“Drug Nuisance Properties and Municipal Carceral Power in Philadelphia”
Abstract: In 1991 Philadelphia prosecutors formed the Public Nuisance Task Force (PNTF) to shutter bars they accused of harboring narcotics activity. Between the early 1990s and the late 2010s the PNTF would go on to seize nearly 1,700 homes, most located in Black and Latinx neighborhoods devastated by decades of disinvestment. I explore how the PNTF’s targeting of drug nuisance properties transformed these neighborhoods into arenas for the projection of municipal carceral power. Prosecutors defended the unit’s work by claiming it remedied the harms associated with the criminalized distribution of narcotics. However, my research reveals how the PNTF’s home seizures ultimately exacerbated racialized disinvestment and reproduced racial segregation.
Bio: Jackson Smith is a Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow with the Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies and the Department of History at UCLA, where he is working to complete his book manuscript on the history of vice policing in Black Philadelphia from Prohibition to the contemporary War on Drugs. His research on race, policing, and property in Philadelphia has been supported by the Social Science Research Council, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and the National Science Foundatio n. For more information, visit jacksonsmith.info.
