NCJ Number
168210
Journal
Journal of Offender Rehabilitation Volume: 24 Issue: 3/4 Dated: (1997) Pages: 53-73
Date Published
1997
Length
21 pages
Annotation
Drug-using shelter tenants who were living in an urban, single-room-occupancy (SRO) neighborhood were studied with respect to the manner in which they engaged in the process and stages of becoming part of a community.
Abstract
The participants lived in Wood Street Commons in Pittsburgh, Pa. The analysis used an ethnographic methodology. Results revealed that a significant number of the tenants were ex-offenders. Their recommunalization involved eight developmental stages: (1) alienation, (2) powerlessness, (3) disaffiliation, (4) assuming the values of the nonmembership group, (5) perceiving the social structure as open, (6) performances, (7) embracement, and (8) role distance. The community's culture and the recommunalization process reflected several of the drug peace proposals of Arnold Trebach in the 1987 text The Great Drug War. These ideas included taking back the community, setting priorities, cohabitation, screening, and treatment. Recommunalization and drug peace combined with the effusive culture that evolved largely through sustained tenant involvement to operate as tangible expressions of a peer-directed paradigm that recognized individual and collective competency. Findings suggested that communities must move beyond the rhetoric of drugs and drug users as completely evil and begin to reaffirm rather than disregard human life and provide decarcerated addicts and others with the necessary time, space, and support from which to change their lives. Figure and 29 references (Author abstract modified)