Some people sell specialty goods, such as drug-free urine or fake documents, that legally compromised people need to get through police stops or bypass their various restrictions. Others are finding underground ways to supply the basic goods and services that legally compromised people find too dangerous to access through standard channels, or are prevented from accessing because of their legal restrictions: car repair, cell phones, even health care. Moreover, many things that clean people hold as basic rights or free goods become highly sought-after privileges for those under various forms of confinement: fifteen minutes of intimacy with a spouse within the prison walls, an evening away from the home one is obligated through probation or parole restrictions to return to, or a few more months outside jail before a sentencing hearing. These, too, become commodities for which people with a compromised legal status will dearly pay.
What do people participating in this underground market make of what they are doing?
Rakim seemed to take a sympathetic attitude toward his clientele, viewing his urine business as a necessary correction to an unjust system:
I’m not trying to help people break the law, but the parole regulations are crazy. You fall off the wagon, have a drink, smoke weed, they grab you up; you’re in for three years. Even if you start using drugs again, real drugs, should you be sent back to prison for that? That’s not helpful at all. So you come to me. For those times when you drink a little too much, or smoke weed, you know, because anything at all in your system will set off the machine.
Jokingly, he noted that this side business encouraged him to stay away from drinking or using drugs: “When your urine is worth something, you can’t just put anything in your body. If you sell one dirty bag, you’re done.”
Rakim also described his efforts to help men on parole in quite political terms, insisting that the men he supplied with clean urine were being wrongfully deprived of full citizenship rights. Indeed, some of the other people helping to supply legally diminished young men regard themselves as resisting police who act as an occupying force in the Black community, and helping to combat a prison system that is a key site for racial injustice. One parole officer I interviewed referred to the Underground Railroad when describing his efforts to smuggle goods to inmates. Others, like Janine who worked at the courthouse, seemed moved by a personal relationship to make an exception for a particular person.
In contrast, some of the prison guards I spoke with expressed considerable hostility toward inmates, and frustration at the inherent tensions in their jobs. One guard reasoned that the risk of physical violence at the hands of prisoners justified the extra money he earned selling cell phones and drugs to them. He and his coworkers viewed the money they earned from inmates under the table as a way of sticking it to their employers and making lemonade out of lemons.
Still others may feel alternately sickened by the money they take from desperate inmates and parolees, justified on personal or political grounds, and guilty about the risks their services pose to people already so vulnerable. During our chat over a drink, the halfway house guard shared his complex and conflicting motives and feelings about taking money to sneak men out at night:
It’s a broken system. On a good day, I think I’m doing something for justice, something for the brothers. These men are locked up because they didn’t pay their court fees, or they got drunk and failed [their piss test]. They’ve been locked up since they were kids. Then they come home to this shit [the halfway house], sleeping one on top of the other, no money, no clothes. And the rules they have to follow—nobody could follow those rules. It’s a tragedy. It’s a crime against God. Sometimes I think, in fifty years we are going to look back on this and, you know, that this was wrong. And everybody who supported this—their judgment will come. So I think, each night I give a man is a night he remembers he’s a human being, not an animal. And most of these guys, they’ve got a few weeks or a few months before they go back in. You can say a night out is a small thing, but it’s a big thing, too. And each guy who sleeps out is one less guy in the rooms. We’re fifty-three over capacity now.
On a bad day I think I’m taking from men who have nothing; I’m taking from them to pay my kids’ tuition, pay the bills. That’s not right. And whatever happens [to them when they leave the halfway house], that’s on my head. They get rearrested, shot, I did that.
Regardless of the meaning that participants in the underground market apply to these exchanges, or the stated or unstated reasons they undertake them, we must acknowledge that the criminal justice arm of the state extends beyond the persons who are the direct targets of the police, the courts, or the prisons, and even beyond their families. A large number of people provide underground assistance to men running from the police or going through the courts and the jails. Through these illicit exchanges, they, too, become involved in the “dirty” world. The assistance they provide may give them some sense of contributing to those less fortunate, or even of participating in an underground political movement against the overreach of the police and the prisons. But they also come to rely on legally precarious people for income, and by extension on the criminal justice system that seeks these people and confines them. Through their financial dealings with people with warrants, or who are in jail, or going through a court case, or out on parole, these brokers of under-the-table goods and services also come to be partially swept up into the criminal justice system, to know about it, to interact with it, and to rely on it. And some find that their business with those caught up in the system renders them vulnerable to arrest. We might think of this as a kind of secondary legal jeopardy, a spilling over of the legal precariousness that the young men who are the main focus of this study face.4
SEVEN
Clean People
In the neighborhood of 6th Street, many young men become entangled with the police, the courts, the parole board, and the prisons. Their girlfriends and female relatives sustain raids and interrogations, and spend some amount of time managing these men’s legal affairs. Still others in the area come to orient themselves around the police and the prisons because they are providing underground support to the legally compromised people around them.
And yet, the neighborhood also contains many who keep relatively free of the courts and the prisons, who go to school or work every day as the police chase their neighbors through the streets. Not only women manage to stay “clean.” While 60 percent of Black men who didn’t graduate from high school have been to prison by their midthirties,1 this means that 40 percent have not. Though many of the men who haven’t been incarcerated are nevertheless caught up in court cases and probation sentences, the neighborhood also includes a good number of young people who successfully keep their distance from criminal justice institutions that occupy the time and concern of so many others.
This chapter describes four groups of people in the 6th Street community who are carving out a clean life for themselves as their friends and family go in and out of prison and the police helicopters circle overhead. Through these portraits, I describe the variety of relations that clean people come to have with those involved with the police and the courts, how they make sense of their situation, and how they view those on the other side.
INDOOR GUYS
In March of 2004, Mike got sentenced to one to three years in state prison. As I traveled to visit Mike on the weekends, I kept in touch with some of his friends and relatives who wanted to know how he was doing. But having not yet formed independent relationships with his friends and neighbors, I had no reason to hang out on 6th Street in Mike’s absence. As I tried to figure out how to return, I met another group of guys who lived in an adjacent neighborhood, roughly fifteen blocks away.
Lamar lived in a three-bedroom row home with an older man who had some cognitive disabilities. Lamar’s mother had arranged for her son to live with this man as part of a small caretaking business that she operated from her house a few blocks away. The disability checks the man received from the government
were enough to cover the house’s mortgage and his food, so in exchange for living there rent free, Lamar made sure the man ate regular meals and didn’t burn the house down with his smoldering cigarettes. In her own home, which she shared with Lamar’s father, his mother housed three other men with similar disabilities.
Most evenings after work, Lamar’s friends came over to his house to drink beer and play video games. His job as a security guard on the University of Pennsylvania campus meant regular hours and working behind a desk, leaving him free after 5:00 p.m. and full of energy for the evening’s video game matches. His house was an ideal bachelor pad—warm and roomy but not too well kept, and with no spouse or mother or children hanging about. The older man he watched spent most of the time in his room, listening to records.
Lamar’s friends were roughly the same age as Mike and Chuck, and they, too, hung out together as a unit—but they had no dealings with the police or the courts and, from what I could tell, very few connections with others who did. They had legal jobs: security guard, maintenance man, and convenience store clerk; jobs with uniforms and IDs and the formal paychecks large companies print out. When they lost those jobs, they relied on the generosity of friends and family rather than seeking income in the streets.
These young men drank beer instead of smoking pot; many of them had monthly or random piss tests at their jobs. And rather than shoot the shit on the back steps or in the alleyway, they spent their leisure time playing video games indoors. They didn’t need thermal wear or heavy boots in the winter, because their houses were well heated and they spent very little time outside.
As Lamar and his friends parked their cars and made their way toward the house every evening, they passed another group of guys in hoodies and black jeans standing on the corner. They didn’t talk to these men, exchanging only a slight nod as they passed. I imagined that these young men were much like the ones I had gotten to know around 6th Street: caught up in the police and the courts, and likely selling drugs hand to hand.
Lamar and his friends played just one video game—Halo. The game’s premise was modern-day urban warfare: the players hid from the opposing team and tried to kill them with machine guns. Lamar had two small TVs going in the living room; these he connected to four controllers each, so that eight of his friends could play against each other simultaneously. Like many other single men in their twenties and early thirties, the guys amused themselves with this game until the wee hours three or four nights a week.
Much of the evening’s conversation concerned the game:
“Nigga, I told you he was coming around the corner! That’s it, you done!”
“I ain’t fucking with you no more, man. I can’t keep taking these hits . . .”
Lamar’s two closest friends were Darnell and Curtis. Darnell was a rotund man in his midtwenties who worked as a manager at a health research firm just outside the city. He told me he made about forty thousand dollars a year, which was less than half the salaries of his two sisters, both of whom had advanced degrees and lived in the ’burbs. Darnell’s girlfriend had a young son and, as she often reminded Darnell, had put herself through college while raising him. She was now finishing a degree in legal services. Her baby’s father, who lived in Virginia, earned almost six figures, a point she frequently raised with Darnell during their heated arguments over his lack of ambition. In contrast to the scene with his sisters and girlfriend, at Lamar’s house Darnell was the richest and the best educated—in fact, other members of the group periodically accused him of thinking he was better than they were and sticking his nose in the air.
Lamar’s other close friend, Curtis, was in his late twenties and did maintenance for a chemical plant in South Philly. He told me he had been a drug dealer in his youth, but had abruptly quit when his daughter was born. He spoke little; Darnell referred to him as a “deep well.”
The only woman who hung out with this group was a heavy and very pretty woman named Keisha who worked as a phlebotomist at a local hospital. After passing the six-month drug screen at her job, she resumed her pot smoking, though Lamar made her take it out on the back porch.
“I love blood!” she’d say after a few puffs. “It does something for me, what can I say.”
From what I could gather, Keisha and Lamar had never been intimate, but had been friends since childhood. After Lamar’s best friend died in a car crash during their senior year of high school, Keisha had taken his place as Lamar’s closest confidant. She didn’t play video games but hung out many evenings with the guys.
In addition to these close friends, Lamar’s game nights included two of his cousins. One did heating and air-conditioning repair at the University of Pennsylvania and lived with his girlfriend and their new baby in a middle-class Black suburb just inside the city. He was also sleeping with Keisha, this relationship having started long before he met the mother of his child. Keisha had a live-in boyfriend, and saw Lamar’s cousin on the weekends at Lamar’s house. His cousin explained to me that Keisha could never be his official, full-time girlfriend, because she hung out with men too much, plus she was a cheater. Keisha was also about one hundred pounds heavier than his baby-mom, and he enjoyed her fuller figure in private more than in public. For her part, Keisha seemed happy with her live-in boyfriend, so long as she could still see Lamar’s cousin on the weekends.
Lamar’s other cousin was a thin young man of eighteen. This cousin had grown up mainly in a group home, and was unemployed for most of the time I knew him. Near the end of my time in the neighborhood, though, he landed a job at a downtown Wawa, a popular convenience and hoagie chain. Lamar and I often visited him there, and sometimes picked him up from his shift, since he had no car.
Bit by bit I came to learn about Lamar’s family. His mother, the woman who owned the house in which he lived and who ran the care-taking business, was actually his adopted mother—his birth mother had given him up when he was a small boy, owing to her crack addiction and poverty. Lamar’s father was a continuing crack user, and was supported entirely by Lamar’s adopted mother, who cared for him as well as three other men with mental disabilities. He’d come to Lamar’s house about once a week to drink beer with the guys. He bobbed and weaved and smiled a lot, and Lamar tolerated him with kindness and patience. At one point when discussing with me his cousin’s upbringing in the group home, Lamar said, “If not for my mom, that would have been me. That woman’s a saint.”
One thing that distinguished Lamar and his friends from other groups of guys who played video games together—for example, the young men I’d encountered in the dorms of Penn’s campus—was that they lived in a neighborhood in which lots of other young men were getting arrested and locked up. Their indoor life, with its legal pastimes and thrills, meant that they weren’t out in the streets. Indeed, when Lamar or his friends would run into someone they hadn’t seen in a while, their answer to the question “How you doing?” was often “Staying out of trouble.” Perhaps this signified that although they might be unemployed or not advancing in their careers, they weren’t out there getting locked up, and this in itself was an accomplishment.
This isn’t to say that Lamar and his friends had no dealings with the justice system whatsoever. A few months after we met, Lamar completed the payments on some speeding tickets and recovered his driver’s license. Another one of his friends had his license suspended for an unpaid moving violation and was working on getting it back. But this seemed to be the extent of their legal entanglements and civic diminishment. After eight months spending most of my evenings at Lamar’s house, I hadn’t taken a single field note that contained the word police. No officers busted down Lamar’s door. I never observed him receiving a phone call that a friend or relative had gotten booked. Once in a while we heard sirens outside, but no one looked up from the video game to investigate, even when they seemed close by. Whomever the cops were looking for, it didn’t concern them.
One outdoor activity in the warmer months that did involve a few b
rushes with the authorities was drag racing. Lamar and his friends liked to refurbish old European cars, especially Volkswagens, and soup them up to be racing cars. They spent hours adding accessories or changing the suspension, and then we’d sometimes go out to the races at the empty strips of road out past the airport. Some of the guys who came to the races were Cambodian and Laotian, others Latino. Once we also drove to a convention in Maryland. Drag racing could have gotten them arrested or injured, but mostly Lamar’s friends came to the races as spectators, to admire the other cars and watch the races. We always managed to leave before the cops showed up, and compared to the professional and leisure activities of the 6th Street Boys, the drag racing seemed quite benign.
Nine months into my time with Lamar and his friends, I observed an incident that revealed a great deal about where they stood in relation to the guys I had come to know over on 6th Street. It was the only time I saw any one of them come face to face with a man on the run.
Lamar called me one afternoon and said, “I got some news.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yup. I just found out my mom died.”
“What? Oh my god. I’m so sorry.”
Turns out it wasn’t his mom mom who had passed but his birth mother, a woman he barely knew.
Lamar went back and forth about whether to attend the funeral—he’d been recently fired from his security guard job for lateness and didn’t have money for a suit, or even black pants. Could he just wear jeans? His friends and I finally persuaded him to go, and to show our support, his cousin, Keisha, and I came along. We all wore jeans.
On The Run: Fugitive Life in an American City Page 20
