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

an important qualification

corporate hyperconsumption drives contemporary U.S. society,

This marginality is spatial as well;

began to wonder whether each statute I encountered, each city code, each emerging community standard regarding waste and its reuse wasn’t in reality designed to eliminate any form of material

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

Is the criminologist’s job to resolve legal and cultural ambiguities, simply to acknowledge them—or sometimes even to celebrate them?

intimately, sensually, filthily, from the bottom up,

exploring in their research the slippery boundaries between law and

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.