Empire of Scrounge: Inside the Urban Underground of Dumpster Diving, Trash Picking, and Street Scavenging (Alternative Criminology)

In a real sense this map became my method.

if this is true of people and the situations in which they find themselves, it seems to me, it’s also true of objects.

labeling theory suggests that to understand crime we must understand the social processes through which crime is constructed.

reclaimed some of the categories of meaning and morality that set my

trajectory toward the empire of scrounge in the first place—the

if the empire could offer a sort of shambling material self-reliance, could it offer some sort of analytic and aesthetic self-reliance, too?

cultural reconstruction of the criminological enterprise.47

I hoped first to survive as an independent urban scrounger—but I also hoped to challenge taken-for-granted understandings of crime and control, the politics of crime and justice, and maybe even the practice of criminology itself.

requires something more than statistical aggregation or theoretical abstraction.