The Suburban Crisis

The Suburban Crisis: White America and the War on Drugs

Published in 2023 by Princeton University Press (link to book page). Read interviews with Lassiter on the book’s main themes in CrimeReads and with the History News Network. Listen to a podcast interview with New Books Network. Watch Lassiter’s book talk at the University of Pennsylvania. Read Lassiter’s essay about America’s bipartisan and unwindable war on drugs in TIME/Made By History. Preview the audiobook here. Full list of coverage below.

The Suburban Crisis explores political culture and public policy formation in U.S. history from the 1950s through the 1990s by analyzing the real-and-symbolic relationship between cities and suburbs and the comprehensive role of racial and spatial discretion in the wars on delinquency, crime, and drugs. Based on extensive archival research at the local, state, and federal levels, The Suburban Crisis connects grassroots politics to state-building and public policy formation through a comparative methodology that includes a dozen case studies of states or localities, close analysis of landmark national legislation in the wars on drugs and crime, and investigation of the white/suburban/victim and nonwhite/urban/villain categories that have structured American politics and culture. The book examines the unstable and shifting interplay between the criminalization and decriminalization of white middle-class youth and makes several original contributions to the scholarship on the carceral state. These include a conceptual consensus framework that analyzes law enforcement and public health policies as subsets of the same mission to regulate and control youth subculture and recreational drug markets, and excavation of the almost unknown suburban side of a war on drugs that arrested a much higher percentage of white Americans between 1967 and 1981 than ever before or since. The Suburban Crisis argues that criminalization of marijuana—the “white middle-class” drug problem—actually eclipsed heroin as a state priority during this time period and that American political culture and policymakers consistently framed white middle-class youth as “impossible criminals,” the primary victims of both organized drug traffickers and criminal law enforcement.

Previews of major themes of The Suburban Crisis have appeared in two special journal issues featuring new scholarship on the carceral state in the Journal of American History (June 2015) and the Journal of Urban History (September 2015).

Book Jacket: Since the 1950s, the American war on drugs has positioned white middle-class youth as sympathetic victims of illegal drug markets who need rehabilitation instead of incarceration whenever they break the law. The Suburban Crisis traces how politicians, the media, and grassroots political activists crusaded to protect white families from perceived threats while criminalizing and incarcerating urban minorities, and how a troubling legacy of racial injustice continues to inform the war on drugs today.

In this incisive political history, Matthew Lassiter shows how the category of the “white middle-class victim” has been as central to the politics and culture of the drug war as racial stereotypes like the “foreign trafficker,” “urban pusher,” and “predatory ghetto addict.” He describes how the futile mission to safeguard and control white suburban youth shaped the enactment of the nation’s first mandatory-minimum drug laws in the 1950s, and how soaring marijuana arrests of white Americans led to demands to refocus on “real criminals” in inner cities. The 1980s brought “just say no” moralizing in the white suburbs and militarized crackdowns in urban centers.

The Suburban Crisis reveals how the escalating drug war merged punitive law enforcement and coercive public health into a discriminatory system for the social control of teenagers and young adults, and how liberal and conservative lawmakers alike pursued an agenda of racialized criminalization.

The Suburban Crisis-Interviews, Talks, Media Coverage, Reviews

CrimeReads (April 19, 2024): “Matthew D. Lassiter on What We Miss about White America and the War on Drugs” (interview)

The New Republic (Feb. 27, 2024): Book review by Claire Potter, “The Suburbs Made the War on Drugs in Their Own Image

New Books Network (Feb. 2, 2024): Podcast interview with Lassiter by host Caleb Zakarin in the “Drugs, Addiction and Recovery” series. (Also read a separate interview for the New Books Network newsletter here).

History News Network (Jan. 10, 2024): “How Liberal Policymakers and White Suburban Parents Drove the War on Drugs” (interview)

Inquest (Dec. 14, 2023): “The Suburban Drug War: How White, Middle-Class Youth in the Suburbs Experienced the War on Drugs is a Largely Untold Chapter in the Arc of Mass Incarceration” (excerpt from book introduction)

TIME/Made By History (Dec. 7, 2023): Matthew D. Lassiter, “America’s War on Drugs Has Always Been Bipartisan–And Unwinnable

University of Pennsylvania Urban Studies/40th Annual Norman Glickman Public Lecture (Oct. 17, 2023)