On The Run: Fugitive Life in an American City

by Alice Goffman

  Though some women manage to redeem their relationships, their reputations, and their sense of self after they cooperate, and a rare few are able to withstand police pressure and garner some honor and acclaim, it must be said that the police’s strategy of arresting large numbers of young men by turning their mothers and girlfriends against them goes far in creating a culture of fear and suspicion, overturning women’s basic understandings of themselves as good people and their lives as reasonably secure, and destroying familial and romantic relationships that are often quite fragile to begin with.

  FOUR

  Turning Legal Troubles into Personal Resources

  The police and the courts are certainly making life difficult for families in the 6th Street neighborhood: breaking loved ones apart, sowing suspicion and distrust. But residents aren’t simply the unwilling pawns of oppressive authorities. Both men and women at times actively make use of the form this intervention takes, appropriating their legal entanglements for their own purposes. In their ongoing struggles to negotiate family and work, and to make claims for themselves as honorable people, young men and women turn the heavy presence of the police, the courts, and the prisons to their advantage in ways the authorities neither intended nor expected.1

  JAIL AS A SAFE HAVEN

  Prisons were designed to be so unpleasant that even those living in quite harsh conditions outside their walls would find them a deterrent from crime.2 To be sure, young men around 6th Street usually take great pains to elude the police and stay out of jail. But confinement begins to look more attractive to them during times of sustained violent conflict. When the 6th Street Boys found themselves under threat from other groups of young men from neighboring blocks, they sometimes manipulated their legal entanglements so as to get taken into custody voluntarily, in effect using jail as a safe haven from the streets.

  During a dice game one evening, Tino put a gun to Jay-Jay’s head and demanded all his money. Tino had moved to 6th Street only a few months before, so Chuck and Mike considered him only a candidate member of the group—a recent transplant on probationary status. Jay-Jay, who was originally from 4th Street but a frequent guest on 6th, didn’t think that Tino was seriously trying to rob him, and told him to stop playing. Tino had been “wetted” (that is, taking wet [PCP]) all weekend and was now humiliated by Jay-Jay’s refusal to take his robbery seriously; he demanded again that Jay-Jay give him everything in his pockets. Jay-Jay again refused.3 By this time, Chuck and Reggie were yelling at Tino to put down the gun. Steve, also wetted out that night, was laughing—he didn’t think that Tino had what it took to rob Jay-Jay or to shoot him, and said so. Tino pulled the trigger and Jay-Jay fell to the pavement.

  Later, sitting in the basement with Chuck, Reggie, Steve, and me, Tino held his knees and rocked back and forth, repeating, “My intentions wasn’t to shoot him. My intentions wasn’t to shoot him.”

  Steve fired back, “You was wrong. No two ways about it. You was wrong.”

  Reggie’s phone rang three times that night with messages from the 4th Street Boys: “It’s on.”

  Jay-Jay’s death triggered what is called a war, a series of shootouts between members of one block and those of another. In this case, Jay-Jay’s boys from 4th Street and the Boys Across the Bridge joined forces. They began driving up and down 6th Street and shooting at the 6th Street Boys.

  At first the 6th Street Boys hesitated to go to 4th Street and shoot at the men attacking them. Steve mentioned many times that since Jay-Jay had been killed, the 4th Street Boys had every right to shoot at them. But Steve’s and Chuck’s families were in danger: Steve’s brother had stopped going to baseball practice, and his sister, who slept on the living room couch right by the window, had to move down to the basement. A bullet went right past Tim’s knee while he was watching TV. These young men wouldn’t stop, the guys thought, until they fired back.

  Most of the 6th Street Boys weren’t present for this war. Mike, Ronny, and Anthony were in prison or jail, and Alex had moved off the block and was working at his dad’s heating and air-conditioning repair shop. After he killed Jay-Jay at the dice game, Tino moved to North Philadelphia, where he went into hiding for three months. This meant that only Chuck, Reggie, Steve, and Steve’s younger cousin were left to fight two blocks of young men by themselves. After a couple of weeks, Chuck and Steve had both been shot—Chuck in the neck and Steve in the thigh. Fresh bullet holes dotted five houses on Chuck’s street.

  As the weeks went by, I watched the remaining members of the 6th Street Boys get taken into custody—not in connection with these shootings, but for quite minor probation and parole violations, or for bench warrants for not showing up at court or for failure to pay fines and fees.

  A few days after he was shot, Steve paid an unscheduled visit to his probation officer and asked to be tested for drugs. His urine test came back positive for marijuana, a result he had skillfully evaded in many previous tests. The PO issued him a warning for the positive test, letting him know that the next time he failed the test he would go back to jail for the violation. Two weeks later, Steve returned and was again tested for drugs. This time the judge sent him back to jail for six months.

  Steve’s younger cousin went to the police station and turned himself in on a bench warrant he had been issued ten months earlier for not paying his court fees. The officer who took the report later told me that the judge had offered to release him and put him on a payment plan for the court fees, but he declared that he was never going to pay the money and that they might as well keep him until he worked off the court fees and costs in jail. (The judge had ruled that his fees would be reduced by ten dollars for every day he spent in custody.) Chuck had no warrants pending and wasn’t on probation at the time, so he remained on the block a few weeks after Steve and his cousin got taken into custody. Then he drove a friend’s off-road motorbike past the police station and allowed himself to be chased for two blocks before he stopped the bike and put up his hands. The police charged him with fleeing the police and driving an off-road bike on city streets, and took him in. This left Reggie, who had a body warrant out for his arrest for a robbery. After a week on his own, he went down to the local police station and turned himself in.

  The four members of the 6th Street Boys who were present on the block during this war may have allowed themselves to be taken into custody for reasons having nothing to do with the conflict. It is also possible that they didn’t elect to get taken into custody and were caught, but these alternative explanations seem unlikely. Steve’s cousin freely turned himself in on a low-level bench warrant and then refused to accept the judge’s offer that would have allowed him to remain out of jail. This was the first time I had known Steve’s cousin to turn himself in. Steve appeared at his probation officer’s without being asked, and then volunteered for a drug test—the only time he had done so in the three years I had known him. He had managed to pass all his drug tests and adhere to other requirements of probation in the previous eight months. Chuck, who rode an illegal motorbike past the police station, may have been doing so for the thrill of publicly evading the authorities. Mike, for one, delighted in outrunning the cops before an audience of neighbors, family members, and women. But Chuck had no history of driving off-road motorbikes near police officers, let alone driving by police stations on them.

  I believe that Reggie was the last person to get himself taken into custody because he already had a body warrant out for his arrest for armed robbery; he worried that if he turned himself in, he’d sit in jail during a lengthy trial and then possibly serve a number of years in prison. Chuck, Steve, and Steve’s cousin, who turned themselves in more quickly, faced only a few months in jail apiece for their less serious violations: just enough time to let the violence on the street subside. Reggie tried to stay out as long as he could, but with dwindling numbers of the group still out on 6th Street it became too dangerous to try to make it on his own. A few years of prison seemed like the better option.

>   Three members of the group who were already in custody admitted to me that they were glad to be locked up so that they didn’t have to participate in this war. This also led me to think that Chuck, Reggie, Steve, and Steve’s cousin got arrested deliberately, using their wanted status to get out of harm’s way.

  . . .

  Sometimes women, too, used jail as a safe haven, calling the police on their sons or partners when they decided the streets had become too dangerous.

  When Steve got into an altercation with a guy from 4th Street, his girlfriend, Taja, called the cops and told them where they could find Steve; he had a warrant out for violating his parole. Taja told me that she’d have called the cops on the men who were trying to shoot him but feared retaliation, so instead she told the police to come get Steve. In her mother’s kitchen, she and I talked over her decision with her sister:

  TAJA: I miss him or whatever, but better that than I get the call like, “Yo, come to the hospital.” Right?

  HER SISTER: Niggas is trying to get at him [kill him]. You did what you needed to do.

  Though Steve’s girlfriend may have saved his life, he refused to speak to her for over a month while he sat in jail, refusing her visits and returning her letters. This, she said, hurt her deeply. Still, she remained adamant that she had done the right thing, and after a few months in jail he began to forgive her.

  While men may quietly turn themselves in to save themselves from mortal danger, women looking to prevent the men in their lives from getting killed find that jail isn’t such an easy option. Even if a man would, in his heart, rather be locked up than face a gun battle in the streets, he cannot admit this openly, and so makes quite a public show of his displeasure with the woman who put him there. For women, using jail as a safe haven for partners or relatives in danger comes with a heavy price.

  THE BAIL OFFICE AS A BANK

  After a man’s trial ends, he or his family are entitled to 80 percent of the bail they put up for his release. Bail money becomes available six months after the close of a case, and must be claimed within a year; otherwise it goes into the city’s coffers.

  Instead of recovering the bail money right away, people sometimes leave it at the bail office until they have a particular need for it, effectively using the bail office as a short-term bank.

  Like most young men on 6th Street, Chuck didn’t have a bank account. He attempted to squirrel away money in his mother’s basement, in various holes in the walls, and on his person, but his mother would often find the wads of cash and spend them on drugs. When his girlfriend Brianna was pregnant with their first child, Chuck had three cases end within a span of a few months. Instead of collecting the bail money immediately, he kept it at the bail office, checking in on it periodically. When Brianna gave birth to their baby girl, he cashed it out, and spent the bulk of the twelve hundred dollars on a stroller, crib, breast pump, baby clothes, and groceries.

  Young men around 6th Street also leverage their bail money to obtain informal loans. Mike once got a loan for one thousand dollars from the local marijuana dealer, under the arrangement that Mike would pay it back with interest when his bail came through a few months later. He used his bail papers as proof that this money was indeed coming to him, and on the day the money was available, he and the dealer went down to the office together to retrieve it.

  Bail money accrues no interest while it sits at the bail office; what’s more, 20 percent of the original amount paid cannot be recovered. Even so, leaving the money at the bail office often seems like a better alternative than withdrawing it, given how hard it is to keep money safe and to control how one’s money gets spent. In this way, bail provides some banking privileges and even some informal credit to men who otherwise don’t have access to conventional bank accounts.

  BEING WANTED AS A MEANS OF ACCOUNTING FOR FAILURE

  Once a man finds himself in legal jeopardy, being a dependable friend, spending time regularly with his partner and family, going to work, and calling the police when threatened or harmed are no longer safe options. These actions may expose him to the authorities and lead to his confinement. Yet when wanted men (or social analysts, for that matter) imply that being wanted by the police is the root cause of their inability to get a job, see their children, trust the police, or live in an apartment in their own name, they may be stretching the facts. Long before the rise in imprisonment rates, Black men distrusted the police and faced substantial difficulties in finding work and participating in their families’ lives.4 While a compromised legal status may exacerbate these difficulties, being wanted also serves as a way to save face and to explain personal inadequacies.

  Urban anthropologist Elliot Liebow wrote that the unemployed men he spent time with in the late 1960s accounted for their failures with the theory of manly flaws.5 Instead of admitting that their marriages failed because they couldn’t support their spouses, they explained that they were too manly to be good husbands—they couldn’t stop cheating, or drinking, or staying out late. This reasoning allowed them to save face in light of their failure to secure a job and provide for wives and children. For the young men of 6th Street, who also find themselves unable to secure a decent job, being on the run takes the place of, or at least works in concert with, the manly flaws described by Liebow as a means to retain self-respect in the face of failure. In this way, a warrant becomes a resource in addition to a constraint.

  . . .

  Steve had eight warrants issued on him during the time I knew him, mostly for probation violations, unpaid court fees, and failure to appear for court dates. When he had a warrant out for failure to pay $141 in court fines and fees, he repeatedly mentioned how he couldn’t get work because of it:

  If I had a whip [car], I’d go get me a job up King of Prussia [a mall in a neighboring county] or whatever. But I can’t work nowhere in Philly. That’s where niggas be fucking up. You remember when Chuck was at McDonald’s? He was like, “No, they [the police] ain’t going to see me, I’m working in the back.” But you can’t always be back there, like sometimes they put you at the counter, like if somebody don’t show up, you know what I mean? How long he worked there before they [the police] came and got him? Like, a week. They was like, “Um, can I get a large fry and your hands on the counter because your Black ass is booked!” And he tried to run like shit, too, but they was outside the jawn [the restaurant] four deep [four police officers were outside] just waiting for him to try that shit.

  Though Steve often invoked his warrant as an explanation for his unemployment, the fact was that he didn’t secure a job in the six years that I knew him, including the many periods during which he had no warrant out for his arrest.

  Jamal, eighteen, moved into the neighborhood with his aunt, and after a while became Reggie’s young boy. Like the other guys, he often talked about his court cases or mentioned that he had to go see his probation officer. One afternoon, Steve, Mike, Chuck, and I were sitting on Chuck’s back-porch steps when Reggie drove up the alleyway and announced, “Yo, the boy Jamal, he clean, dog! He ain’t got no warrant, no detainer, nothing. He don’t even got, like, a parking ticket in his name.” Reggie told us that he’d just been to see Jamal’s mother across town, and she’d complained to him that her son hadn’t yet found a job. She informed Reggie that Jamal had no pending cases or anything else “in the system that would hold him,” so he should have had no problem finding employment.

  Reggie then talked about what he would do if he had his warrant lifted, as the guys suspected Jamal had:

  I wish I would get my shit [warrant] lifted. I’d be bam, on my J-O [job], bam, on my A-P [apartment], bam, go right to the bank, like, “Yeah, motherfucker, check my shit, man. Run that shit. My shit is clean, dog. Let me get that account.” I be done got my elbow [driver’s license] and everything.

  Here Reggie explains how his wanted status blocked him from getting jobs, using banks, obtaining a driver’s license, and renting an apartment. Yet the things he thought a “clean”
person should do weren’t things that he himself did when he was in good standing with the authorities over the the years that I have known him; nor were they things that most of the other men on the block did. Alex, Mike, and Chuck sometimes got jobs when they didn’t have warrants out for their arrest, and Chuck even got a job once when he did have one. But others, like Reggie and Steve, remained unemployed whether they had warrants or not. None of them obtained a valid driver’s license in the six years of the study.6 Only Mike and Alex secured their own apartments during this time, but they kept them for less than three months. None of the men opened a bank account, to my knowledge.

  . . .

  Being wanted, then, can work as an excuse for a wide variety of unfulfilled obligations and expectations. Having a warrant may not be the reason why Steve, for example, didn’t look for work, but police officers do in fact come to a man’s workplace to arrest him, and some of the men, like Chuck, experienced this firsthand. In the context of their ongoing struggles, the explanations young men give for their failures to find a job, see their families, secure an apartment, apply for a driver’s license, or open a bank account amount to reasonable half-truths that can convincingly account for these failures, in both their minds and those of others who have come to see their own lives in similar terms.7

  THE THREAT OF PRISON AS A TOOL OF SOCIAL CONTROL

  Many women in the 6th Street neighborhood devote themselves to the emotional and material support of their legally compromised partners and kin, taking the protection of their partners and male relatives from the police as part of their sacred duty as mothers, sisters, partners, and friends. But these relationships don’t always run smoothly. Sometimes men break their promises; sometimes they cheat, in plain view of the neighborhood gossips, bringing humiliation to women; sometimes they become violent. At this point women may find that a man’s legal precariousness can come in handy as a weapon against him. In anger and frustration at men’s bad behavior, women at times harness a man’s warrant or probation sentence as a tool of social control, to dictate his behavior or to punish him for various wrongs.