Professor Kleiman's paper is a sophisticated analysis that helps break up the paradigms that limit drug policy discussion such as "enforcement equals supply reduction," and "treatment and prevention equal demand reduction." Professor Kleiman draws an important, subtle distinction in police anti-drug activity. Unfocused "street sweeps" that have been notably unsuccessful in Washington, D.C., for example are contrasted with "market disruption" enforcement that has a marketplace objective of minimizing the number of completed drug transactions. Professor Kleiman also draws distinctions between different types of drug buyers and recognizes that society is better rewarded when the ability of highly committed drug users to buy drugs is disrupted.

Professor Kleiman asks intriguingly, "why will drug dealers hire people that McDonald's would not touch, often trusting them with cash or valuable drug inventories?"[42] His answer focuses on the consequence of current laws and enforcement practices, but one should consider the sociological analysis of Philippe Bourgois.[43] Bourgois' in-depth interviews with his neighbors on a block in New York's East Harlem demonstrates that the crack dealers, as boys, were very hard workers. They did errands, carried bags and hustled for legitimate income. But when they sought full-time employment as adults, the employment they could obtain was often in profound cultural conflict with the street culture in which they had shaped their values and identity:

Workers like Caesar and Primo appear inarticulate to their professional supervisors when they try to imitate the language of power in the [white collar] workplace. ... They cannot decipher the hastily scribbled instructions -- rife with mysterious abbreviations -- that are left for them by harried office managers on diminutive Post-its. The "common sense" of white-collar work is foreign to them; they do not, for example, understand the logic in filing triplicate copies of memos or for postdating invoices. When they attempt to improvise or show initiative, they fail miserably and instead appear inefficient -- or even hostile -- for failing to follow "clearly specified" instructions.

Their interpersonal social skills are even more inadequate than their limited professional capacities. They do not know how to look at their fellow service workers -- let alone their supervisors -- without intimidating them. They cannot walk down the hallway to the water fountain without unconsciously swaying their shoulders aggressively as if patrolling their home turf. Gender barriers are an even more culturally charged realm. They are repeatedly reprimanded for offending co-workers with sexually aggressive behavior.

The cultural clash between white "yuppie" power and inner-city "scrambling jive" in the service sector is much more than superficial style. Service workers who are incapable of obeying the rules of interpersonal interaction dictated by professional office culture will never be upwardly mobile. In the high-rise office buildings of midtown Manhattan or Wall Street, newly employed inner-city high school dropouts suddenly realize they look like idiotic buffoons to the men and women for whom they work. This book's argument -- as conveyed in its title -- is that people like Primo and Caesar have not passively accepted their structural victimization. On the contrary, by embroiling themselves in the underground economy and proudly embracing street culture, they are seeking an alternative to their social marginalization. In the process, on a daily level, they become the actual agents administering their own destruction and their community's suffering.[44]

Bourgois tells of a thirteen-year old boy who wants to grow up to be a cop, but as the years pass he becomes steadily entangled in the drug business as a runner and errand boy.[45] The future of the children in El Barrio is profoundly limited. Angel and Manny, ten and eight-years old, are "my two favorite shiny-eyed street friends."[46] After their mother became a crack addict, Bourgois happened to find them at home in the dark (electricity bill unpaid) "scraping peanut butter out of an empty jar," their mother passed out from her last crack binge.[47] Several years later, Angel was earning $100 per night selling crack, until he was placed on five years probation for shooting at a cabdriver in a bungled hold-up. Now he's cleaning a restaurant downtown -- off the books. He still lives with his mother whose crack-selling boyfriend stores crack in the apartment. Angel's girlfriend moved in with him and their baby.[48] The challenge that Professor Kleiman poses for reducing the role of juveniles in drug markets requires much more sophisticated economic and social changes than getting prosecutors to agree to abandon mandatory minimum sentencing tools.

Professor Kleiman is correct in identifying the social dimensions to the alternatives to drug dealing, but perhaps he is somewhere between realistically and excessively cautious in noting that "it seems implausible that anything we are likely to do with respect to youth employment will have a major impact on dealing."[49] The creation of meaningful youth employment may have important indirect effects on dealing that are not easily visualized through the drug policy lens because their primary impact is upon status and gender relationships.

He makes a very important point regarding all anti-drug persuasion programs: the messages that are developed are designed first to appeal to adult anti-drug leaders and the political constituencies to which they respond, and the likelihood that the anti-drug messages will resonate with the adolescents to whom they are ostensibly directed is in the realm of the accidental.[50] Professor Kleiman is on the right track in trying to identify what features of the drug dealing life attract young men. He is correct that in many instances the actual salary realized from drug dealing is not great, notwithstanding the mythology of riches.[51] Many young men in the barrios and ghettoes probably recognize that fact -- but it is a job that pays an off-the-books salary, and has other important benefits such as ready access to drugs and girls. His persuasion campaign would probably benefit by highlighting the features of the work that are repellant.[52]

C. "Persuasion" or "Punishment"

Unfortunately, I suspect that many of the "professional persuaders" in our society do not see much future for persuasion. In October 1996, I debated the school board president of one of the nation's largest school districts on The Diane Rehm Show on National Public Radio, regarding "zero tolerance" drug policies in the schools. The issue was the appropriateness of a four-month suspension of an eighth grade student, Kimberly Smartt, from Baker Junior High School in Fairborn, Ohio. Smartt had been ordered expelled from September to February for taking two Midol tablets from the school nurse and giving one to a classmate.[53] The classmate was suspended for ten days and ordered to undergo a psychiatric evaluation.[54] The penalties were later reduced. I suggested that expulsion and suspension were excessive penalties for these offenses and, since the students were honor students, simply explaining to the students what they did wrong would be sufficient to correct the problem, but the school board president protested that would be totally inadequate. They do not listen, she explained, they only understand punishment. I thought she was describing a primitive way of training donkeys, not educating the children we are raising to lead America in the Twenty-First Century. Persuasion is no longer conducted "retail" in the United States, except in the courtroom perhaps, or in one-on-one sales. Most persuasion today is in mass advertising or manipulation, or by virtue of the threat of extreme sanctions adopted by the school board president and school principals.

Whether addressing children in El Barrio or honor students, our society is caught in the middle between not doing enough or doing too much. The real conditions get ignored for the children in El Barrio and the honor students get suspended because punishment has become the prevailing educational paradigm, not respect for students or their capacity to reason.

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