“You Know It When You See It”: Drug Nuisance Property and the Carceral Management of Racialized Disinvestment in Philadelphia

Abstract

In 1991, Philadelphia prosecutors formed the Public Nuisance Task Force (PNTF) to close bars they accused of harboring narcotics activity. Between the early 1990s and the late 2010s, the PNTF would go on to seize 1,697 homes, most located in Black and Latinx neighborhoods devastated by decades of disinvestment. I contend that the PNTF mobilized municipal carceral power to target these drug nuisance properties as they attempted to manage enduring disinvestment in Philadelphia’s most racially segregated neighborhoods. Prosecutors defended these practices by claiming they remedied the harms associated with the criminalized distribution of narcotics. However, my research reveals how the PNTF’s home seizure program ultimately exacerbated the compounded harms caused by drug prohibition and disinvestment. I argue that within this drug nuisance policing framework utilized by PNTF prosecutors, it was precisely the vulnerability of Black and Latinx homeowners to harm that racially marked them as unfit for property ownership.