In 2014, Philadelphia’s affluent suburbs suffered a shocking revelation. Two young white men—Neil Scott, 25, and Timothy Brooks, 18—had been charged with running a “preppie drug ring,” distributing cocaine, ecstasy, and marijuana. These two, along with nine sub-dealers, provided substances to colleges and high schools across six counties in eastern and central Pennsylvania. Much was made of the fact that Scott and Brooks were graduates of the region’s most prestigious all-boys private school, the Haverford School, where tuition cost upwards of $35,000 a year. “You’re dealing with kids from one of the finest institutions probably in the country,” remarked Montgomery County district attorney Risa Vetri Ferman at a press conference. “To take those skills and turn it into this kind of illegal enterprise is very distressing.” To underscore the point, Ferman displayed a lacrosse stick alongside the guns and drugs confiscated in the raid on the dealers’ homes.

The ensuing media frenzy derived in large part from, as one local journalist put it, a sense of “karmic justice.” For once, entitled, white, suburban elites were not exempt from the law’s sharp edges. Finally, these privileged kids would face meaningful consequences for their illegal activity. Decades into the war on drugs, which disproportionately criminalized Black and Latino working-class youth, the fate of the Main Line preppie drug ring seemed to promise a measure of parity in an otherwise structurally unequal criminal system.

Yet the subsequent court case seemed to presume the ringleaders’ innocence, or at least their capacity for redemption. Montgomery County judge Steven O’Neil sentenced Brooks to just nine to twenty-three months, remarking that he believed he had “a bright future ahead of him.” The sub-dealers got similarly lenient probation sentences. One of their lawyers told the Main Line Times & Suburban that his client was “‘a really good kid’ who made a ‘big mistake’ and who has ‘straightened himself out’ and wants to continue his education.” “He had a great internship with an investment firm that he lost,” the attorney added ruefully.

The unique compassion extended to white Americans is the obverse of the criminal suspicion that attaches to Black and other nonwhite Americans. This disparity is as old as the US legal system itself. In his history of race and crime in the Progressive era, Khalil Gibran Muhammad shows that even though white European immigrants committed crimes at high rates, Progressive reformers “insisted on seeing past the moral turpitude, violence, and ‘disposition to criminality,’” and worked tirelessly to help white immigrants “assimilate” by providing vital social services, public recreation, and other philanthropic support. They did not do the same for the even more downtrodden Black Southern migrants to Northern cities, who even racially liberal Progressive reformers insisted were innately deviant, irredeemable, and undeserving of entry to their settlement houses. To construct an “enduring statistical discourse of black dysfunctionality,” Muhammad writes, required casting white immigrant criminality as forgivable and fixable.

Matthew Lassiter’s magisterial new book, The Suburban Crisis, brings this analysis into the postwar era. Drawing on an impressive trove of congressional hearings, local law enforcement archives, news articles, and anti-drug organization papers, Lassiter’s analysis focuses on a historical fact hiding in plain sight, yet little studied in histories of the carceral state: Although masses of white middle-class youth in the postwar period experimented with illegal drugs, they by and large escaped the criminal penalties to which working-class youth of color were subjected. If, as Lassiter shows, white suburban drug charges reached “historically high levels” during the apex of the state’s war on drugs, how did the state ratchet up its nominally race-neutral assault on illegal narcotics without locking up masses of white suburban adolescents?

Rather than lawbreakers, white suburban drug users were categorized as what Lassiter calls “addict-victims” and “impossible criminals.” Throughout the second half of the 20th century, panicked parents, policymakers, and law enforcement agents ignored ample evidence that white youth sought and distributed drugs on their own, instead blaming “urban” (that is, Black or Latino) “drug pushers and foreign trafficker[s]” who allegedly crossed into the suburbs to prey on innocent white teenagers. Such claims of “racialized external invasions” fueled calls to crack down on drugs, culminating in new and punitive drug laws aimed at stamping out so-called urban drug pushers. But these same laws threatened to criminalize white youth drug users, too—if they were applied universally. Instead, a “pusher-victim trope” depicted white suburban drug users as innocent, “otherwise law abiding” victims deserving of compassion and rehabilitation. To protect these “impossible criminals,” suburban law enforcement, politicians, and parents built parallel, often unofficial offramps that diverted white suburban youth from the life-altering prosecution and imprisonment inflicted on their nonwhite urban peers. The war on drugs’ targeted criminalization of urban Black and Latino working-class youth was inseparable from a “reciprocal decriminalization of whiteness.”

The key was the seemingly benign federalist principle of “local discretion.” The flexible range of penalties for drug offenses, together with state deference to local decision-making on crime control, gave judges, police, and prosecutors wide latitude. In effect, these local legal actors could silently—and legally—reinscribe patterns of racial preference and privilege by their right to decide whether and whom to arrest, divert, prosecute, or imprison. This was a prime instance of what historian Stuart Schrader calls “decentralized despotism,” granting local authority the power to criminalize and punish. In such a system, Schrader writes, “thousands of everyday micro-fascisms” flourish, deepening state racial domination even without an overt Jim Crow politics. Because these mechanisms are presumed both lawful and neutral, their significance is often obscured. By making legible this diffuse post-Civil Rights politics of local discretion, The Suburban Crisis also helps uncover some of the carceral state’s more insidious forms of racial cruelty.

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The postwar suburban boom drove a national rise in car ownership throughout the 1950s. With more and more teenagers behind the wheel, the media stoked fears that this newfound mobility would produce an “epidemic” of youth “delinquency.” In Southern California, media fearmongering focused on Mexican American drug “peddlers” who allegedly “preyed” on white youth in the Los Angeles suburbs. Though baseless, this narrative of urban invaders corrupting wayward suburbanites “produced a narcotics crisis,” Lassiter writes, cementing the racialized “pusher-victim” trope in the suburban imaginary. In response, white parents and groups like the California Federation of Women’s Clubs organized to demand tougher drug laws. By 1951, their efforts had already paid off. That year, a landmark California law imposed a mandatory minimum sentence for distributing narcotics to a minor: three or six months for possession or sale, all the way up to a maximum of six years, with no possibility of probation, even for first-time offenders.

A slew of severe antidrug laws soon followed nationwide, starting with the Boggs Act, passed by Congress in 1951. That law imposed mandatory minimum sentences for drug possession, sale, and trafficking—including an exceptionally punitive two- to five-year sentence for first-time offenders—and placed marijuana on par with harder drugs like heroin. By 1955, Lassiter writes, over half of state legislatures had passed mandatory minimum laws “equivalent to or harsher” than Boggs. In 1956, Congress cracked down even further, with longer mandatory minimum sentences for sale of narcotics, including five to twenty years for first-time convictions.

In theory, these new laws applied to anyone caught possessing or distributing illegal drugs. But the children of the white suburbanites who backed anti-drug reform were always implicitly exempt. In California, local law enforcement protected white suburban youth from prosecution by simply discharging them, arranging plea deals to reduce their charges to non-criminal sanctions, or diverting them into treatment programs. Mass lenience for white youth was paired with mass criminalization of nonwhite urban residents. In Los Angeles County, Black and Mexican young people were charged with narcotics violations and sent to juvenile detention centers at far higher rates than whites. Such data points appeared to “prove” that nonwhite drug addicts and “pushers” were behind the nation’s drug crisis, institutionalizing what Lassiter calls a “racial knowledge” about drugs and criminality.

The drug panics of the 1960s only further entrenched this pattern. While other historians have emphasized the racialized criminalization of heroin users in cities, Lassiter again looks to the suburbs. The hippie counterculture inspired a surge in drug experimentation among the white middle class, mainly with marijuana and LSD. By the end of the decade, suburban juvenile drug arrests had tripled, leading to an increase in the proportion of white juvenile arrests “for the first time in modern history.” At the same time, arrests of African American juveniles actually declined, undermining the prevailing racist assumption that nonwhite youth were uniquely deviant. As Lassiter writes, these dual trends precipitated a “racial-political crisis.”

Confronted with a new “epidemic” of white middle-class drug use, policymakers, pundits, and law enforcement recast the problem as a product of the “generation gap” that lured suburban youth into rebellious countercultures. Cases involving “misguided or foolish teenagers” were dismissed, and additional “discretionary penalties designed for the white middle-class market” were created. “In 1970,” Lassiter writes, “one Dallas County judge sentenced two visiting Black college students from California to three years in prison for possession of marijuana, shortly after his son received probation for the same offense.” Around the same time, in 95 percent white Nassau County, Long Island, higher rates of psychedelics and marijuana use by white students led local judges and prosecutors to develop a “quasi-formal system” of plea bargains that limited young first-time offenders to noncriminal charges. As a result, marijuana possession was “effectively decriminalized” for white youths who were deemed “otherwise law-abiding citizens.” Meanwhile, the county’s Black residents were more likely to be arrested for heroin and “eight times more likely than white students to be prosecuted and incarcerated.” As Lassiter notes, “the carceral state sought to scare white middle-class youth into avoiding illegal drugs through the possibility of arrest but not ruin their lives and destroy their futures when they broke the law.”  These patterns of discretionary compassion for white youth appeared as the legitimate exercise of judicial prerogatives, and thus evaded political scrutiny. As historian Naomi Murakawa has written, this “procedurally fortified” structure of discrimination “distracted from the normative core of punishment in a system of persistent racial hierarchy.” Stripped of its explicitly racialized character, the US legal system’s continued collusion with white supremacy could appear as only so many impartial assessments about risk and rehabilitation.

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Even as white exemption became the norm throughout the 1960s and ’70s, the extent of suburban youth drug use threatened to upend the racial logic of the state’s punitive antidrug regime. Because state and federal drug laws considered marijuana as dangerous as narcotics like heroin, it was possible, albeit rare, for young white pot smokers to receive harsh mandatory minimum sentences for using and distributing marijuana. Alarmed by their children’s brushes with the law, however comparatively lenient, some parents and advocates began to question “antiquated drug enforcement policies” that over-criminalized marijuana and subjected white “youth victims” to the same harsh penalties as nonwhite “pushers” and “hoodlum addicts.” In response, liberal policymakers like Connecticut Democratic senator Thomas J. Dodd proposed reforms tailored to protect these white innocents: eliminating federal mandatory minimums for individual drug use, lessening penalties for marijuana possession, and making casual sale a misdemeanor for first offenders.

This leniency was not solely a liberal project, any more than criminalization was a singularly right-wing one. Across an increasingly fractured partisan spectrum, white exemption was a rare point of unity. In the same proposal, Lassiter notes, Dodd called for reforms that increased sentences for “major drug traffickers” and “professional criminals,” typically and erroneously deemed the primary cause of suburban drug epidemic. Similarly, President Richard Nixon negotiated a merger with Dodd that resulted in the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act of 1970, which nationalized the “impossible criminal” approach. At a 1969 meeting of state governors, Nixon mused that he “used to believe the answer was more penalties,” but now wondered “how could the nation put millions of teenagers and college students in prison?” Though authored by Nixon’s camp, the final version of the law contained many of Dodd’s original provisions for softening federal drug laws in ways that would benefit white youth while toughening penalties for so-called “professional criminals.”

This bipartisan “selective de-escalation” of the war on drugs only amplified the latter’s racial inequalities. After many state legislatures enacted marijuana reform laws, pot-related arrests declined, drastically reducing the overall number of white juvenile drug arrests. Yet total drug arrests “more than doubled during this period,” reflecting the intensified policing of heroin and cocaine, which were primarily associated with Black and nonwhite urban populations. “Between 1978 and 1989,” Lassiter writes, “the Black arrest share skyrocketed from 22 to 42 percent,” and “the Black juvenile arrest share quadrupled from 12 to 49 percent.” At every level of government, white youth were shielded from criminal consequences for the same actions that sent Black and brown youth to prison, marring their lives and foreshortening their futures. It’s an insight that Black and criminalized radicals have long articulated, and one that has increasingly pierced mainstream consciousness, particularly since 2020. But by exhaustively documenting these procedural yet critical instances of racial state-building, Lassiter’s book further exposes the unnamed structures that have reproduced white supremacist power, even decades after the end of legal racial discrimination.

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White exemption was not only a project of politicians and bureaucrats. Equally important was a cluster of now little-known grassroots suburban “parent power” groups that pushed for punitive drug enforcement, especially against the marijuana that so attracted their own children. These organizations positioned themselves as “nonpartisan,” but often leaned liberal. One of their most vocal leaders, Maria Keith Schuchard, was “a self-described liberal Democrat” from the Atlanta suburbs with a PhD in English. But whatever their progressive origins, parent power groups such as Dekalb Families in Action (founded in 1978) and the National Federation of Parents for Drug-Free Youth (founded in 1980) welcomed participants across the political spectrum, embedding themselves in both Democratic and Republican administrations. “Rather than a Democratic ‘right turn’ that anticipated the conservative backlash on the horizon,” Lassiter writes, “the antimarijuana crusade drew from an analysis of the suburban family crisis with deep roots in liberal politics and mainstream postwar developments.”

In 1977, an “explosive” report from the National Institute on Drug Abuse found that growing numbers of high school and middle school students had smoked pot “at least once,” and many did so on a weekly basis. The newly formed parent power groups responded with a “zero tolerance” campaign against marijuana decriminalization. By the late 1970s, the drug’s popularity had brought decriminalization into mainstream opinion; Jimmy Carter had even endorsed the policy during his presidential campaign. Once elected, Carter nominated Peter Bourne as his first director of the Office of Drug Abuse Policy (ODAP), who “energetically advocated” for marijuana decriminalization, contending that too many resources were wasted on a drug he deemed “less hazardous than smoking cigarettes.”

In response, Schuchard became a “one-woman lobbying operation,” writing what she called “mad Mom” letters to the President and First Lady Rosalynn Carter. Railing against the administration’s “new mythology of ‘harmless marijuana,” Schuchard made dubious claims about marijuana’s role as a “gateway” drug to harder narcotics, and the “amotivational syndrome” that weed allegedly engendered among otherwise innocent, healthy youth.

Schuchard and her allies soon got the ear of influential former White House drug czar and later NIDA director Robert DuPont, who successfully pressured Carter reverse his “non-criminal policy of discouragement” in favor of criminalization. Most dramatically, the suburban groups pushed ODAP director Bourne to resign in 1978, all but killing any prospect of marijuana decriminalization at the federal level. His successor, Lee Dogoloff, shared their antimarijuana fervor. By 1979, the decriminalization bill Carter endorsed two years earlier had been buried, and weed was “elevated . . . to the center of the federal war on drugs.” Working closely with parent power groups, the Carter administration “foment[ed] marijuana panic” and generously funded anti-drug programming, laying groundwork for the Reagan-era Just Say No campaign.

Through it all, parent power groups continued to advocate for policies that safeguarded their own children from criminal consequences. These organizations did encourage harsher noncriminal penalties for white youth. Such “tough love’” and “coercive public health” programs included putting “uncooperative pot smokers and underage drinkers” in “lockdown rehabilitation,” suspending or expelling drug users from school, working with police to “bust” teenagers at parties, and more. As Lassiter acknowledges, these were hardly slaps on the wrist; but even the most zealous parent groups did not want to see white children funneled into the criminal system. Most tough-love policies continued to protect white youth from the violence of incarceration and the stigma of criminal records.

In the end, it was this coalition of suburban centrists, rather than the more openly villainous Anita Bryant types, who paved the way for the drug war’s worst racialized harms. By killing federal marijuana decriminalization and pushing Carter toward a “zero-tolerance” approach, networks of affluent white parents sponsored the patterns of disproportionate arrest, prosecution, and incapacitation of Black and brown youth on marijuana charges that would come to a head under Reagan and Clinton. When marijuana arrests increased after passage of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, for example, African Americans were arrested and detained at far higher rates than whites, despite continued higher rates of drug use among white youth. Other factors, such as broken windows policing, also played a part in this crackdown. But white middle-class antidrug warriors helped institutionalize the “pusher-victim” framework in law and turned equitable drug reform into a political taboo.

For Lassiter, the political influence of these “ordinary parents” suggests that the real drama of postwar American political history is not necessarily found in its starkest extremes. The most powerful grassroots forces in his history are instead those that constructed “movement[s] that no one [could] argue with,” premised on nominally uncontroversial yet ideologically loaded calls to protect children and defend “family values.” A fixation on partisan conflict prevents us from seeing the political power that grows from the small talk and shared grievances aired in suburban living rooms. So too is the real engine of racist criminalization found less in inflammatory law-and-order rhetoric than in the quiet administrative violence of legal discretion. By historicizing and politicizing this violence, Lassiter chips away at the postwar criminal legal system’s false face of political neutrality. The era of marijuana panics and Just Say No may might seem far away, but the cracks and gaps in the system exploited by white authorities—from parents and teachers to prosecutors and judges—remain wide open. The members of the preppie drug ring, after all, walked right though them.

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