Race, Space, and the Regulation of Surplus Labor: Policing African Americans in Los Angeles's Skid Row

This essay examines the joint racial and class domination exercised in Los Angeles's Skid Row. Known widely as the “homeless capital of the United States,” Skid Row has become home to a predominantly African American population, drawn to the area by social services that have been purposefully relocated from other parts of the city. Through the partnership of criminal justice and social welfare institutions, this population is “reprogrammed” in work-training programs and siphoned into subpoverty jobs under threat of incarceration. These institutions serve as instruments of labor extraction and control, sanctioning “nonproductive” means of subsistence, enforcing capitalist norms of leisure, and strengthening the symbiosis between the state and the owning class, all under the auspices of a race-neutral “broken windows” theory of law enforcement.