Choosing to sell books on the street in a way that is protected by law and the police allows one to live within a subculture -- while Jencks sees addiction as a cause of the alienation and despair of the men chronicled in Sidewalk, and does not see the subculture produced by homeless men as a truly functional one.
In defense of his thesis, Duneier chronicles what he calls the patterns of cooperation as well as of competition among sellers, suggesting that the men form a community and can even serve mentoring roles for the larger community, outside of the immediate world of the street. He challenges the later policing campaigns that drove many of these once-protected individuals from their spaces, stating that the sellers of books offer rich and poor customers, the "expectation of continued discussion," and "a symbol of those values necessary to live in accordance to ideals of self-worth" (Duneier, pp. 19, 38, 34).
All but one of the sellers were once drug addicts -- former drug addicts, they stress to the author. Some say they "made a choice to live on the streets," rather than go back to a society that brutalized them with the demands of war, poverty, and racism -- and eventually, drug addiction and prison time. (Duneier, pp. 23, 49, 54) Rather than an assumption of control by a drug or by 'the man' they see selling books on the street as an assumption of control over their own lives. Rejected by society,...
(Duneier, p.80) Duneier also attempts to downplay other discomforting aspects of the life he chronicles, such as its all-male composition, and the threatening behavior of homeless men towards women in the neighborhood. The eschewing of females shows the limits of focusing only on one 'slice' of a population, in mistaking a small, specific pool for the entirely.
In contrast, Christopher Jencks' the Homeless does not concentrate on a finite population, but compares the populations of homeless overall from the 1970's to the 1980's to ask why the population was greater during the latter decade -- his conclusion, after estimating the increase, was the presence of crack cocaine in the afflicted neighborhoods. The decline in marriage and the increased cost in housing were also contributing factors. (Jencks, pp.56 & 76) Jencks sees the phenomena of increasing homelessness thus not as a symptom of a sick society, but of increasingly maladaptive individual estrangement from a once healthy society -- when individuals lack social and familial connections, they are more apt to…
