"We Weren't Like No Regular Dope Fiends": Negotiating Hustler and Crackhead Identities

Abstract

We investigate how participants in the street economy of crack cocaine construct a "hustler" identity by contrasting their social behaviors and styles with a dialectically contrastive crackhead identity. For those who are proximate to, or involved in, the crack cocaine economy, effort is required to avoid being labeled a crackhead. Would-be hustlers construct boundaries that separate them from others on the street through talk and behavior. We draw on interviews conducted with 28 men convicted of committing violent street crimes to explore how they distance themselves from those exhibiting distasteful symptoms of crack addiction. By examining the boundaries between these two street-based identities we increase sociological understanding of the significance of offenders' identity work for shaping their conceptions of self and other, as well as their interactions in everyday street life.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 128 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.