On The Run: Fugitive Life in an American City

by Alice Goffman

  Most days, Pappi’s college-aged son ran the cash register in the front, taking lottery ticket numbers and selling drinks and snacks. His daughter worked the grill and meat counter in the back, serving up hoagies or grilled cheese. But in addition to common corner grocery store items, Pappi also sold prepaid cell phones under the table. Depending on the day, he might have a hookup for a used car rental with no questions asked, or a “connect” to a local motel where you could check in without showing ID or a credit card.

  The goods and services Pappi sold under the table weren’t known by the store’s normal customers. You had to ask for them, and you had to be the right person asking in order to get them. But they weren’t exactly illegal, either. These items ordinarily required the purchasers to provide documentation of both their identity and their creditworthiness—a state-issued identification card, proof of insurance or credit, or a bank account.

  Pappi supplied specialty goods and services to his customers, but he also acted as a broker between legally compromised people and individuals providing a range of goods and services they were seeking. One of the people he connected his customers to was Jahim, who worked at a garage a few blocks south. At this garage patrons could ask for Jahim, and get their car serviced or repaired without presenting ID, insurance, or any paperwork on the car whatsoever. Downtown on South Street, a man named Hussein sold stereos and other electronics on payment plans, allowing the customer to give any name whatsoever, and asking for no ID to set up the arrangement. Bobby M on Third Street rented out rooms without any proof of ID or credit. His rates were higher than elsewhere, but he accepted a handshake rather than a lease.

  People working in the medical field also find that their jobs enable them to provide under-the-table support to legally compromised people. Indeed, a number of local women who worked in area hospitals and doctor’s offices provide medication and expertise to men too scared to seek treatment at a hospital, where their names might be run and warrants or other pending legal matters would come up.

  The first time I witnessed this kind of underground health care was the day Steve’s fourteen-year-old cousin, Eddie, broke his arm while running from the police. An officer had stopped him on foot just outside Pappi’s, and after patting him down found a small amount of crack on his person. Eddie took off when the officer began taking out the handcuffs, and he soon lost him in the alleyways. In his efforts to escape, Eddie had scaled a fence and landed badly. He walked into his grandmother’s house panting and clutching his right forearm, the bone exposed.

  After an hour on the phone, his grandmother told me triumphantly that a woman was coming over to fix Eddie’s arm.

  “Is she a doctor?” I naively asked.

  “She’s a janitor,” his grandmother laughed. “But she works at the hospital.”

  . . .

  Two hours later, Eddie’s arm was still bleeding, even though we’d wrapped it in dish towels and propped it up on the high back of the couch. Eddie had been taking swigs of Wild Irish Rose, and was now cursing and singing in about equal parts.

  The woman finally arrived around midnight, wearing scrubs and carrying a large plastic bag full of medical supplies. She unwrapped Eddie’s arm and injected him with some kind of anesthetic. After a few minutes of cleaning the wound and catching up with Eddie’s grandmother, she told me to turn up the music. Then she asked his grandmother to hold on to Eddie’s torso while she clutched his broken arm between her thighs and pulled the bones back into place with both her hands. Eddie screamed and struggled to get away, then cried for a good ten minutes. The woman dropped two needles into boiling water on the stove and used them to sew up the broken skin. With Eddie quietly crying, she placed a bandage over the stitches, and then began wrapping his arm in white cotton padding, placing rolled gauze in his hand for him to cup in a loose fist. She took some tougher foam material from her bag and cut it to fit his forearm, then wrapped this in an ace bandage. After about an hour, Eddie’s arm sat in a sling, and the woman left instructions to change the bandages and check the wounds every day. For her service, Eddie’s grandmother paid the woman seventy dollars and a plastic bag filled with three plates of corn bread and chicken she had made that afternoon.

  After this memorable event, I began to observe that a number of other local residents who worked in the medical field supplied various forms of off-the-books care to young men who avoided the hospital for fear of encountering the police.

  Aisha and Mike’s cousin Ronny, sixteen, had been boarding a bus when the gun tucked into his waistband went off, sending a bullet into his thigh. (He had begun carrying the gun when, coming home from a two-year stint in juvenile detention, he found his neighbor and close friend slain and the 6th Street Boys in a series of shootouts with the 4th Street Boys.) Having recently returned from the juvenile detention center on three years of probation, Ronny refused to go to the hospital, convinced that the trip would land him back in juvenile on a violation. He spent the next five days bleeding on his grandmother’s couch, his friends and family pleading with him to go to the hospital, but to no avail. Then his grandmother located a woman working as a nurse’s aide who agreed to remove the bullet.

  She performed this procedure on the kitchen table. Ronny’s grandmother shoved a dish towel into his mouth and asked me to turn up the music to cover his screams. When the nurse’s aide finished up and Ronny appeared likely to survive, his grandmother paid her $150, and the next day brought her some of her famous spicy fried chicken wings.

  OPPORTUNITIES ON THE INSIDE

  While some people supplying protections and privileges to legally compromised people launch this enterprise through their personal contacts, or by finding that their job opens up ways to help and profit from these people, others come into contact with people living under legal restrictions directly through their position within the criminal justice system. Certain court clerks, prison guards, case managers, and halfway house supervisors leverage their professional positions to grant special exemptions and privileges to defendants, inmates, and parolees who can come up with the cash. And like those brokers of goods and services who aren’t employed by the criminal justice system, these individuals occasionally assist for personal reasons or simply out of a desire to help.

  Janine finished high school with great grades and then enrolled in a two-year college to earn a certificate in criminal justice. As she told it, a lifetime of watching her brothers and father deal with the police, the courts, and the prisons had convinced her that she’d be more qualified for this kind of job than for medical work—the other sector of the economy that seemed to be growing at the time. Upon graduation, she tried to get a job as a prison guard, since the benefits were great and the wages good, but instead was hired by the scheduling office at the Criminal Justice Center downtown. The job was pretty straightforward: handle the scheduling of court cases, and manage the calendars of the judges, district attorneys, and public defenders. Since each of the hundreds of cases that came through the criminal courts each month had upwards of twelve court dates before going to trial—or far more likely: settling with the defendant, making a deal—this scheduling provided fulltime work for Janine and two others.

  Janine had been going through the cases one day when she came upon a name that looked very familiar to her: Benjamin Greene. Benny—if it was indeed the same person—had been the only guy who was nice to her in middle school, when she was overweight and her mother’s boyfriend was touching her at night. Benny would let her sneak into his basement bedroom to sleep without asking anything from her. She looked up his name on the court computer and saw his picture pop up on the screen. It was Benny, sure enough, now fifteen years older.

  Janine had heard that Benny had become a major dealer after high school and was even wanted by the feds for a while. But this didn’t stop her from remembering his kindness. Benny had a preliminary hearing for a gun and drug case scheduled for the following week, so she waited out in the hallway for him, approaching him shyly a
s he was leaving the courtroom. “My heart was pounding,” she told me a couple of months later while we had coffee across the street from the courthouse. “I didn’t know if he was married, or had kids, or if he ever thought about me anymore. But he looked the same, just with more hair [on his face].”

  Within minutes of their meeting, Benny asked Janine if she could help to get his case thrown out—if she could perhaps talk to the judge or the district attorney. She refused to do this, but realized she could arrange the judge’s schedule so that Benny’s court dates would be quite far apart—four months instead of one or one and a half.

  I met Janine through Benny; he came through the block one day and told everybody listening that he’d gotten a girl who worked in the courthouse to push his dates back. He acted as if he thought nothing of exploiting her feelings for his own gain and spoke quite dismissively of her. But when I had coffee with Janine, she explained that Benny had offered to pay her handsomely for her efforts to muddle the schedules; in fact, he insisted on paying her each time she was successful.

  “How much is he paying you?” I asked.

  “Three hundred. Three hundred each time.”

  “What are you doing with the money?”

  “I’m paying off my student loans!”

  Seeking additional verification that Janine was really receiving this money, I asked Benny about it in private one afternoon. He admitted he was paying her, and explained that this was in part because he didn’t want to be indebted to her for the great favor she was doing him, especially knowing how much she liked him.

  A year later, Benny was still on the streets, thrilled to be spending time with his baby-mom and two children. In the end, his court case took three and a half years to process—a good year and a half longer than any other case I’d seen. When Benny was finally sent to state prison, Janine told me that he wrote her that same week, thanking her for giving him the extra time outside with his family.

  If court clerks have a bit of leeway to grant certain defendants special privileges such as extra time between trial dates, jail and prison guards have considerably more. And though a number of legal restrictions are imposed on those who are on probation or parole or going through a court case, jail and prison inmates encounter a far greater list of rules and prohibitions, opening up a much larger window of economic opportunity for those working at correctional facilities. While certainly not all or perhaps even most guards participate in the informal penal economy, at least some profit from smuggling in everything from knives to drugs to cell phones.

  Twice I accompanied Miss Linda to meet a guard whom she paid to smuggle in marijuana to one of her sons sitting in county jail. Another time I accompanied Mike’s girlfriend to a meeting with a prison guard who accepted a blow job and thirty-five dollars in exchange for smuggling in three pills of oxycodone to Mike, which he took to ease the pain from a severe beating received in the yard.

  In 2011, I learned that Miss Linda had been paying a guard to smuggle Percocet to her son Reggie in the prison yard. He had been sitting in state prison for six months on a parole violation, this time for driving a car without a license. Shortly after his arrival, a female guard threw a bucketful of ammonia into his face, causing significant injury. My field notes from that visit:

  First time seeing Reggie since the ammonia incident. Wasn’t her fault, he says—she was playing. The eyedrops the nurse provided weren’t working to dull the pain, so the same guard who ruined his eyes started selling him Percocet under the table for a small fortune. Three days ago, the guard got transferred—apparently unrelated to having injured Reggie or the drug smuggling—so now Reggie’s in severe withdrawal. “Like the flu,” he says, “but ’way worse.” That’ll pass, but his blindness likely won’t. He’s hoping to get another guard to sell him Percocet or oxycontin, but hasn’t found one yet.

  In addition to drugs, some guards do a good business in cell phones. At CFCF in 2011, these were going for five hundred dollars. The family or girlfriend of an inmate would meet the guard and pay him or her in cash, which I observed on a number of occasions.

  Guards also sell something less tangible to inmates and parolees: private time with women.

  Mike and I were sitting in the visiting room at Camp Hill state prison, located two hours west of Philadelphia. We were eating microwaved chicken fingers from the turnstile snack machine and catching up on neighborhood gossip. Mike pointed to a small room near the drink machines. “See that?” he said. “There’s no camera in there. Niggas was taking they girls in there and smashing [having sex]; this guard was taking, like, a bean [one hundred dollars] for fifteen minutes. He left, like, right after I got here, so I never got to use it.”

  When Mike finished his three-year prison term, he got paroled to a halfway house in North Philadelphia. There, too, certain guards were willing to extend special privileges, for a fee. This North Philadelphia halfway house held ten beds to a small room, but often twenty men slept there. On the second night, Mike told me that he’d gotten no sleep because one of his roommates had stabbed another, whom the man caught trying to steal his shoes. On my first visit, a dense crowd of young men greeted me as I walked through the doors of the compound, clamoring with one another against the glass for a look at the outside. After years behind bars, Mike found the halfway house untenable: “You get the smell of freedom, but you can’t touch it or taste it.”

  During the few hours he was permitted to leave during the day, Mike began to get reacquainted with the city, learning what kinds of clothes people were wearing nowadays, signing up for Facebook, and acquiring an iPod. On the third day, he was given enough hours to visit his baby-mom, Marie, and their two children. He seemed nervous about it, and I tried to reassure him that after he saw them he’d feel more at ease.

  When we spoke after the visit, Mike sounded worse. He learned that his children were staying with their maternal grandmother, who had also taken in her brother, a man in his sixties. Mike believed that this uncle had the habit of asking children to sit on his lap and touching them. Marie was employed by a local hospital as a nurse’s assistant and would leave for work at five in the morning; this meant that his seven-year-old daughter and ten-year-old son were alone with their uncle for two and a half hours before their grandmother would return from her night shift and take them to school. What Mike wanted was to stay at his baby-mom’s house overnight so that he could be there during those two critical hours when his children were left alone with their uncle. I imagine he also wanted to spend time with his baby-mom, though he didn’t voice this reason when we discussed the situation.

  The solution came when Mike discovered that a number of the halfway house residents were paying a guard between one hundred and two hundred dollars a night to allow them to leave at midnight and return before the 8:00 a.m. count the next morning. In fact, so many of the men were paying off this guard for the privilege that when I would come to say hello to Mike in the evening, I’d see one after another jump into waiting cars outside the compound. I initially wondered if these men had special evening passes, possibly to work a night shift, or perhaps were choosing to leave the halfway house, violate their parole terms, and go on the run. When Mike explained about the guard, I realized that at least some of these men were paying to leave for the night and sneak back in the next morning.

  At first Mike’s baby-mom agreed to contribute a significant portion of the payoff, telling me she’d give any amount to know her children were safe. By the second week, however, she refused to contribute any more, saying that she couldn’t give over her entire paycheck just to secure a night with Mike.

  When Mike’s money for nightly payoffs ran out, I asked him if he’d introduce me to the halfway house guard who was taking the cash. Since the guard was single and around my age, Mike invited him to go for a beer with me, introducing me as his godsister, as he often did. He also told the guard that I was writing his biography and might want to talk with him about Mike’s experience in the halfway house.
2

  The guard agreed to meet me for drinks at the Five Points, a well-known “grown folks” bar. He wasn’t at all what I had expected: a quiet, thoughtful man who showed me pictures of his three children while sipping on an orange soda.

  He began our conversation by saying that Mike was one of the guys he worried about the most. If Mike could just get through these first few weeks, he’d be okay.

  The guard’s phone rang soon after we began talking. He picked up and said, “Yeah, he’s a go.” I asked what the calls were about, and he told me quite openly that he was helping some of the guys get out of the house at night.

  “What do you charge?” I asked.

  “It depends,” the guard said. “If the guy is going out to sell drugs and, you know, get the gun back that he left with his friend when he got locked up, I charge two hundred dollars. Most of that goes to my supervisor—they think he doesn’t pay attention, but he knows what it is; he’s taking his cut. If the guy’s going to work or looking after his kids—you know, he’s a good guy—I charge a lot less, or I let him go for free, and take care of my supervisor from the others.”

  “Is it risky?”

  “Put it this way: this is my third house. The first house got shut down because the toilets were stopped up; for months they weren’t working, and men were sleeping in their own shit, getting sick from it. The second got shut down because the guards were selling guns, not just guns—machine guns, M16s. [The guards were] using the men in the house to run guns out of state, okay? You have no idea what goes on.”

  “So letting men out at night . . .”

  “It’s against policy. It’s a violation of their parole. But show me a house in Philly where that’s not going on.”3

  . . .

  Faced with heavy surveillance and supervisory restrictions, some individuals tangled up with the police, the courts, and the prisons seek a number of specialty goods and services to evade the authorities or live with more comfort and freedom than their legal restrictions allow. A number of young people in the 6th Street neighborhood, as well as people working as court clerks, prison guards, and halfway house operators, are making a few extra dollars by providing an array of underground goods and services to those individuals moving through the criminal justice system. With the exception of prison guards, those working in this market tend not to know one another or form much of a collective body.