territories. Unkempt properties are mostly those of absentee landlords; fining the poor tenants wouldn’t do any good, and demolishing badly maintained properties just creates more lots in which drugs and guns can be hidden.