Editing Social control (section)

====Broken windows theory in the United States====
In the United States, early societies were able to easily expel individuals deemed undesirable from public space through [[vagrancy (people)|vagrancy]] laws and other forms of banishment. In the 1960s and 1970s, however, these exclusion orders were denounced as unconstitutional in America<ref name="nine">Herbert, Steve and Katherine Beckett. 2009. Zoning out disorder: Assessing contemporary practices of urban social control. ''Studies in Law, Politics, and Society''. 47: 1–25.</ref> and consequently were rejected by the US Supreme Court.<ref name="eight">Beckett, Katherine and Steve Herbert. 2008. Dealing with disorder: Social control in the post-industrial city. ''Theoretical Criminology''. 12: 5–30.</ref> The introduction of [[broken windows theory]] in the 1980s transformed the concepts cities used to form policies, to circumvent the previous issue of unconstitutionality.<ref>Harcourt, Bernard and Jens Ludwig. 2005. "Broken windows: New evidence from New York City and a five-city [[social experiment]]". ''The University of Chicago Law Review''. 73: 271-320.</ref> According to the theory, the environment of a particular space signals its health to the public, including to potential vandals. By maintaining an organized environment, individuals are dissuaded from causing disarray in that particular location. However, environments filled with disorder, such as broken windows or graffiti, indicate an inability for the neighborhood to supervise itself, therefore leading to an increase in criminal activity.<ref name="tented">Ranasinghe, Prashan. 2010. Public disorder and its relation to the community-civility-consumption triad: A case study on the uses and users of contemporary urban public space. ''Urban Studies''. 48: 1925–1943.</ref> Instead of focusing on the built environment, policies substantiated by the Broken Windows Theory overwhelmingly emphasize undesirable human behavior as the environmental disorder prompting further crime.<ref name="eight" /> The civility laws, originating in the late 1980s and early 1990s, provide an example of the usage of this latter aspect of the Broken Windows Theory as legitimization for discriminating against individuals considered disorderly in order to increase the sense of security in urban spaces.<ref name="nine" /> These civility laws effectively criminalize activities considered undesirable, such as sitting or lying on sidewalks, sleeping in parks, urinating or [[drinking in public]], and begging,<ref name="ten">Beckett, Katherine and Steve Herbert. 2010. "Penal boundaries: Banishment and the expansion of punishment". ''Law and Social Inquiry''. 35: 1–38.</ref> in an attempt to force the individuals doing these and other activities to relocate to the margins of society.<ref name="eight" /> Not surprisingly then, [[criminalization of homelessness|these restrictions disproportionally affect the homeless]].<ref name="eight" />

Individuals are deemed undesirable in urban space because they do not fit into [[norm (social)|social norms]], which causes unease for many residents of certain neighborhoods.<ref>England, Marcia. Stay out of drug areas: Drugs, othering, and regulation of public space in Seattle, Washington. ''Space and Polity''. 12: 197–213.</ref> This fear has been deepened by the Broken Windows Theory and exploited in policies seeking to remove undesirables from visible areas of society.<ref name="tented" /> In the [[post-industrial society|post-industrial city]], concerned primarily with retail, tourism, and the service sector,<ref name="eight" /> the increasing pressure to create the image of a livable and orderly city has no doubt aided in the most recent forms of social control.<ref name="nine" /> These new techniques involve even more intense attempts to spatially expel certain individuals from urban space since the police are entrusted with considerably more power to investigate individuals, based on suspicion rather than on definite evidence of illicit actions.<ref name="ten" />