“An informative and scholarly addition to the growing body of literature regarding the criminal pursuit of gang involvement and violent offenders in Los Angeles. . . . Phillips invites readers to challenge Operation Fly Trap. How can the operation be celebrated as an unqualified success in the wake of all the human wreckage?” 

R. M. Seklecki, Minot State University | Choice

“I thoroughly enjoyed reading Operation Fly Trap. The dramatis personae are treated as human beings, and the reader gets a chance to look at them in the flesh: loving, betrayed, strung out, anxious, and more. The book marries the real conditions of poverty, racism, and war with the day-to-day lives of victims and offenders. This is first-class ethnography.”

John Hagedorn, University of Illinois at Chicago

“In this fascinating and powerfully compelling book, ethnographer Susan A. Phillips goes behind the lines in the war on drugs to explore its everyday effects. Through remarkably frank, honest, and self-reflective testimonies, both police officers and their targets reveal the enormous disorder created by policies designed to promote order. Operation Fly Trap humanizes and personalizes the social disintegration unwittingly promoted by drug criminalization and mass incarceration, revealing in vivid and memorable detail how aggressive policing and punitive sentencing unwittingly produce the very problems they purport to prevent.”

George Lipsitz, author of How Racism Takes Place

“Susan A. Phillips’ book should be required reading for every proponent of the wars on drugs and gangs who may be entertaining second thoughts at what they have wrought. She illuminates evidence that the wars may be self-justifying and self-perpetuating. The blunt questions are whether turning under-valued human beings into ‘high-value targets’ for police and prosecutors only creates a vacuum to be filled by vengeance, and whether demonizing only assures the further rise of demons.”

Tom Hayden, author of The Long Sixties