On The Run: Fugitive Life in an American City

by Alice Goffman

  There was a big showing in room 405 today for Reggie’s Must Be Tried.4 I drove his mother, Miss Linda, and their neighbor Anthony, who has two bench warrants and took a real risk showing his support today. Reggie’s older brother, Chuck, drove their youngest brother, Tim, who skipped class today at his new school in order to come. Victoria, Reggie’s sometime girlfriend, met us there. The judge, a stern-faced Italian man, dropped all the charges—conspiracy, drug possession (when he arrived at the hospital he had some work [drugs to sell] on him), possession of a weapon—so now it’s just attempted murder. On the way back, we heard from Reggie’s cousin Keisha, who said she had gone to the neighborhood courthouse instead of the courthouse in Center City. She met us back at the house and brought some weed. All in all, it was quite festive and solidary. Reggie called from jail and discussed the showing with me proudly, comparing it to Rocky’s sentencing last month, where none of the people who had promised to attend actually showed up.

  PENAL EVENTS AS ROMANTIC SHOWDOWNS

  As important social occasions, the events marking a man’s movement through the criminal justice system can become public stages for run-ins between women competing for his affections.

  When a man is on the outside, he has some chance of keeping the women in his life from finding out about each other. When he gets booked, such a balancing act becomes much more difficult. At his sentencing, his longtime girlfriend comes face to face with his “jump-off”—a woman she didn’t know existed. In the first days that he is permitted to have visits in county jail, the mother of his child confronts his new girlfriend, who had arrived fifteen minutes before she did and took up his visiting hour. Women also look through the sign-in book at the visitor’s desk to determine whether other women have been there.

  These meetings can become dramatic events in which women size each other up, try to determine where they stand in relation to each other, and even demand that the man make a public statement about their respective places. It is in the jail visiting room, the courthouse, and the bail office that women triumph as a man’s main partner, or get humiliated and cast aside.

  . . .

  When Mike was released from prison, he was sentenced to a halfway house in North Philly, and there he met Tamara, a caseworker for the residents. She was in graduate school as well, working on her master’s degree. Tamara and Mike started dating, and when Mike later went back to prison on a violation for breaking curfew, Tamara started coming to visit him. He was careful to ensure that she visited on separate days from his baby-mom, Marie, who came once a week with his two children. But a couple of weeks into his sentence, Tamara came on an off day, ostensibly to visit her younger brother, who was also serving time at Graterford:

  There was an important incident at Graterford today. Marie and I drove up there to see Mike, and Tamara is sitting two tables over, playing chess with her brother. So Marie and I are sitting there, and Tamara comes over and says, “What’s up, Mike, how you doing?” and he says to Marie, “This is Tamara, she works at the halfway house.” To Tamara he says, “This is Marie, my kids’ mom.” At this Marie stands up and says, “Is that all I am to you? That’s all I am? I ain’t drive five fucking hours for this shit.”

  In almost a whisper Mike says, “Shut up and sit down before they cancel this visit.”

  “Who is she?”

  “Nobody, just a friend.”

  “You fucked her, didn’t you.”

  “Oh, here you go. Why you always assume that?”

  “Because I know you. I know you.”

  “We don’t mess with each other, we just cool.”5

  The rest of the visit, Marie is touching Mike and playing with his hair. Tamara starts talking loudly to her brother so that we can hear, telling him that she really likes Mike and hopes he isn’t still messing with his baby-mom. Mike starts talking louder so that Marie can’t hear what Tamara is saying, and looks at me pleadingly to do something about the situation.

  When the guard indicates that the time is up, Marie stands and holds on to Mike’s waist, looking up at him and leaning in for a kiss. Mike hesitates and grins sheepishly, and then hugs her back and kisses her.

  By the time we are waiting in the holding cell outside the visiting room to be released, tears are streaming down Tamara’s cheeks.

  A similar public reckoning took place when Aisha attended her boyfriend Trey’s sentencing in the federal courts in 2009. In this case, she clearly lost to Trey’s baby-mom:

  Aisha called me today, sobbing loudly. I left class and came over right away. Second time I’ve seen Aisha cry in seven years, the first time being at the funeral of her sister’s boyfriend, whom the police strangled to death in front of us. Trey’s sentencing was today, and to the heavy news of his 15-year bid in federal prison was added the injury of his baby-mom showing up and sitting with Trey’s mother. When Aisha got there, his BM was already there in the second row, talking quietly with his mom and aunt. Aisha said his mom didn’t even greet her, acted as if she didn’t know her, like they hadn’t been talking every day this whole year he’s been away.

  Given her anger and hurt, I am surprised by how sensitive Aisha is to Trey’s mother’s position. She said that his mother probably just didn’t know what to do with the two of them in the same room.

  Aisha said she wasn’t sure if she should leave, but in the end she decided to stay, sitting in the back row. His BM ignored her the whole time he was up there, making all the sounds and gestures when he came out that women make to indicate that it is their man standing up there. Then his BM spoke to her as they took the stairs down.

  “She asked me right to my face if I was a dyke,” Aisha told me.

  “Why would she think that?”

  “Because that’s what Trey told her. He said we was just cool, I just be sending him money and stuff.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I told her: I’m not a dyke; he told me he don’t mess with you anymore.”

  Aisha said that the woman responded by showing Aisha her ring, saying, “We are getting married as soon as he comes home.” Aisha looked at Trey’s mother for confirmation, and Trey’s mother refused to meet her eyes, as if she were trying to be careful getting down the steps.

  To Trey’s BM Aisha replied, “Well, better you than me, because I am not waiting no 15 fucking years for him.”

  Today, Trey has called twice and is trying to tell Aisha that he didn’t even know that his BM would be there, and that he keeps telling her not to come. He will take her off his visitor’s list wherever they take him. But Aisha isn’t listening anymore. She tells Trey that she knows he is lying and that he never would have told his baby-mom that she was a lesbian unless he wanted to preserve his relationship with her. If he was really done with her, he would have openly acknowledged that Aisha was his girlfriend. In addition, there was the indisputable evidence of the seating arrangements in the courtroom. If Aisha had been his girlfriend, then his mother would have sat with her in the first row, and the mother of his children would have been sitting in the back, not the other way around. “Your mom was sitting with her,” she says to him on the phone. “You can’t tell me they didn’t come together.”

  “All the months I wrote him and visited him and put money on his books, and took his collect calls,” Aisha says to me. “I’m done.”

  By way of neutralizing Aisha’s threat to the mother of his children, Trey had told this woman that Aisha was a lesbian and hence they were “just friends.” Meanwhile, he had been telling Aisha that things were over between him and his baby-mom, and he simply saw her because she had been bringing the kids to visit. When Aisha and Trey’s baby-mom ran into each other at his sentencing, these separate narratives collided: his baby-mom found out that Aisha was a genuine competitor, while Aisha discovered that Trey and his baby-mom were still very much romantically involved.

  . . .

  To say that the events accompanying a man’s movement through the criminal justice system have becom
e key social occasions isn’t to say that the community has no other ways of going public with a new relationship, sizing up rivals, or coming together. Cookouts and block parties continue, as do funerals and christenings. Many young women and a much smaller number of young men still graduate from high school. But court sentences, bail hearings, and homecomings from a long sentence have become frequent enough, and for enough people, that they now exist alongside these older occasions, serving as significant social events not just for young men and their immediate families but sometimes for their larger networks of family, friends, neighbors, and acquaintances.

  LEGAL WOES AS THE BASIS OF PERSONAL HONOR

  Just as the criminal justice system now furnishes the social events around which young people work out their relationships to one another, it has provided the social material with which young people construct themselves as brave and honorable. Contact with the criminal justice system is almost universally understood as something to be avoided. The institution is, generally speaking, one that grants dishonor and shame rather than pride or standing to those who pass through it. Even so, the looming threat of prison, the movement of young men through the courts and the jails, the assignment of a diminished and precarious legal status to these young men, and the pressure on their loved ones to provide information about them, all provide some opportunity for bravery and honor.

  . . .

  In these field notes from the spring of 2007, Chuck’s friend Anthony describes a number of his legal entanglements and brushes with law, taking considerable pride in his own conduct:

  Around 1 in the morning last night, Chuck and Anthony are sitting on Chuck’s front stoop, passing a blunt (a cigar hollowed out and filled with marijuana) back and forth. We have just been to the bar, and Anthony, having had more than a few shots of Hennessy, begins to pace around and talk about his warrants.

  “I ain’t sweating them, man,” he says. “I went to court with ya’ll, I be driving around.” Here he refers to Reggie’s latest court date, which he risked arrest to attend in solidarity.

  Chuck tells Anthony that if he keeps talking loudly he’ll wake up Pop George, Chuck’s grandfather.

  “If the law come,” Anthony says, ignoring Chuck, “I’m out. You ain’t going to see me no more.”

  I tell Ant that if he has bench warrants, he should go to the Warrant and Surrender Unit and get them taken care of. Chuck nods his head in agreement. A few weeks ago Chuck had missed a court date, and he and I had spent seven and a half hours in the basement of the Criminal Justice Center getting the warrant lifted and a new date.

  Anthony says, “I ain’t turning myself in. They going to have to come get me. I ain’t making their job easier.”

  Chuck tells him that as long as his warrants are only for failure to appear, not a probation violation, he won’t get taken into custody; they’ll just issue him a new date. Anthony asks how many men who came to the Warrant and Surrender office that day for a new date wound up getting taken into custody on the spot. Chuck doesn’t answer, and Anthony repeats the question.

  Chuck laughs and says, “Three.”

  Anthony acts out how surprised the men must have looked to see the guards coming up behind them with the handcuffs.

  Still pacing, Anthony says, “If they do grab me, I ain’t calling niggas, like, I need this I need that, put bread on my billzooks [books—commissary], write me, and all this. I’m just calling niggas like: what’s going on out there?”

  Chuck replies that Anthony will so call for money when he gets to jail, just like everybody else.

  Anthony shakes his head no, insisting, “I bids, nigga, I bids!” By this he means that he handles his time in jail without complaint, like a pro.

  Talk turns to the two women we’d seen at a bar earlier that night, one of whom used to date Mike, and then Anthony brings it back to his legal matters.

  “All my cases was gun cases,” he says. “I never caught a drug case.”

  I take this to mean that he is normally quite skilled at evading the police, and only gets arrested when he is caught carrying a gun because of the various beefs between 4th Street and 6th Street, which are beyond his control.

  Anthony continues: “I beats cases. [The s is for extra emphasis.] I’m 27 now, and I been in jail like four, five years, and I ain’t got NO convictions.”

  He turns to me. “How many motherfuckers you know that’s my age, A, and don’t got no convictions?”

  I shrug.

  “I’m old as shit not to have convictions.”

  Anthony is now quite drunk and bragging about all kinds of things: the women at the bar whom he could have slept with if he had wanted to, all the free drinks the bartender gave him, his performance on the basketball court earlier today. Chuck keeps telling him to keep quiet, because Pop George will hear him. “As soon as he calls my name,” Chuck says, “it’s over.”

  Ant starts saying, half-jokingly, that he is going to rob the next guy to come up the block.

  Chuck says, “Just don’t put my name in it. Don’t put me on your call list”—by which he means that when Ant gets booked, he better not mention that Chuck had anything to do with the robbery. Anthony replies, “I’m not getting booked!!”

  Chuck repeats that he doesn’t want his name in it.

  “You crazy,” Anthony says. “I never got locked up on 6th Street. When I get locked up, I’m getting locked up on 4th and Castor, 6th and Elmsworth . . .” By this I take him to mean that he knows his neighborhood and its alleys so well that the cops would never catch him here. He also implies that the 6th Street neighborhood contains so many people willing to help him hide that he will always be safe.

  Chuck laughs and tells Anthony to take his ass in the house.

  Anthony replies, “When did I ever get booked on the 6?!”

  Chuck says, “Yo, pipe down.”

  Anthony nods emphatically, his point made.

  A neighbor pulls up with a woman in his car, and the talk turns to who is out creeping, that is, cheating on their spouse.

  On this night, Anthony took pride in how he approached his time on the run, and how he typically handled the months or years in jail awaiting trial. He also boasted about his lack of convictions, the first time I’d heard someone bring this up. His account of his conduct throughout his legal woes was offered as a testament to his good character, but also as an indirect way of indicating his respect in the community. Because Anthony’s ability to evade the police depended on the willingness of others to open their doors to him and to keep silent in the face of police questioning, the length of his time on the run, the number of his cases that got thrown out for lack of witnesses, and the rarity of his arrests occurring in the 6th Street neighborhood showed the esteem with which neighbors and friends held him.

  Getting arrested is nothing to be proud of, but news may travel of a young man’s bravery during the beating that sometimes accompanies the arrest—like it did when Ronny neither cried nor begged when the police broke his arm with their batons. An arrest warrant is certainly bad news, but surviving on the run requires skill and cunning, for which a person can be admired and granted some degree of respect. Given the number of restrictions a man on probation or parole has, and the frequency in which these supervisory sentences result in a violation and a subsequent return to jail or prison, merely continuing to live on the outside can be seen by others as a significant accomplishment.

  COMMITMENT AND SACRIFICE IN A FUGITIVE COMMUNITY

  Just as young people work out their social relations in the courtroom or construct an honorable identity by handling their legal woes with dignity, so too do they demonstrate their devotion by taking legal risks on one another’s behalf. With police stops and searches a daily occurrence, and many residents either going through court cases or risking arrest on sight, there is simply not enough safety from the authorities to go around. Saving oneself may mean giving up a brother, son, or best friend. In the context of legal insecurity, people show their lo
ve and commitment to one another by protecting those close to them from the police, sometimes at the cost of their own safety. Some of these gestures are as small as telling a cop that they didn’t see which way a man went. Some are bigger, like when a man with a warrant risks an encounter with the police to attend the birth of his child. And some are as big as offering oneself up for another’s arrest. Small or large, all these gestures carry deep meaning, becoming rituals that people perform to show respect, to demonstrate love or intimacy, to uphold the revered status of others, and to identify themselves as good people. In this way, people construct a moral world through the looming threat of prison, finding opportunities for acts of protection and sacrifice that bind them to others.

  One major risk young men take on behalf of those they hold dear is to attend the funerals of close friends who have been shot. Police usually show up at these services to videotape the mourners with a tripod camera.

  Recall that when Ronny’s cousin was shot and killed, Reggie attended the funeral although he had a warrant out for his arrest. Reggie phoned me afterward specifically to let me know he had taken this risk on behalf of his deceased friend.

  Indeed, a certain amount of this kind of legal risk-taking is expected in very close relationships, such that when a man fails to sacrifice his personal safety to fulfill his social obligations, it is taken as an indication of selfishness, or a sign that he isn’t sufficiently invested in the relationship.

  . . .

  When Brianna, Chuck’s girlfriend, was due with their first child, he promised to attend the birth despite having a low-level warrant out for his arrest. In the end he stayed home, later sitting with me and lamenting how angry Brianna would be that he had failed to show up as he had promised. He wasn’t wrong about her reaction—when I arrived at the hospital to see her and the new baby, her mother and aunt were sitting next to her bed, discussing his failures as a father and partner: