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Over the last several decades, proactive policing, in which departments use data on reported crimes to determine where local police officers will target their surveillance, has increased police contact with residents in certain neighborhoods. Drawing on field research conducted over a three-year period (2007-2010) among adult and adolescent African American men in a San Francisco neighborhood with a concentrated poor, Black population, I provide an ethnographic account of routine encounters with the police that structure adolescent boys' daily lives in potentially significant ways. I build on Erving Goffman's discussion of "patterns of mortification" to describe how typical encounters unfold in the day-to-day lives of young men and consider the implications of such encounters for healthy adolescent development., (© 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.)

This chapter introduces the innovative field-based studies on disadvantaged men that are featured in this volume. Together, these studies of disadvantaged men from diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds and both urban and nonurban settings complement and extend recent discussions of emerging adulthood, which typically conceptualizes the transition to adulthood as a normative and linear process. The authors offer that the research presented here provides a more accurate rendering of the transition to adulthood for young disadvantaged men. For disadvantaged young men, the transition to adulthood is often complex and nonlinear, and features a diversity of pathways that are often overlooked in contemporary research on transitions to adulthood. The chapter ends with a call for research and theory that better reflects the precarious nature of pathways to adulthood for disadvantaged men in urban and nonurban settings. Researchers are encouraged to draw on findings from field-based studies to inform policies and practices directed at minimizing the marginalization of disadvantaged men from mainstream society., (© 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.)