On The Run: Fugitive Life in an American City

by Alice Goffman

  When I met Alex, he was twenty-two and living with his girlfriend, Donna, who later became pregnant with his second child. Alex was serving a two-year parole term and had recently gotten a job at his father’s heating and air-conditioning repair shop. He was spending less time on the block than he used to, when he was unemployed and selling marijuana.

  The repair shop closed at five o’clock. Donna worked in a liquor store, which closed some hours later. On Thursday and Saturday nights, she also tended bar at the KatNip. This meant that after he got off work, Alex could go and visit his old friends from 6th Street before Donna had the chance to haul him back home. Sometimes he would stay on the block drinking and talking until late at night.

  Donna frequently argued with Alex over what time he got home and his drunken condition. During these fights, she occasionally threatened to call his parole officer and claim that Alex had violated his parole. She also threatened to report him if he broke up with her or cheated on her, or if he didn’t contribute enough of his money to the household. The 6th Street Boys often joked that Alex couldn’t stay out past eight o’clock, because Donna would call the PO and report him for staying out past curfew.8 As the night went on, Mike would say, “Okay, Alex, better get your fat ass home before your mizz [missus] pick up the phone!”

  Aside from this ability to call the parole officer and notify him of a violation—which could easily send Alex back to prison—Donna also had the advantage that Alex was paroled to her apartment. This meant that she could phone the parole office and tell them she no longer wanted Alex to live there. In this case, he would be placed in a halfway house.9

  In the early morning after a party, Mike and I drove Alex back to Donna’s apartment. She was waiting on the step for him:

  DONNA: Where the fuck you been at?

  ALEX: Don’t worry about it.

  DONNA: You must don’t want to live here no more.

  ALEX: Come on, Don. Stop playing.

  DONNA: Matter of fact, I’ll give you the choice. You’re going to sleep in a cell or you want to sleep in the halfway house.

  MIKE: You drawling [acting crazy], Donna, damn!

  DONNA [to Mike]: Ain’t nobody talking to you, nigga!

  ALEX: Come on, Don.

  DONNA [to Alex]: Uh-unh, you not staying here no more. I’m about to call your PO now, so you better make up your mind where you going to go [either jail or a halfway house].

  ALEX: I’m tired, man, come on, open the door.

  DONNA: Nigga, the next time I’m laying in the bed by myself, that’s a wrap [that’s the end].

  ALEX: I got you!

  Later that day, Donna phoned me to vent. She listed a number of reasons why she needed to threaten Alex like this. If she didn’t keep him on a tight leash, he’d spend all his money on lap dances or on drugs or alcohol. And, she explained, he might violate his probation and spend another year in jail:

  I can’t let that nigga get locked up for some dumb shit, like he gets caught for a DUI or he gets stopped in a Johnny [a stolen car] or some shit. What the fuck I’m supposed to do? Let that nigga roam free? And then next thing you know, he locked up, and I’m stuck here by myself with Omar [their son] talking about “Where daddy at?”

  Donna seemed to view her threats as necessary efforts to rein Alex in. Threatening to call the police gave her some chance of keeping him home with her instead of out in the street, where he might get into trouble. His presence in the house also meant that she’d have more help with their two-year-old son. And the more time he spent at home with her, the less money he would be spending on beer or marijuana or other women. If his paycheck got diverted to other expenses, it would be difficult for her to pay the bills. Donna also indicated that she missed Alex and wanted to spend more time with him.

  To Alex, her threats seemed manipulative and underscored the unfair balance of power:

  I fucking hate my BM [baby-mom]. Just because she can call the law she think she in control, like she can just run all over me. One day she’s going to get it, though. She’s going to see [she will lose me to this poor treatment and regret it].

  Yet Alex was determined to complete his probation, and believed that in order to do this, he must comply with Donna’s demands. He remarked, “It’s better for me to be locked up in her house than locked up in that house [jail].” With her power to call the police and land him in prison, he also thought there was little he could do to fight back when she did things like take his house keys, put holes in his tires, or throw his clothes out the second-story window: “I can’t do nothing, you understand. I just got to wait.”

  Mike and Chuck were sure that Alex would continue to live with Donna even after finishing his parole, but he proved them wrong. A week after he completed that two-year term, he left her house and rented his own apartment.

  Marie, the mother of Mike’s two children, lived on Chuck’s block in a house with her mother, grandmother, and five other relatives. She, too, used the threat of the police to gain some measure of control over her partner. The couple had started dating in high school; their son was born during their senior year, and their daughter two years later.

  A few years after their second child was born, Mike began openly seeing a woman named Chantelle. He claimed that he and Marie had broken up and he could do as he wished. Marie, however, hadn’t agreed to this split, and maintained that they were still together and that he was in fact cheating. “He don’t be telling me we not together when he’s laying in the bed with me!” she lamented.

  Mike began riding past Marie’s block with Chantelle on the back of his ATV motorbike. Marie was infuriated by the insult of her baby-dad riding through her block with another woman for all her family and neighbors to see, and told him that he could no longer come to visit their two children. Mike and Marie spent many hours on the phone arguing over this. Mike would plead with her to see the children and she would explain that in order to do this, he’d have to tell Chantelle that it was over.

  Chantelle wanted to fight Marie, and almost did so one afternoon. Marie was standing outside her house with seven relatives behind her, waving a baseball bat and shouting, “Get your kids, bitch. I got mine” (meaning that she had more claim to Mike than Chantelle did, because they shared two children). One of Chantelle’s girlfriends and I held Chantelle back while she took off her earrings and screamed, “I got your bitch, bitch!”10 and “I’ma beat the shit out this fat bitch.”

  Marie began threatening that she would call the cops on Mike if he continued to see Chantelle, since he had a bench warrant out for his arrest. For a time, Marie and Mike’s conversations on the phone would end like this:

  MARIE: Alright, nigga. In five minutes the cops is going to be up there.

  MIKE: You’re not calling the cops.

  MARIE: You still fucking her?

  MIKE: I’m doing what I’m doing.

  MARIE: Do you see the [police] car outside? It should be there by now.

  Despite her threats, Marie tried a number of tactics to get Mike to stop sleeping with Chantelle before she resorted to actually calling the police on him. She poured bleach on the clothes that he kept at her house so that he didn’t have nice clothes to wear when he went out with the other woman. She took her house keys and drew a white line in the paint on his car, and then she threw a brick through his car window. She attempted to throw hot grease on him when he came into the kitchen, but he ducked, and most of it missed him. She began prank-calling his mother, Miss Regina, pretending to be Chantelle, in an attempt to find out how close Chantelle and Mike had become, and what this new woman’s relationship was with Mike’s mother.

  After the hot grease and the prank phone calls, Mike consulted his mother and his friends Chuck and Steve. All agreed that Marie needed to be taught a lesson—even Miss Regina, who in Mike’s words is “not a violent person.”

  Mike paid a woman who lived down the street a large bag of marijuana to beat up Marie. According to him, he and this woman drove to the b
us stop and waited until Marie appeared. Then the woman got out of the car and beat Marie against a fence. Mike stayed in the car and called to her to hit Marie again and again. Mike said that Marie didn’t fight back, only put her arms up to block the blows to her face.

  A few days after the swelling around Marie’s eyes and cheeks had gone down, Mike and I were sitting on a neighbor’s porch steps. A police car pulled up, and two officers arrested him on the warrant. He didn’t think to run, he told me later, because he only had a bench warrant and assumed they were coming for two young men sitting next to us, who had recently robbed a convenience store.

  While Mike sat in the police car, Marie came out of her house and talked at him through the window in a voice loud enough for the rest of us to hear: “You not just going dog me [publicly cheat on or humiliate me]! Who the fuck he think he’s dealing with? Let that nigga sit for a minute [stay in jail for a while]. Don’t let me catch that bitch up there, either [coming to visit in jail].”11

  During the first few weeks that Mike was in jail, he refused to speak to Marie or allow her to visit him. In a letter to his mother, he wrote, “I love Marie, but she loves the cops too much, so I think I’m going leave her and be with Chantelle.”

  Yet as the trial dragged on, Mike started asking me if Marie knew about the court dates and if she’d be there. On the dates that he wasn’t brought out of the holding cell and into the courtroom, he’d call me later to ask if Marie had shown up. On the day of his sentencing a year and a half later, Marie appeared in the courthouse in a low-cut top with a large new tattoo of his name on her chest. When Mike came into the room, they locked eyes and both began to cry. On the way out of the courthouse, Miss Regina joked, “I don’t know why I bothered to come today. I should have gone to work. All he was looking at was that damn Marie.”

  So Mike forgave Marie for calling the cops on him when he had a warrant, though he’d sometimes bring up this betrayal in later years when they were fighting.

  . . .

  Marie had gotten Mike taken into custody for a warrant on a case he already had pending, but at times I observed women going a step further: bringing new charges against a man because of some personal wrong.

  Lisa was in her late thirties and lived on Mike’s block with her two nieces. Her son was a car thief and typically spent only a couple of weeks in the neighborhood between stints in jail. Lisa had a crack habit, and sometimes allowed Mike and his friends to hang out or sell out of her house in exchange for money and drugs. She was also a part-time student at Temple University, though the guys joked that she’d been in school for nearly two decades.

  Lisa and Miss Linda were such good friends that Miss Linda’s sons Chuck and Reggie stayed overnight at Lisa’s house many times when they were growing up, and considered her something of an aunt. Then, when he was eighteen years old, Reggie got Lisa’s sixteen-year-old niece pregnant. He refused to help pay for her abortion or even to acknowledge that he had impregnated her. Lisa declared that she “wasn’t fucking with Reggie no more,” meaning that she was cutting off the long-standing relationship between their families. Her two nieces threatened to have him beaten up by various young men they were involved with. Because Reggie usually hung out on the corner only two houses away, this became a frequent conflict.

  That same spring, the war with 4th Street was under way. The 4th Street Boys had united with the Boys Across the Bridge and were driving through 6th Street, shooting at Reggie and his older brother, Chuck. On one of these occasions, Reggie fired two shots back as their car sped away. These bullets hit Lisa’s house, breaking the glass in the front windows and lodging in the living room walls. Although no one was wounded, Lisa’s two nieces had been home at the time. They phoned their aunt, who called the police. She told them that Reggie had shot at her family, and the police put out a body warrant for his arrest for a double count of attempted murder.

  After five weeks, the police found Reggie hiding in a shed and took him into custody. Miss Linda and Chuck tried to talk Lisa and her nieces out of showing up in court so that the charges would be dropped and Reggie could come home.12 From jail, Reggie phoned Anthony, his mother, and me, and discussed this in a four-way conversation:13

  REGGIE: The bitch [Lisa] know I wasn’t shooting at them [her nieces]. She knows we’re going through it right now [are in the middle of a series of shootouts with young men from another block]. Why would I shoot at two females that live on my block? She knows I wasn’t shooting at them.

  ANTHONY: You might have to pay her a couple dollars and put her up in the ’tel [to ensure that she won’t be home if the police should try to drag her in to testify].

  REGGIE: She just mad because her son locked up. She’s hurting right now, so she’s trying to take it out on me.

  MISS LINDA: What you really need to do is call that bitch up and tell her that you apologize [for not taking responsibility for the pregnancy].

  REGGIE: True, true.

  Reggie did apologize to Lisa and her nieces—before the court date—and spread the word that he was responsible for getting Lisa’s niece pregnant. Lisa and her nieces didn’t show up for three consecutive court dates, and after five months Reggie came home from jail. Lisa seemed pleased with this result:

  You not just going get my niece pregnant, then you talking about that’s not your child, you know what I’m saying? That nigga used to be over my house every day when he was a kid. [Meaning that because Reggie had known their family for so long, he should have shown more respect.] Fuck out of here. No. I mean, I wasn’t trying to see that nigga sit for an attempt [an attempted murder conviction], but he needed to sit for a little while. He got what he needed to get. He had some time to sit and think about his actions, you dig me? He done got what he needed to get.

  . . .

  From these examples, we can see that young women and men around 6th Street sometimes reappropriate the intense surveillance and the looming threat of prison for their own purposes. Even as women endure police raids and interrogations, and suffer the pain of betraying the man they’d rather protect, they occasionally make use of a man’s “go to jail” card to protect him from what they perceive to be mortal danger. In anger and frustration at men’s bad behavior, they can sometimes use men’s precarious legal status to control them, to get back at them, and to punish them for any number of misdeeds. In doing so, they get men taken into custody, not for the crimes or violations the police are concerned with, but for personal wrongs the police may not know or care about.

  Perhaps more remarkably, the young men who are the targets of these systems of policing and surveillance occasionally succeed in using the police, the courts, and the prisons for their own purposes. They may check themselves into jail when they believe the streets have become too dangerous, transforming jail into a safe haven. When they come home from jail or prison, they may turn the bail office into a kind of bank, storing money there for specific needs later on, or using those funds as collateral for informal loans. Young men even turn their fugitive status into an advantage by invoking a warrant as an excuse for a variety of unmet obligations and personal failings.

  In these ways, men and women in the neighborhood turn the presence of the police, the courts, and the prisons into a resource they make use of in ways the authorities neither sanction nor anticipate. Taken together, these strategies present an alternative to the view that 6th Street residents are simply the pawns of the authorities, caught in legal entanglements that constrain and oppress them.

  FIVE

  The Social Life of Criminalized Young People

  In the neighborhood of 6th Street and others like it, boys begin in school, but many make the transition to the juvenile courts and detention centers in their preteen or teenage years. By the time many young men in the neighborhood have entered their late teens or early twenties, the penal system has largely replaced the educational system as the key setting of young adulthood. These boys and young men are not freshmen or seniors but defendants
and inmates, spending their time in courtrooms instead of classrooms, attending sentencing hearings and probation meetings, not proms or graduations.

  As the criminal justice system has come to occupy a central place in their lives and by extension those of their partners and families, it has become a principal base around which they construct a meaningful social world. It is through their dealings with the police, the courts, the parole board, and the prisons that young men and those close to them work out who they are and who they are to each other.

  CHILDREN’S LEGAL WOES AS MOTHER’S WORK

  When I first met Miss Linda, her eldest son, Chuck, was eighteen, her middle son, Reggie, was fifteen, and her youngest son, Tim, was nine. Chuck and Reggie were already in jail and juvenile detention centers, respectively, but I was around to watch Tim move from middle school to the juvenile courts as he turned twelve and thirteen. At this point Miss Linda transferred much of her parental energies to this new setting. The following scene is an excerpt from field notes:

  We are sitting in small wooden chairs lined up in rows in Room K of the Juvenile Courthouse, located at 18th and Vine in downtown Philadelphia. The room has high, recessed ceilings and paneled walls. It is 9:10 in the morning, and the room begins to fill with boys and their mothers or guardians. Miss Linda’s youngest son, Tim, 13 now, is sitting to my left with his elbows resting on his knees, his hands making a cup holding up his head. He checked his cell phone at the entrance and so has little to do now but watch the other people or try to sleep.

  Miss Linda sits on his other side and fidgets, moving her legs up and down in quick motion.

  Tim asks her if she still has any gum, and she says no, unless you want half of what I got in my mouth. He shakes his head emphatically. She says, “Don’t act like you don’t be taking the gum out of my mouth just ’cause Alice here.”