Dealing Crack

February 15, 1999
This book is a report on Jacobs's ethnographic fieldwork among crack dealers in one neighborhood in St. Louis. The chapter subjects include motivation and social organization of dealers, predators in street drug sales, police (and undercover officers), and dealing in the current declining market, as well as background on the crack epidemic and research methodology. A criminology professor at the University of Missouri, St. Louis, Jacobs writes about his fascinating experiences with insight. By interviewing and studying dealers in their natural settings, he also runs into risky situations with potentially dangerous felons and some unfriendly police. Highly recommended for scholars, students, and professionals in criminal justice (and the interested general public), both for the methodology and for the carefully gathered detail on one group of offenders. There have been a number of recent studies on the patterns of selling, purchasing, and using crack and cocaine, including a study on selling crack in Harlem (Philippe T. Bourgois, In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio, LJ 11/15/95). Jacobs's book is a valuable addition to that literature.--Mary Jane Brustman, SUNY at Albany Libs.

February 15, 1999
Although the use of crack cocaine is declining, its devastating social impact is still very much in evidence. Jacobs, a sociology professor, details that devastation and the low-level street enterprise involved in selling crack. Jacobs studied the crack trade of inner-city St. Louis and interviewed 34 dealers to learn how and why so many urban youth choose the risks and slim rewards of crack dealing over legitimate enterprises. He details the operations of the freelance, gang-affiliated dealers: securing product, packaging, competing for a dwindling, dangerous client base, and dodging the police. Jacobs' interviews reveal the dealers' contradictions: awareness of the destructive nature of the product they sell but refusing to accept responsibility for its consequences; scornful of the meager wages available to the unskilled but unwilling to adapt their personae to be more socially acceptable. This well-researched book is an engrossing exploration of a troubling social issue. ((Reviewed February 15, 1999))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 1999, American Library Association.)