5. Liebow, Tally’s Corner, 116–19.
6. In Pennsylvania, obtaining a driver’s license requires a birth certificate or passport, a social security card, and two proofs of residence (e.g. a lease or a bill with the person’s name and address). Obtaining these items in turn requires identification and processing fees. The applicant must undergo a physical exam by a doctor, pay for and pass a written permit test, and either locate an insured and registered car with which to take the driving test or pay to rent one at the test site. Because men drove without proper documentation, they got tickets, which had to be paid before they could begin the license application process.
7. On this point see Liebow, Tally’s Corner, 113.
8. Those on probation or parole from county jail typically are not given a curfew. Those on parole from a state-imposed sentence (which is a minimum of one year) often have more stringent requirements, which may include obeying a curfew, finding a job, finishing high school, calling the parole officer in the evening from the appointed house, staying away from others who have committed crimes, and so forth.
9. A person who is on parole in Pennsylvania must be paroled to a particular house, which must be inspected in advance and pass a number of requirements. A person cannot in most cases be paroled to his own independent residence. Those released on parole who do not have a house to which they might be paroled are sent to halfway houses.
10. A response to a verbal insult, meaning roughly “You think I’m a bitch now? You haven’t seen anything yet.”
11. A former Philadelphia probation officer told me that on an average day he received “countless calls” from, as he put it, “the baby-moms.” He said that they would phone and try to get their boyfriends put in jail, and then when these men were in jail, they would phone him to try to get their boyfriends out again.
12. This is a fairly common thing to do. In fact, some people get others arrested simply to extort money from them, which they request in exchange for not showing up as a witness during the trial.
13. Since time for phone calls is quite limited, and inmates in county jail are permitted to make only local calls, a substantial need for three-way calling arises. Those in prison have an even greater need, since they typically can call only the numbers on their prearranged list. In the mid-2000s, the regulation against three-way calling was thought to be surmountable by blowing into the phone so that whoever was monitoring the call could not pick up the noise of the numbers being pressed during the three-way dialing.
CHAPTER FIVE
1. Kathleen Nolan provides a nuanced account of a heavily policed public school serving poor Black students in New York. There, the students’ behavioral problems, such as wearing a hat or talking back to a teacher or police officer, became criminal charges for which they stood trial and in some cases were sentenced to detention centers or jails. Kathleen Nolan, Police in the Hallways: Discipline in an Urban High School (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 53–64.
2. For a detailed account of the work women do to build and maintain relationships with partners who are sitting in prison, see Megan Comfort, Doing Time Together: Love and Family in the Shadow of the Prison (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).
3. As a young man sits in prison, the number of visitors tends to dwindle. Thus, at the beginning of Mike’s sentences, his mother struggled to accommodate the friends and girlfriends eager to see him; in contrast, nearer to the end of a term she would implore them to make the drive, the goal then being to ensure that he’d receive a visit at least every two to three months.
4. In the Philadelphia criminal court, a case must move forward on the third preliminary hearing or get dismissed. On this date, no further postponements or continuances are possible: the DA must present whatever evidence and witnesses he or she has been able to procure at that point. This date is commonly known as a Must Be Tried.
5. These notes were taken as Marie and Mike spoke, with a pen borrowed from the guard and written on the back of the visitor’s sheet.
6. Though Mike and Chuck maintained this principle in the abstract, I noticed that when they were sent to jail, they did ask close relatives and girlfriends to bring in drugs or money. From my experience in visiting rooms, it is typically the main girlfriend or baby-mom who places marijuana or pills in her clothing and passes off to her boyfriend.
7. On the centrality of gift exchanges of food, clothing, child care, and other basic necessities in poor Black communities, see Carol Stack, All Our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Black Community (New York: Harper & Row, 1974).
CHAPTER SIX
1. Shonda is referring to drug-screening machines that test for traces of illicit substances on the hands. The corrections officer wipes visitors’ hands with a swab and puts it under a machine that generates a report of substances discovered.
2. This was not such a strange thing to say. A number of young people in the neighborhood were attempting to sell memoirs about their lives on the streets and in prison.
3. This conversation was taped with permission on my iPhone. Some irrelevant pieces of the discussion were omitted.
4. The term secondary legal jeopardy echoes Megan Comfort’s “secondary prisonization,” a term she uses to describe how women come under the prisons’ authority through their relationships with incarcerated partners. Megan Comfort, Doing Time Together: Love and Family in the Shadow of the Prison (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).
CHAPTER SEVEN
1. Becky Pettit and Bruce Western, “Mass Imprisonment and the Life-Course: Race and Class Inequality in U.S. Incarceration,” American Sociological Review 69 (2004): 151, 164.
2. On the myriad restrictions and hardships that prompted Black sharecroppers to migrate to the North during this era, see Nicholas Lemann, The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America (New York: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 1992), chap. 1.
3. These suspicions have been echoed by scholars who have drawn strong connections between whites’ growing unease in the Civil Rights and post–Civil Rights eras and the rise of tough-on-crime rhetoric, particularly the racially coded rhetoric of conservative politicians. See Katherine Beckett and Theodore Sasson, The Politics of Injustice: Crime and Punishment in America (Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press, 2000), 53–54.
4. I wrote this conversation down as a text message to myself while it was going on and just after. As with other quotations, it should be taken as a close approximation of the wording and sequence, not a recording.
5. Noted while he spoke and directly afterward on a cell phone. Here I have omitted my small interjections, such as “yep,” “uh huh,” and “sure is” as well as other unrelated comments, such as those directed at the cat that had jumped up on the table.
6. See the appendix for a detailed account of Chuck’s death.
7. I typed this conversation into my phone while it was happening—the quotes should be taken only as a close approximation.
CONCLUSION
1. Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: New Press, 2010); Loïc Wacquant, “Deadly Symbiosis: When Ghetto and Prison Meet and Mesh,” Punishment & Society 3, no. 1 (2001): 95–133.
2. Leon F. Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (New York: Knopf, 1979).
3. Vagrancy laws have resurfaced recently in the form of “quality of life” policing. These laws lead to arrests for minor crimes such as panhandling, jumping turnstiles, sleeping in public places, and loitering. For these laws in New York City, see Mitchell Duneier, Sidewalk (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999). In Seattle see Katherine Beckett and Steve Herbert, Banished: The New Social Control in Urban America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).
APPENDIX
1. At first I thought that no whites lived in the neighborhood. Those we saw wore police uniforms or worked for the welfare office. Later I learned that a few whites did in fact live in the ne
ighborhood—some had been there since the ’50s, before it became a Black neighborhood; others had married in. Others were the white-looking children of a white and a Black parent. The very few whites working and living in the neighborhood would often nod to me when we passed each other on the street, in the special way that minorities do when they chance upon another of their kind.
2. See William Labov, Language in the Inner City: Studies in the Black English Vernacular (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1972).
3. The difficulty I had renting in a Black section of the city should in no way be taken as comparable to the difficulty very likely to be experienced by a Black person moving to a white section of the city. Though real-estate agents were unwilling to rent to me, I don’t believe they assumed I was dangerous or would become a blight on the neighborhood. They didn’t turn me down because my stigmatized status would depreciate their property values. Rather, they often indicated that they thought I was too good for the apartments, so that in being turned down I didn’t have to simultaneously suffer any insult to my person; I didn’t experience what Elijah Anderson refers to as the acute disrespect that Black people encounter in dealing with whites. See Elijah Anderson, The Cosmopolitan Canopy: Race and Civility in Everyday Life (New York: Norton, 2011), 253.
4. On the difficulties faced by young men recovering from nonfatal gunshot wounds, see Jooyoung Lee, “Wounded: Life after the Shooting,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 642 (2012): 244–57.
5. Carol Stack, All Our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Black Community (New York: Harper & Row, 1974).
6. Kathryn Edin and Laura Lein, Making Ends Meet (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1997).
7. Katherine Newman, No Shame in My Game (New York: Vintage and Russell Sage Foundation, 1999).
8. Ironically, for young men around 6th Street the term buddy means a woman whom one does sleep with, though not under the guise of any official romantic relationship. The term friend also has sexual connotations, and is rarely used to describe male friendship. Men call each other homies, partners, boys, or my man so-and-so.
9. Randall Collins, Violence: A Micro-Sociological Theory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 186.
10. Erving Goffman describes participant observation as the “willingness to be a horse’s ass.” Erving Goffman, “On Fieldwork,” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 18, no. 2 (1989): 128.
11. A critique of this kind of identity story, as well as a critique of the ethnographer-centered narrative more broadly, can be found in Dave Grazian’s unpublished paper, “The Riches of Embarrassment: The Presentation of Missteps, Mistakes and Pratfalls in Ethnography.”
12. Mitchell Duneier, Sidewalk (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999), 11–12, 20–21, 334–39; see discussion in Robert M. Emerson, Contemporary Field Research: Perspectives and Formulations (Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 2001), 118–19.
13. Howard Becker, personal communication, September 11, 2013.
14. Anderson, Cosmopolitan Canopy, xiv–xv.
15. Ibid., 189, 191, 293.
16. For a nice contemporary treatment of the performance of race, see Shatima Jones, “Shaping Community” (unpublished manuscript).
17. My sense is that gender as well as race played a role in the lack of interest the police held for me. Philippe Bourgois has reported from his fieldwork in a Puerto Rican neighborhood in North Philadelphia that the police do stop people more frequently when he is around, as they assume that any white man in the neighborhood must be buying drugs. Personal personal communication after the panel “Criminalizing the City: 10th Annual Series of Public Conversations on Major Civic Issues Facing Philadelphia,” Urban Studies Program, University of Pennsylvania, March 2012.
18. The frustration and shame with which poor young men of color view their reliance on the drug trade and their inability to obtain a “real job” have been a recurrent finding in the urban ethnographic literature over the past three decades. Anderson summed up this tension in a statement by a respondent: “Why is it so hard for me to get a job, and so easy for me to sell drugs?” (Elijah Anderson, presentation, Community Justice Symposium, Baltimore, Maryland, March 8–10, 2007). For particularly strong accounts of young men’s struggles to leave the readily available but dangerous and morally tainted drug trade for low-wage work in the legal economy or for small-business ownership, see, for New York, Philippe Bourgois, In Search of Respect (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), and, for Springfield, Massachusetts, Timothy Black, When a Heart Turns Rock Solid: The Lives of Three Puerto Rican Brothers On and Off the Streets (New York: Pantheon Books, 2010).
19. Goffman, “On Fieldwork,” 125–26.
20. Jennifer Hunt discusses how she worked out a nonsexual role in a group of male police officers in “An Ethnographer’s Journey,” Chronicle of Higher Education, September 2010; and “The Development of Rapport through the Negotiation of Gender in Field Work Among Police,” Human Organization 43 (1984): 283–96. Also see the discussion in Emerson, Contemporary Field Research.
21. On this point see Emerson, Contemporary Field Research.
22. Anderson, Cosmopolitan Canopy, 40–42.
23. Collins (Violence, 185) points out that most would-be violence does not happen, but ends in bluster and empty threats. This certainly appeared to be the case for young men around 6th Street.
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