On The Run: Fugitive Life in an American City

by Alice Goffman

  11. Devah Pager, Marked: Race, Crime, and Finding Work in an Era of Mass Incarceration (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 4–5.

  12. Bruce Western, Punishment and Inequality in America (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2006), especially 191.

  13. Of the 217 households surveyed by Chuck and me in 2007.

  14. In these eighteen months of daily fieldwork, there were only five days in which I observed no police activity.

  15. W. E. B. DuBois, The Philadelphia Negro (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press [1899] 1996).

  16. This key social divide in the Black community can be seen in Anderson’s earliest book, A Place on the Corner. A further and more formal development can be found in “Decent and Street Families,” chapter 1 in Code of the Street (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), 35–65.

  17. Even middle-class, respectable, and well-connected Black people in Philadelphia are aware of these distinctions to some extent. In 2007, I was asked to be in a working group writing a policy brief for congressional representative Chaka Fattah, who was running for mayor. The group was composed of me and six distinguished Black Philadelphians, including three attorneys, two long-established community organizers, and one writer for the Philadelphia Daily News. The first meeting was held in a high-rise building in Center City. When it wrapped, the elevator wasn’t working, so we took the stairs. Nearing the second floor, we heard banging noises, and after a bit of discussion and more listening, we concluded that someone must be stuck inside the elevator. One of the lawyers suggested we call the fire department. At this suggestion to alert the authorities, the journalist quipped, “Hope nobody has any warrants!” There were chuckles all around.

  CHAPTER ONE

  1. An expression of affirmation, meaning roughly “Did I ever.”

  2. The terms young boy and old head have been used in the African American community at least since the 1970s. The words denote a mentoring relationship between an older and a younger man or boy, and imply some level of commitment to the welfare of the young boy from the old head and some level of deference and duty on the part of the young boy. Elijah Anderson first mentions the term old head in a footnote in A Place on the Corner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 225, then elaborates on the relationship between old heads and young boys in Streetwise: “The old head/young boy relationship was essentially one of mentor/protégé. The old head might be only two years older than the young boy or as much as thirty of forty years older; the boy was usually at least ten. The young boy readily deferred to the old head’s chronological age and worldly experience” (Elijah Anderson, Streetwise: Race, Class, and Change in an Urban Community [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990], 69). Anderson goes on to explain that traditional old heads who preached respectability are struggling to maintain their role with a new generation of young men facing a labor market with few decent jobs available to them. New old heads who grew up in street life are replacing the traditional male role models of previous decades (see also Elijah Anderson, Code of the Street [New York: W. W. Norton, 1999], 145–46). In keeping with Anderson’s discussion, the old heads around 6th Street mentored young boys not on how to make it in respectable jobs but on the strategies for survival in a physically dangerous and heavily policed drug trade.

  3. Mike and Chuck sometimes debated whether or not their group of friends could call themselves a gang or even a collective group at all. Philadelphia does not have neighborhood or citywide gangs like the Crips or Bloods, but instead has smaller street-based groups. Mike, Chuck, and their friends were bound to each other by their identification with 6th Street: they either grew up on the blocks crossing 6th Street or spent time there because a close relative had moved to the neighborhood. Five of them had “6th Street” tattooed on their arms, and when they and others wrote me letters from jail, they would end them with their nicknames, followed by “6th Street” or “4-ever-6.” They sometimes called themselves the 6th Street Boys, the team, the squad, the clique, or the block. At other times, they forcefully denied they were a collective or group at all, although the fact that they bothered to discuss this might support their group identity rather than call it into question. In Scott Brooks’s ethnography of Philadelphia basketball players in middle and high school, Jermaine explains the city’s gang system succinctly: “It go by street, really. You got D Street, they represent they block; H street represent they block; K Street, J Street, like P Street. We ain’t really got like Bloods and Crips. It just go by your street” (Scott N. Brooks, Black Men Can’t Shoot [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009], 149).

  4. Writing about Philadelphia in the 1960s, Jonathan Rubinstein (City Police [New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1973]) discusses the need for police officers to show “activity”: the work the officers do that can be statistically counted and used informally to judge performance and merit.

  CHAPTER TWO

  1. It is noteworthy that in pursuits involving men and women, the women were, at least in all instances I observed, the hunters. That is, they took on the role of the police. The houses they were attempting to get the man back to were referred to by both parties as jail or prison, and when the men did get taken home, they and others referred to their girlfriends’ having them on lockdown. That is, women were both the police and the wardens. This game version of the women getting the men home strongly parallels the serious role women play, both voluntarily and involuntarily, in the capture and imprisonment of the men in their lives, discussed in the next chapter.

  2. The 111 occasions are not counted separately per man; some escapes from the police involved two or more people running away.

  3. These numbers and descriptions of young men running from the police come from cases that I observed with my own eyes. I heard recounted far more chases than I observed, but I did not use these narratives as data. Comparing my observations with people’s descriptions of the same incidents retold after the fact, I concluded that there is a bias toward reporting chases and getaways that involve known people, that involve elaborate attempts to get away, and that end in the police catching the person. From my observations, in most cases when men see the police and take flight, the police do not chase them at all. Those times the police do give chase, the man typically gets away rather than gets caught, and his successful getaway usually does not involve any creative or herculean efforts. Rather, he typically gets away in a quite mundane way, because the officer in pursuit runs slower or gives up faster. Accounts of chases are interesting in their own right, but are not good data for learning how men actually go about running from the police and the resulting success rates.

  4. In Philadelphia, the courts can issue an arrest warrant if a person fails to pay fines for traffic violations or misses a court date in regard to these violations. A person can also be imprisoned for failing to pay these moving violations (Philadelphia County, 33 Pa.B. Doc. No. 2745 and Pa.B. Doc. No. 03–1110).

  5. There are many reasons why people do not turn to the law when some crime has been perpetrated against them; having a precarious legal status is simply one of them. For a discussion of legal cynicism, see David S. Kirk and Andrew V. Papachristos, “Cultural Mechanisms and the Persistence of Neighborhood Violence,” American Journal of Sociology 116, no. 4 (2011): 1197–1205.

  6. When a wanted man fearful of calling the police instead settles disputes with his own hands, this violence is secondary deviance—the additional crime a person commits because he has been labeled a criminal. Here the warrant serves as the label, creating more reason to commit crime and get into trouble than the reasons a man already had. For a discussion of secondary deviance in the labeling literature, see Howard Becker, Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance (New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1963), chap. 1, and Edwin M. Lemert, Social Pathology: A Systematic Approach to the Theory of Sociopathic Behavior (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1951), 75.

  7. Ronny’s cousin died during the summer, when I was out of town. Reggie called me a few times on
the day of the funeral and gave me these updates.

  8. Viviana A. Zelizer, The Purchase of Intimacy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007).

  9. Prisons and jails offer food, toiletries, clothing, phone cards, books, and other items through commissary accounts. The families and friends of inmates may send money to their loved one’s account via the US mail or via online money transfer companies, such as jpay.com, that charge a fee for the service. The cash a man has in his pockets when taken into custody may also be moved into this account. Because the inmate is not permitted to possess or exchange currency, he or she never sees this money, and can use it only for items offered for sale by the prison. Typically, inmates are permitted to make purchases from their commissary account once a week. Child support and other court fines and fees are deducted automatically. In some jurisdictions, prisons require inmates to purchase their bus ticket home from this account, so the inmate may scramble to raise these funds from friends and family before he or she is granted release. This account is referred to as the books, as in “Can you please put some money on my books?”

  10. Robberies during or after dice games were quite common around 6th Street at the time I was there. This makes sense, because men would be carrying large amounts of cash and were typically the sort who would not be able to go to the police. Chuck once described a two-man team who robbed dice games as their primary form of income and had been doing so for years, but I never met them personally.

  11. Though wet was popular in many parts of Philadelphia, Steve was the only member of the 6th Street Boys who took it regularly. Around 6th Street, wet came in the form of dark crystallized leaves with a little shine sold in small glass vials and smoked in a cigarette or cigar wrapper (called a blunt). Its chemical composition is not at all clear to me, but I believe it involved tea or marijuana leaves soaked in embalming fluid and mixed with PCP.

  12. Paying for a witness’s hotel stay on the night before court is a typical way to get a person not to show up. It serves as a way to compensate him or her, but more important, it ensures that the person won’t be home if the police should try to drag him or her in to testify.

  CHAPTER THREE

  1. While conducting fieldwork, I became attentive to the particular moment that women discover a partner or son is wanted by the police by reading studies of people receiving life-altering news in hospitals and doctors’ offices. There, family members learn that a loved one has a disease, not a warrant for arrest, but the shock and confusion are common to both, and the news may have a similarly transformative effect on relationships. For two excellent studies of hospital patients and their families receiving life-altering news, see David Sudnow, Passing On: The Social Organization of Dying (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1967), chap. 5; and Doug Maynard, Bad News, Good News: Conversational Order in Everyday Talk and Clinical Settings (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 9.

  2. This conversation was recorded with permission on my iPhone. Some off-topic pieces of the discussion were omitted.

  3. The way others tell it, Mike’s mother didn’t exactly tell his father to stop coming around—he did that all on his own.

  4. The term rider has been discussed by Jeff Duncan-Andrade, who uses the spelling rida. He defines it as a “popular cultural term that refers to people who can be counted on in extreme duress.” Jeff Duncan-Andrade, “Gangstas, Wankstas, and Ridas: Defining, Developing, and Supporting Effective Teachers in Urban Schools,” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 20, no. 6 (2007): 623.

  5. There are few systematic studies of the legal and financial obligations incurred by people moving through the courts. In a unique study, Harris, Evans, and Beckett quantify the financial burden for a sample of people in Washington State. They find that those who have been convicted of misdemeanor or felony charges will owe on average more than $11,000 to the courts over their life span, and likely will pay significantly more than that because of the interest accruing on their legal debts. See Alexes Harris, Heather Evans, and Katherine Beckett, “Drawing Blood from Stones: Monetary Sanctions, Punishment and Inequality in the Contemporary United States,” American Journal of Sociology 115 (2010): 1753–99.

  6. Gresham Sykes, Society of Captives (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, [1958] 2007), 63–83.

  7. From a taped interview with two former members of the Philadelphia Warrant Unit, 2010.

  8. These techniques as I describe them represent the women’s perspective on the police’s efforts to secure their cooperation. For a contemporary treatment of police work from the officers’ perspective, see Peter Moskos, Cop in the Hood: My Year Policing Baltimore’s Eastern District (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008).

  9. In Philadelphia, a man cannot visit a jail where he has been an inmate for six months after his release. In practice, this paperwork takes quite a while to go through, so that men who have ever been an inmate at a county jail are often denied visitation rights to any of the local jails. Prisons also run the names of visitors, making it dangerous for men with warrants or other legal entanglements to go there for visits. A third barrier to visitation is the canine unit, which is occasionally stationed in the prison or jail parking lot. Though visitors can refuse to allow the dogs to search their vehicles, they will be denied entrance to the facility.

  10. For a detailed account of evictions among poor families in the United States, see Matthew Desmond, “Disposable Ties and the Urban Poor,” American Journal of Sociology 117 (2012): 1295–1335; and Matthew Desmond, “Eviction and the Reproduction of Urban Poverty,” American Journal of Sociology 118 (2012): 88–133.

  11. Research suggests these are quite realistic fears. Incarceration increases the likelihood of infectious disease and stress-related illnesses, according to Michael Massoglia, “Incarceration as Exposure: The Prison, Infectious Disease, and Other Stress-Related Illnesses,” Journal of Health and Social Behavior 49 (2008): 56–71. The same researcher has shown that incarceration causes long-term negative health effects. See Michael Massoglia, “Incarceration, Health, and Racial Disparities in Health,” Law and Society Review 42 (2008): 275–306.

  12. Of course, that Miss Linda was good at protecting Chuck, Reggie, and Tim from the police may also have contributed to the frequency of police raids, as her firm protectionist stance likely encouraged her sons’ continued residency in the house. Other neighbors explained her ability to ride by the fact that in comparison with other women, Miss Linda had little to lose. Since her father owned the house, it wasn’t as easy to evict her. Since the house was already in quite poor condition, she didn’t fear the destruction caused by the raid as much as other women did. And since she held no job, the police couldn’t threaten to notify her employer.

  13. Michelle never admitted to this; Mike’s lawyer showed his mother and me the statement at the arraignment.

  14. For a nuanced account of the many excitements and pleasures to be found in breaking the law, see Jack Katz, Seductions of Crime: Moral and Sensual Attractions in Doing Evil (New York: Basic Books, 1990).

  15. For an illuminating account of the complex ways in which women view the confinement of a loved one, including some surprising upsides to romantic involvement with a man sitting in prison, see Megan Comfort, Doing Time Together: Love and Family in the Shadow of the Prison (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), chap. 5, especially 126–27, 174.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  1. Victor Rios, writing about Oakland, California, documents young people’s efforts to push back against an expansive and putative criminal justice system, and describes young men’s resistance to their criminalization. See Victor M. Rios, Punished: Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys (New York: New York University Press, 2011). Here young people are not resisting so much as making use of the police, the courts, and the prisons for their own purposes: they appropriate and manipulate criminal justice personnel and process for their own ends. This is perhaps more akin to the subtle transgressio
ns and sub rosa dissent long documented in repressive regimes, from slaves on plantations—see John Blassingame, The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South (New York: Oxford University Press, [1972] 1979)—to peasants in authoritarian states—see James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987).

  2. Georg Rusche and Otto Kirchheimer discuss the pressing problem that early politicians and prison designers faced of making prisons sufficiently unpleasant as to deter even the lowest strata of society from crime. Punishment and Social Structure (New York, 1939), 105–6. For a thorough treatment of their work, see David Garland, Punishment and Modern Society: A Study in Social Theory (University of Chicago Press, 1990), 94.

  3. Jack Katz discusses how would-be robbers risk that a victim may fight back. Randall Collins refers to this as the robber’s failure to establish situational dominance. See Jack Katz, Seductions of Crime: Moral and Sensual Attractions in Doing Evil (New York: Basic Books, 1990); Randall Collins, Violence: A Micro-Sociological Theory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 185.

  4. See W. E. B. DuBois, The Philadelphia Negro (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press [1899] 1996); St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton, Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, [1945] 1993); Elliot Liebow, Tally’s Corner (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1967); Carol Stack, All Our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Black Community (New York: Harper & Row, 1974); Kathryn Edin and Laura Lein, Making Ends Meet (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1997); Katherine Newman, No Shame in My Game (New York: Vintage and Russell Sage Foundation, 1999); Mitchell Duneier, Sidewalk (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999); and Elijah Anderson, Code of the Street (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999).