Denial of Shelter and the Shifting Dimensions of Social Control: The Case of Court-ordered Eviction

• In Event: 1550 - Research on Deviance and Social Control

Abstract

Eviction is a common yet devastating experience in the United States. While a growing body of literature has assessed the causes and consequences of access to housing, few studies have evaluated how courts' involvement in eviction extends state power. Likewise, research has yet to identify the what contextual factors make court-ordered eviction a preferred form of social control in certain areas, where as many as one quarter of all rented domiciles are evicted in a given year. In this study, we theorize on court-ordered eviction as a form of banishment—legally mandated expulsion from spatial areas. Using novel data on fifteen years of county-level court-ordered eviction rates and unique measures of gentrification and punitiveness, results reveal that gentrification, punitiveness, and racial threat all contribute to the prevalence of court-ordered evictions. However, variance decomposition analyses indicate that these determinants of crime control primarily affect eviction filing rates, rather than judges’ decision to evict tenants. These results corroborate recent claims that community actors play an increasingly central role in controlling disorder and hold implications for how civil law is increasingly being used to extend the reaches of the “shadow carceral state.”

Authors

• Scott W. Duxbury

• Laura DeMarco, Ohio State University