The day before I began this review I returned from Zurich, Switzerland. As far as I could tell from my travels throughout the city, the entire conurbation, including modest outer neighborhoods, was orderly, gleaming, and spotless. Every inch was carefully tended, litter was virtually absent, no homeless or beggars were in evidence, and scruffy parks, crumbling pavement, vacant, junk-filled lots, and decrepit buildings were not to be found. No loud street music blared, and neatly dressed pedestrians patiently waited for lights to change. I never saw the police. There was some graffiti, mostly away from the affluent city center, but the unassertive scrawls were tame by American standards. The contrast with the mean streets of Philadelphia I traversed on my way home from the airport was stark. Loitering, litter, and squalor were everywhere, and the homeless were out in force. Abandoned lots and boarded-up buildings dotted most boulevards, even in some of the “nicer” business and residential districts. “Police activity” repeatedly slowed traffic.
Precincts like the worst I drove through form the backdrop for Misdemeanorland, a Yale law professor's detailed and carefully researched account of the decades-long effort to deal with the low-level lawbreaking that bedevils many American cities. These “subfelony” rule violations, and the measures taken to discourage and contain them, have spawned a sprawling bureaucratic and legal establishment peopled by numerous attorneys, prosecutors, judges, clerks, bureaucrats, law-enforcement officers, and other functionaries. Through the system pass thousands of urban dwellers, many of them chronic scofflaws, for whom its intricacies, demands, and arcane rules are pervasive facts of life that seriously curtail their freedom and warp their existence.
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