Social Control - Formal

Formal

Historically, societies were able to easily expel individuals deemed undesirable from public space through vagrancy laws and other forms of banishment. In the 1960’s and 1970’s, however, these exclusion orders were denounced as unconstitutional and consequentially were rejected by the Supreme Court. The introduction of Broken Windows Theory in the 1980’s generated a dramatic transformation in the concepts used in forming policies in order to circumvent the previous issue of unconstitutionality. According to the theory, the environment of a particular space signals its health to the public, including to potential vandals. By maintaining an organized environment, individuals are dissuaded from causing disarray in that particular location. However, environments filled with disorder, such as broken windows or graffiti, indicate an inability for the neighborhood to supervise itself, therefore leading to an increase in criminal activity. Instead of focusing on the built environment, policies substantiated by the Broken Windows Theory overwhelmingly emphasize undesirable human behavior as the environmental disorder prompting further crime. The civility laws, originating in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, provide an example of the usage of this latter aspect of the Broken Windows Theory as legitimization for discriminating against individuals considered disorderly in order to increase the sense of security in urban spaces. These civility laws effectively criminalize activities considered undesirable, such as sitting or lying on sidewalks, sleeping in parks, urinating or drinking in public, and begging, in an attempt to force the individuals doing these and other activities to relocate to the margins of society. Not surprisingly then, these restrictions disproportionally affect the .

Individuals are deemed undesirable in urban space because they do not fit into social norms, which causes unease for many residents of certain neighborhoods. This fear has been deepened by the Broken Windows Theory and exploited in policies seeking to remove undesirables from visible areas of society. In the post-industrial city, concerned primarily with retail, tourism, and the service sector, the increasing pressure to create the image of a livable and orderly city has no doubt aided in the most recent forms of social control. These new techniques involve even more intense attempts to spatially expel certain individuals from urban space since the police are entrusted with considerably more power to investigate individuals, based on suspicion rather than on definite evidence of illicit actions.

Park exclusion orders (prohibiting individuals from frequenting one, some, or all of the parks in a city for an extended period of time due to a previous infraction), trespass laws (privatizing areas generally thought of as public in order for the police to choose which individuals to interrogate), and off-limit orders (Stay Out of Drug Areas (SODA) and Stay Out of Areas of Prostitution (SOAP) which obstructs access to these spaces) are just a few of the new social control techniques employed by cities to displace certain individuals to the margins of society. Several common themes are apparent in each of these control mechanisms. The first is the ability to spatially constrain individuals in their own city. Defying any of the above statutes is a criminal offense resulting in possible incarceration. Although not all individuals subjected to an exclusion order will abide to it, these individuals are, at the very least, spatially hindered through decreased mobility and freedom throughout the city. This spatial constrain on individuals leads to a serious disruption and interference of their lives. Homeless individuals generally frequent parks since the area provides benches for sleeping, public washrooms, occasional public services, and an overall sense of security by being near others in similar conditions. Privatizing areas such as libraries, public transportation systems, college campuses, and commercial establishments that are generally public gives the police permission to remove individuals as they see fit, even if the individual has ethical intent in the space. Off-limit orders attempting to keep drug addicts, prostitutes, and others out of concentrated areas of drug and sex crimes commonly restricts these individuals’ ability to seek social services beneficial to rehabilitation, since these services locate within the SODA and SOAP territories.

By prohibiting their access to important public aspects of the city, undesirable individuals are increasingly outlawed to the periphery of society. Despite the need to address the social issues inherently devastating these individuals, pushing these individuals further out of sight only pushes them further out of mind.