City Baby and Star

Book excerpt: This book is an exploration of the sociological, biological, and psychological forces that create pathways into and out of street deviance. Utilizing in-depth case studies, the book examines the relationship of an individual's learned and inherited human traits and the culture that receives, socializes, and judges him or her. The book centers on the compelling life stories of City Baby and Star, two women who became criminal drug addicts, and the colorful history of San Francisco's Tenderloin District. It explains why City Baby is trapped in a world of drugs and violence, and how Star escaped hers. It describes how addictions and criminal behaviors are rooted in the human biological urge to seek meaningful lives and how the organization of our culture produces the very problems it abhors. The book asks, why do tenderloins, 'containment zones' for crime, exist in virtually every major city in the world and what do we do, as a community, to contribute to the problem of street deviance everywhere? This work will be of interest to sociologists, psychologists, criminologists, as well as the general reader.