On The Run: Fugitive Life in an American City

by Alice Goffman

  My stomach is growling, and Tim turns to me and says, “That you?”

  I nod. Miss Linda and I had split a 25-cent bag of corn chips this morning as we waited for Tim to shower and iron his clothes, but that was hours ago.

  We watch the other boys file in. They look to me to be 10, 11, and 12 years old, a few of them, like Tim, in their early teens. Some of them are walking in with their mothers and are coming from home to attend probation hearings or to be tried for various crimes. Others are accompanied by caseworkers and come from juvenile detention facilities. These boys hope to be released today, so they carry on their shoulders large white cloth bags containing their clothing and other meager possessions. By 9:30 there are about 50 boys in the room and 5 girls. Two of the boys look Latino to me; all the others are Black. A sea of silent Black boys waiting to be tried.

  A white uniformed guard moves down the aisle and tells two boys to take off their baseball caps, which they do grudgingly. One of the boys reveals hair that had been braided a couple of months ago and badly needs to be taken out and redone; he tries to smooth it out with the palm of his hand.

  The guard tells the woman behind us that she can’t eat those crackers in the courthouse. She says, “This isn’t the courthouse; this is the waiting room.” He says, “Ma’am, put the crackers away or go outside and eat them.” She puts them in her pocket, and when the guard is a few rows behind us she mumbles that she’s a diabetic and has to eat at certain times.

  Mothers approach a middle-aged white man in khaki pants who sits at a desk in the front of the room. They ask questions which I can’t quite hear from the middle row where we are sitting. After a while the man stands and says, “If you have court today, form a line to check in.” He holds a thick printout with a long list of names and leafs through it, telling the boys in line which courtroom they will have. He pauses to listen to a mother who has approached him at the desk, who says her son was unable to come to court today. She says something else, and the man replies loudly that he doesn’t decide who gets a warrant and has nothing to do with warrants. He looks up her son’s name on the sheets of paper and tells her which courtroom to go to. One of the boys in line has a heavy metal leg restraint that causes him to limp as he drags it along the floor. Another is handcuffed in the front with a white plastic band.

  We move to a small courtroom now, where we sit on long benches and wait for a judge to appear and begin hearing the cases. In the rows around us sit mothers and their sons, some with their younger children also. A mother in front of us recognizes a woman in our row; they reach over the bench and talk about mutual friends and relations, one mother saying, “Yeah, he passed in May,” the other responding, “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  Two guards stand at the front, and the public defenders and some case managers sit in the first row. A thin white woman, who I assume is a public defender, stands and turns toward us and calls a name; no one replies. She calls another name, and a boy and his mother or guardian approach her and speak in muffled voices. Miss Linda recognizes one of the public defenders as the lawyer who defended her middle son, Reggie, some years back. The judge emerges from a door behind the bench, and the guard asks us to stand and then to be seated.

  Tim had caught this case last year when he attempted to leave school in the middle of the day; his teacher pursued him out of the school and into the street. Tim threw rocks at the teacher as he ran away, and though none of these rocks hit the teacher, he pulled a hamstring while in pursuit, and so the school police arrested Tim on charges of aggravated assault.1

  Eventually, Tim’s name is called, and he walks with his mother to the front of the desk. The judge asks if a certain person is here; I assume this is the teacher. The prosecutor says, “No, Your Honor, I do not believe he is here, but I did reach him last night, and he told me he was planning to be here.” The public defender, the judge, and the prosecutor all look at their calendars and go back and forth for a while until they find a good date to continue the case. The court clerk passes a paper to Miss Linda, and it is all over. Tim and his mother move toward the door, signaling me to get up.

  We walk quickly out of the room and through the building, past security, as if staying any longer might cause the judge to change his mind or find something in the file indicating that Tim should be detained. When you go to court, there’s always a chance that they might take you; we will celebrate Tim’s continued freedom when we get home.

  As we drive back from the juvenile court building, Miss Linda is smiling and laughing. She calls her boyfriend on my cell phone, and says, “Yup. We on our way home now. I knew he wasn’t coming.” If Tim’s teacher doesn’t show up another two times, the case will be thrown out for lack of a witness to the crime. We all know this, and it’s a very exciting prospect.

  I drive up the back alley and park in the driveway Miss Linda shares with the house connected to hers. Miss Linda and Tim walk up the iron stairs to the balcony over the garage, and then into the house from the back kitchen entrance. The sun has come out, and I sit on the iron steps. From here you can see the backs of the houses from the next block over, which share the alleyway.

  Miss Linda comes out with a cup of Irish Rose and smiles. “I’m celebrating!” she says. To a neighbor who has opened his back door she calls out, “You want some?” He nods, and she says he’ll have to give her a dollar—a dollar per cup. He laughs, and she tells him that she isn’t joking.

  She hears the phone ring from inside the house and jumps up, saying it might be Chuck. It isn’t, and I can hear her telling whoever it is that she’s happy because she’ll get to keep her son here with her, at least for the time being. “To keep it real,” she says, “one is enough. At least if Chuck and Reggie are locked up, I know they good. When all three of my sons are home, I can’t get no sleep. Let them come home when these streets cool down, you feel me?”

  The day is getting warmer now, and Miss Linda’s cat, named Rat, emerges from the garage and finds a place in the sun next to some empty Hugs bottles and chicken bones and cigarette butts in the alleyway.

  Tim comes out of the kitchen and down the back steps with two paper cups and passes me one, saying hum to get my attention.

  Miss Linda hears the phone ring again—it is inaudible to me—and jumps up to get it. She is rewarded this time, as it is Chuck calling from CFCF (Curran-Fromhold Correctional Facility), the county jail. She talks with him for a few minutes and then calls Tim over to speak to his brother. Chuck is waiting to start trial for a case he caught for possession with intent to distribute.

  Tim sprints up the stairs. I can hear him laugh, and I assume he’s telling Chuck about the good news today in court.

  Tim talks to his brother for a few minutes and then calls me over to the phone. I walk up the steps and through the kitchen, which smells of cigarette smoke, cooking oil, and animal urine. In the living room, Miss Linda is lying on the two-seater sofa, sipping her drink and watching court TV. Tim says, “I love you, too” to Chuck before passing me the phone.

  With a heavy addiction to crack and alcohol, Miss Linda was by many accounts not an ideal mother. But she took pride in staying abreast of her sons’ legal developments. This was no small or finite task, as at least one of her sons was in juvenile detention, jail, or prison at any given time during the six years I spent with the family—save for a two-month period in 2007 when all three sons were at home.

  In contrast to Miss Linda, Mike’s mother, Miss Regina, worked two jobs and kept an exceptionally clean house. She also spent much of her time dealing with her son’s legal affairs. When Mike was in his early twenties, he caught a series of cases for drugs as well as gun possession. In addition to attending Mike’s court dates and managing his probation and parole, Miss Regina visited him in jail and prison, arranged for his two children to visit, sent him packages and money regularly, accepted his phone calls, and wrote him letters.2 As his sentencing date in the federal courts approached, she also organized Mike’s friends, relat
ives, and past employers to write letters on his behalf, and to attend the trial:

  It is the day of Mike’s sentencing in federal court. He has been awaiting trial in a federal holding cell for the better part of a year and had been in county jail for another year before that.

  This morning, Miss Regina drove his uncle and aunt, and the mother of his children, Marie, to the courthouse downtown. Also, she has arranged for Mike’s grandmother to pick up Mike’s girlfriend and his girlfriend’s mother, who live way out in the greater Northeast. I have come in my own car.

  In the weeks before the sentencing, Miss Regina had succeeded in persuading nine family members and friends to send letters on Mike’s behalf. She gave us each a stamped envelope and typed up the letters that his grandmother and uncle had written by hand.

  Walking into the courthouse, Miss Regina gets a call from Mike’s lawyer, who says there has been a last-minute time change—the sentencing will now take place at 3 p.m. Frustrated but resolute, Miss Regina tells the assembled group that we’ll be going to her house in North Philly to wait it out. There she makes chicken and rice and salad, and entertains us with pay-per-view. She practices what she’ll say if the judge calls on her.

  At the sentencing, Mike emerges wearing the suit that Miss Regina sent him. She remarks on how well it fits and how it was right for her to go with a size smaller than he had suggested. He smiles when he sees so many of his family assembled. I haven’t seen him in over a year, since only direct relatives were permitted to visit him in the federal holding cell. He looks older, his beard grown out.

  The judge, a middle-aged Black man with a stern gaze, asks the parole officer (PO) to stand. He asks if the PO has been in touch with anyone in Mike’s family about his upcoming release. Because the time that Mike has sat awaiting trial will be counted toward his federal sentence, he’ll serve only eight months in the Federal Detention Center. So, he’ll be home within the year. The PO says that Mike’s mother phoned him to give all her contact information, and that she kept calling to check in and let him know that she wanted to be “part of the process.” Miss Regina nods fervently as he is explaining this.

  The judge says that it is clear that Mike is a good person who has done some bad things. He says the letters from Mike’s children made the biggest impact on him; he could tell how much his children loved him and that they actually wrote the letters themselves. Then he got out the letter from Mike’s ten-year-old son and read it aloud to us. The last line was “So please let my daddy come home, because my mother does not know how to raise a boy, and I need my daddy.” Miss Regina mouths the words as the judge reads the letter; she has read it so many times, she knows it by heart.

  The judge says that the maximum sentence for Mike’s offense is 16 years. Given the two years he has already served awaiting trial and given that he has such support from his family, Mike will receive only six months in prison and six months in a halfway house, followed by three years on federal probation. The judge asks Mike if he has anything to say, and Mike says he is sorry for his actions and that he is glad to be given this chance. Then the judge asks Miss Regina to stand as he tells Mike, “Now turn around, and thank your mother for everything she has done for you.” Mike is caught a bit off guard by this, and the judge tells him again to thank his mother.

  Mike turns to her, sobbing. She says, “It’s okay, baby.”

  Like Miss Linda and Miss Regina, many women around 6th Street find that their son’s legal proceedings structure their days, which are punctuated by court hearings, bail payments, jail visits, and phone calls to public defenders. Their days are also marked by the good or bad news they receive concerning his fate with the courts, the parole board, and the prisons. Staying on top of a son’s legal matters and supporting him through the legal process can be a heavy burden, but it can also be a rewarding way for women to spend their time. It is partly through their efforts to keep their sons out of jail and to support them once they have been taken that women fulfill their obligations as mothers.

  PENAL TRANSITIONS AS SOCIAL OCCASIONS

  A young man’s movement through the criminal justice system happens in a series of phases: the police stop him, search him, and run his name in their database; he catches a case, gets taken into custody, gets a bail hearing, attends months or years of court dates, gets sentenced; serves time, pays fees, and comes home on probation or parole. Along the way, he may violate the terms of his supervision, for example by drinking or staying out late, or get accused of a new crime, or fail to pay his court fees and fines, or fail to attend a court date, and be issued a warrant. As he ages, he moves from juvenile detention centers to adult facilities, and from shorter sentences in county jail to longer ones in state or perhaps even federal prison.

  Over the course of a young man’s passage through these stages, a number of events present themselves: bail hearings, trial dates, and returns home after long stints locked up. These events serve as key social occasions, for which a young man’s friends and family dress up and argue over who should pay. People watch carefully to see who is in attendance, who is sitting with whom, who organizes the event or sits in the first row. If the mother of the man’s children is missing from the benches of the courtroom, talk begins to circulate that she has indeed left him for a man down the street. If a new woman is sitting next to his mother in the first row, people acknowledge her as his main partner. At these public criminal justice proceedings, the members of a man’s social circle deduce where they stand in his life and where he stands in the eyes of those around him.

  One of the first significant social occasions that the criminal justice system provides occurs when a young man gets booked. With a young man suddenly taken from his home and placed in confinement, the question arises as to what will happen to the belongings he has left behind. Who will care for these items? Who will take responsibility for them or be allowed to use them? In the first hours or days of a young man’s confinement, a tremendous redistribution of his material possessions takes place, and his partner, family, and friends watch to see whom he chooses to manage this movement of goods and to whom they will be given.

  . . .

  Mike’s mother, Miss Regina, usually coordinated his legal matters, organized the attendance of his court cases, and kept the schedule for jail visits, letting those who wished to see him know what his visiting hours were and which dates had already been spoken for by others.3 Often, she also undertook the management of her son’s affairs while he was away, and when he was first taken, she typically spent a number of days taking care of what he left behind: cleaning out the apartment he could no longer pay rent on, canceling his cell phone and paying the cancellation fees, taking over his children’s school fees, and securing his various possessions—cars, motorbikes, sneakers, speakers, jewelry, CDs—or selling them to pay his bills.

  But when Mike went back to prison on a parole violation in 2004, he appointed his new girlfriend, Tamara, to handle his affairs, mind his possessions, and give some of them to specific people. His mother called me to discuss his decision:

  MISS REGINA: I got no problem with Tamara; she’s a good person. But he’s known her for two months, Alice. I’ve been taking care of his stuff for years. Last time, the only thing I didn’t have here was the bike.

  ALICE: Yeah, Marie [the mother of his children] had it.

  MISS REGINA: And what happened to it?

  ALICE: The cops took it.

  MISS REGINA: Yup. Because her cousin was riding it around. You can’t ride those bikes in town! Those are off-road bikes. Or if you do, you better be faster than the cops!

  ALICE: Right!

  MISS REGINA: Me and you are the only ones that make sure everything is still here when he comes home.

  ALICE: Yep.

  MISS REGINA: When he got locked up for that gun case, everything stayed right here. Every shirt was ironed and waiting for him. Sneakers still in the box. But like I said, if he wants Tamara to do it, that’s fine. She can pay all his
bills and clean out that apartment and find somewhere to put his car that don’t even run. Let her tow that car somewhere, that’s fine with me. I already told him I don’t want anything in that apartment. Anything. And when he comes home and his TV gone and he sees Ant wearing his clothes up and down the street, he better not come complaining to me.

  In some communities, the event that makes clear to a young man’s family that he’s in a serious relationship is a school dance or graduation ceremony to which he takes his new partner. Later, it might be a family wedding out of town, a vacation, or a nephew’s christening. But for Mike, the first event indicating to his mother that he had a serious girlfriend came when he got taken into custody and designated Tamara to handle his affairs.

  Not only does the distribution of his possessions become a key task for a trusted friend or family member, but the people to whom a newly jailed man bestows his belongings are recognized by loved ones as his inner circle, the people he trusts and cares for the most. When Mike violated his parole by drinking alcohol and got sent back to prison a few years before, he phoned me shortly after his arrival to explain who should get what:

  MIKE: I told Chuck he can hold the AP [apartment] down for me till I get back, so can you give him the key? I know his pops ain’t letting him sleep at the crib no more. And he already got the keys to the Bonnie [Pontiac Bonneville]. I told him to just ride out with that.

  ALICE: Okay.

  MIKE: Can you give my cell phone to Shanda? I told her you were going drop it off to her—you know hers got cut off.

  ALICE: Yeah. Probably tomorrow.

  MIKE: My moms might want that car, though. If she call you about the car, just tell Chuck I got to give it to her, you know.

  ALICE: Okay.

  MIKE: Ronny going to come by for my Xbox; I told him to call you before he come to make sure you there.

  The events marking a young man’s passage through the system thus become times when private relationships are made public; when a young man makes careful decisions about the relative ranking of his social relations. But these occasions are not only times when private relationships are made public, they are also times when a man’s general social standing or level of familial and neighborhood support is made manifest. For example, young men on 6th Street took the number in attendance at another man’s sentencing as indication of his social standing, a demonstration of how much “love” he has in the streets. From field notes taken in 2009: