On The Run: Fugitive Life in an American City Read online

  ALICE GOFFMAN is assistant professor of sociology at the

  University of Wisconsin–Madison.

  The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

  The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

  © 2014 by The University of Chicago

  All rights reserved. Published 2014.

  Printed in the United States of America

  23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 1 2 3 4 5

  ISBN-13: 978-0-226-13671-4 (cloth)

  ISBN-13: 978-0-226-13685-1 (e-book)

  DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226136851.001.0001

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Goffman, Alice, author.

  On the run : fugitive life in an American city / Alice Goffman.

  pages cm—(Fieldwork encounters and discoveries)

  Includes bibliographical references.

  ISBN 978-0-226-13671-4 (hardcover : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-226-13685-1 (e-book) 1. Criminal justice, Administration of—Pennsylvania—Philadelphia. 2. African American youth—Legal status, laws, etc.—Pennsylvania—Philadelphia. 3. African American youth—Pennsylvania—Philadelphia—Social conditions. 4. Discrimination in criminal justice administration—Pennsylvania—Philadelphia. 5. Racial profiling in law enforcement—Pennsylvania—Philadelphia. 6. Imprisonment—Social aspects—United States. I. Title. II. Series: Fieldwork encounters and discoveries.

  HV9956.P53G64 2014

  364.3'496073074811—dc23

  2013033873

  This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

  ON THE RUN

  Fugitive Life in an American City

  ALICE GOFFMAN

  The University of Chicago Press

  Chicago and London

  FIELDWORK ENCOUNTERS AND DISCOVERIES

  A series edited by Robert Emerson and Jack Katz

  CONTENTS

  Prologue

  Preface

  Introduction

  1. The 6th Street Boys and Their Legal Entanglements

  2. The Art of Running

  3. When the Police Knock Your Door In

  4. Turning Legal Troubles into Personal Resources

  5. The Social Life of Criminalized Young People

  6. The Market in Protections and Privileges

  7. Clean People

  Conclusion: A Fugitive Community

  Epilogue: Leaving 6th Street

  Acknowledgments

  Appendix: A Methodological Note

  Notes

  PROLOGUE

  Mike, Chuck, and their friend Alex were shooting dice on the wall of the elementary school. It was approaching midnight and quite cool for mid-September in Philadelphia. Between throws, Chuck cupped his hands together and blew heat into his fingers.

  Mike usually won when the guys played craps, and tonight he was rubbing their noses in it, shrugging into a little victory dance when he scooped the dollar bills off the ground. After a pair of nines, Alex started in on Mike.

  “You a selfish, skinny motherfucker, man.”

  “Niggas is always gonna hate,” Mike grinned.

  “You think you better than everybody, man. You ain’t shit!”

  Chuck laughed softly at his two best friends. Then he yawned and told Alex to shut his fat ass up before the neighbors called the law. A short time later, Chuck called it a night. Mike announced he was going to get cheesesteaks with his winnings and asked if I wanted to come with.

  “Can I get a cheesesteak?” Alex interjected.

  “Man, take your fat ass in the house,” Chuck laughed.

  “Oh, so I’m walking?!”

  . . .

  Mike and I were halfway to the store in his car when his cell phone started ringing. When he picked up I could hear screams on the other end. Mike shouted, “Where you at? Where you at?”

  He screeched the old Lincoln around and headed back to 6th Street, pulling up in front of the corner store. There in the headlights we saw Alex, all 250 pounds of him, squatting by the curb, apparently looking for something. When he glanced up at us, blood streamed from his face, down his white T-shirt, and onto his pants and boots. Alex mumbled something I couldn’t decipher, and then I realized he was looking for his teeth. I started searching on the ground with him.

  “Alex,” I said, “we have to take you to the hospital.”

  Alex shook his head and put up his hand, struggling to form words with his mangled lips. I kept pleading until finally Mike said, “He’s not fucking going, so stop pushing.”

  At this point I remembered that Alex was still on parole. In fact, he was quite close to completing his two years of supervision. He feared that the cops who crowd the local emergency room and run through their database the names of Black young men walking in the door would arrest him on the spot, or at least issue him a violation for breaking the terms of his parole. If that happened, he’d be back in prison, his two years of compliance on the outside wiped away. A number of his friends had been taken into custody at the hospital when they sought care for serious injuries or attempted to attend the birth of their children.

  Mike took off his shirt and gave it to Alex to soak up the blood from his face. Chuck had come back around by this point, and carefully helped him into the front seat of Mike’s car. We drove to my apartment a few blocks away. We cleaned Alex up a bit, and then he began to explain what had happened. On his way home from the dice game, a man in a black hoodie stepped out from behind the corner store and walked him into the alley with a gun at his back. This man pistol-whipped him several times, took his money, and smashed his face into a concrete wall. Later, Alex found out that this man had mistaken him for his younger brother, who’d apparently robbed the man the week before.

  Over the next three hours, Mike and Chuck made a series of futile calls to locate someone with basic medical knowledge. Mike’s baby-mom, Marie, was in school to become a nurse’s aide, but she hadn’t been speaking to him lately—not since she’d caught him cheating and put a brick through his car window. Finally, at around six in the morning, Alex contacted his cousin, who came over with a plastic bag full of gauze and needles and iodine, and stitched up his chin and the skin around his eyebrow. His jaw was surely broken, she said, as well as his nose, but there was nothing she could do about it.

  The next afternoon, Alex returned to the apartment he shared with his girlfriend and young son. Mike and I went to visit him that evening. I again pleaded with Alex to seek medical treatment, and he again refused.

  All the bullshit I done been through [to finish his parole sentence], it’s like, I’m not just going to check into emergency and there come the cops asking me all types of questions and writing my information down, and before you know it I’m back in there [in prison]. Even if they not there for me, some of them probably going to recognize me, then they going to come over, run my shit [check for his name in the police database under open arrest warrants]. I ain’t supposed to be up there [his parole terms forbade him to be near 6th Street, where he was injured]; I can’t be out at no two o’clock [his curfew was 10:00 p.m.]. Plus, they might still got that little jawn [warrant] on me in Bucks County [for court fees he did not pay at the end of a trial two years earlier]. I don’t want them running my name, and then I got to go to court or I get locked back up.

  At this point his girlfriend emerged from the bedroom, ran her hands over her jeans, and said, “He needs to go to the hospital. Better he spends six months in jail than he can’t talk or chew food. That’s the rest of his life.”

  . . .

  Alex’s attack occurred over ten years ago. He still finds it difficult to breath
e through his nose and speaks with a muffled lisp. His eyes don’t appear at quite the same level in his face. But he didn’t go back to prison. Alex successfully completed his parole sentence, a feat of luck and determination that only one other guy in his group of friends ever achieved.

  PREFACE

  The number of people imprisoned in the United States remained fairly stable for most of the twentieth century, at about one person for every thousand in the population.1 In the 1970s this rate began to rise, and continued a steep upward climb for the next thirty years.2 By the 2000s, the number of people behind bars stood at a rate never before seen in US history: about 1 for every 107 people in the adult population.3 The United States currently imprisons five to nine times more people than western European nations, and significantly more than China and Russia.4 Roughly 3 percent of adults in the nation are now under correctional supervision: 2.2 million people in prisons and jails, and an additional 4.8 million on probation or parole.5 In modern history, only the forced labor camps of the former USSR under Stalin approached these levels of penal confinement.6

  The fivefold increase in the number of people sitting in US jails and prisons over the last forty years has prompted little public outcry. In fact, many people scarcely notice this shift, because the growing numbers of prisoners are drawn disproportionately from poor and segregated Black communities. Black people make up 13 percent of the US population, but account for 37 percent of the prison population.7 Among Black young men, one in nine are in prison, compared with less than 2 percent of white young men.8 These racial differences are reinforced by class differences. It is poor Black young men who are being sent to prison at truly astounding rates: approximately 60 percent of those who did not finish high school will go to prison by their midthirties.9

  This book is an on-the-ground account of the US prison boom: a close-up look at young men and women living in one poor and segregated Black community transformed by unprecedented levels of imprisonment and by the more hidden systems of policing and supervision that have accompanied them. Because the fear of capture and confinement has seeped into the basic activities of daily living—work, family, romance, friendship, and even much-needed medical care—it is an account of a community on the run.

  . . .

  I stumbled onto this project as a student at the University of Pennsylvania. During my sophomore year I began tutoring Aisha, a high school student who lived with her mother and siblings in a lower-income Black neighborhood not far from the campus. In the evenings we would sit at the plastic and metal kitchen table in her family’s bare-walled, two-bedroom apartment, the old TV blaring, and work on her English or math homework. Afterward her mom and aunts would gather on the stoop of their building and talk about their kids or watch people go by. Gradually, I got to know Aisha’s relatives, friends, and neighbors. When my lease was up, Aisha and her mother suggested that I take an apartment nearby.

  Aisha’s fourteen-year-old cousin Ronny came home from a juvenile detention center that winter. He lived with his grandmother about ten minutes away by car. We started taking the bus to visit him there.

  Soon Ronny introduced me to his cousin Mike, a thin young man with a scruffy beard and an intense gaze. At twenty-two, Mike was a year older than I was. He quickly explained that he was in a temporary financial rut, living at his uncle’s house and with no car to drive. Last year he had his own car and his own apartment, and he planned to get back on his feet very soon. Mike seemed to command some respect from other young men in the neighborhood. When a neighbor asked what a white woman was doing hanging out on the back porch with him, he replied that I was Aisha’s tutor who lived nearby. Other times, he explained that I was Aisha’s godsister.

  Over the next few weeks, Mike introduced me to his mother, his aunt, his uncle, and his close friend Alex. Many inches shorter and nearly twice Mike’s weight, Alex seemed tired and defeated, as if he weren’t trying to succeed in life so much as avoid major tragedy. Gradually I learned that Mike and Alex were two members of a close-knit group of friends. The third member, Chuck, was spending his senior year of high school in county jail awaiting trial on an aggravated assault charge for a school yard fight. Mike missed him keenly, explaining that Chuck was the glass-half-full member of the trio. As Chuck later told me on the phone from jail, “I ain’t got shit but I’m healthy, I ain’t bad looking, you feel me? I’m a happy person.”

  That first month with Mike and Alex was calm—boring even. We would sit on Mike’s uncle’s stoop and share a beer, or hang out in various houses of his friends and neighbors. Some evenings we headed over to Chuck’s mother’s house so Mike could catch his friend’s nightly phone call from jail.

  Then the cops raided Mike’s uncle’s house in the middle of the night. They were looking for Mike on a shooting charge, though he vehemently denied any involvement. With a warrant out for his arrest, he spent the next few weeks hiding in the houses of friends and relatives. Then he turned himself in, made bail, and began the lengthy court proceedings.

  I had never known a man facing criminal charges before, and assumed this was a grave and significant event in Mike’s life. I soon learned that he had gone through two other criminal cases within the past year: one for possession of drugs and the other for possession of an unlicensed gun. Chuck was in county jail awaiting trial, and Alex was completing two years of parole after serving a year upstate for drugs. Mike’s cousin was out on bail. His neighbor was living under house arrest. Another friend, who was homeless and sleeping in his car, had a warrant out for unpaid court fees.

  Near the end of my sophomore year, I asked Mike what he thought of my writing about his life for my senior thesis in the Sociology Department at Penn. He readily agreed, with the caveat that I leave out anything he asked me to keep secret. When Chuck came home from jail that spring, I received his permission to include him as well. Over time, I asked other young men and their families to take part.

  For the next year, I spent much of every day with Mike, Chuck, and their friends and neighbors. I went along to lawyers’ offices, courthouses, the probation and parole office, the visiting rooms of county jails, halfway houses, the local hospital, and neighborhood bars and parties.

  Having grown up in a wealthy white neighborhood in downtown Philadelphia, I did not yet know that incarceration rates in the United States had climbed so dramatically in recent decades. I had only a vague sense of the War on Crime and the War on Drugs, and no sense at all of what these federal government initiatives meant for Black young people living in poor and segregated neighborhoods. I struggled to make sense of the police helicopters circling overhead and the young men getting searched and cuffed in the streets. I worked hard to learn basic legal terminology and process.

  That spring, Mike’s gun case ended and a judge sentenced him to one to three years in state prison. A short time later, I was accepted into a PhD program at Princeton. Through four years of graduate school I continued to live in Aisha’s neighborhood, commuting to school and spending many of the remaining hours hanging out around 6th Street with whichever of the 6th Street Boys were home. On the weekends I visited Mike, Chuck, and other young men from the neighborhood in prisons across the state. Over time, I got to know family members and girlfriends as we cleaned up after police raids, attended court dates, and made long drives upstate for prison visiting hours.

  The families described here agreed to let me take notes for the purpose of one day publishing the material, and we discussed the project at length many times. I generally did not ask formal, interview-style questions, and most of what I recount here comes from firsthand observations of people, events, and conversations. People’s names and identifying characteristics have been changed, along with the name of the neighborhood. Mike initially suggested that in notes and term papers I call his neighborhood 6th Street, and I kept this pseudonym as the project grew into a book.

  Though I gratefully draw on information that a number of police officers, judges, parole officers, and p
rison guards provided in interviews, this book takes the perspective of 6th Street residents. In doing so, it provides an account of the prison boom and its more hidden practices of policing and surveillance as young people living in one relatively poor Black neighborhood in Philadelphia experience and understand them. Perhaps these perspectives will come to matter in the debate about criminal justice policy that now seems to be brewing.

  INTRODUCTION

  In the 1960s and 1970s, Black Americans achieved the full rights of citizenship that had eluded them for centuries. As they successfully defended the right to vote, to move freely, to attend college, and to practice their chosen profession, the United States simultaneously began building up a penal system with no historic precedent or international comparison.

  Beginning in the mid-1970s, federal and state governments enacted a series of laws that increased the penalties for possessing, buying, and selling drugs; instituted steeper sentences for violent crime; and ramped up the number of police on the streets and the number of arrests these officers made. Street crime had risen dramatically in urban areas in the 1960s and 1970s, and politicians on both sides of the aisle saw a heavy crackdown on drugs and violence as the political and practical solution. By the 1980s, crack cocaine led to waves of crime in poor minority communities that further fueled the punitive crime policies begun years earlier.

  In the 1990s, crime and violence in the United States began a prolonged decline, yet tough criminal policies continued. In 1994 the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act poured billions of federal dollars into urban police departments across the nation and created fifty new federal offenses. Under the second Bush administration, the near unanimous endorsement of tough-on-crime policies by police and civic leaders accompanied the mushrooming of federal and state police agencies, special units, and bureaus.1 These policies increased the sentences for violent offenses, but they also increased the sentences for prostitution, vagrancy, gambling, and drug possession.2