On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City

ALICE GOFFMAN
is assistant professor of sociology at the

University of Wisconsin–Madison.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2014 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 2014.

Printed in the United States of America

23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14      1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-13671-4 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-13685-1 (e-book)

DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226136851.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Goffman, Alice, author.

On the run : fugitive life in an American city / Alice Goffman.

pages   cm—(Fieldwork encounters and discoveries)

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 978-0-226-13671-4 (hardcover : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-226-13685-1 (e-book)   1.
Criminal justice, Administration of—Pennsylvania—Philadelphia.   2. African American
youth—Legal status, laws, etc.—Pennsylvania—Philadelphia.   3. African American youth—Pennsylvania—Philadelphia—Social
conditions.   4. Discrimination in criminal justice administration—Pennsylvania—Philadelphia.   5.
Racial profiling in law enforcement—Pennsylvania—Philadelphia.   6. Imprisonment—Social
aspects—United States.   I. Title.   II. Series: Fieldwork encounters and discoveries.

HV9956.P53G64 2014

364.3'496073074811—dc23

2013033873

ON THE RUN

Fugitive Life in an American City

ALICE GOFFMAN

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

FIELDWORK ENCOUNTERS AND DISCOVERIES

A series edited by Robert Emerson and Jack Katz

CONTENTS

Prologue

Preface

Introduction

1.
The 6th Street Boys and Their Legal Entanglements

2.
The Art of Running

3.
When the Police Knock Your Door In

4.
Turning Legal Troubles into Personal Resources

5.
The Social Life of Criminalized Young People

6.
The Market in Protections and Privileges

7.
Clean People

Conclusion: A Fugitive Community

Epilogue: Leaving 6th Street

Acknowledgments

Appendix: A Methodological Note

Notes

PROLOGUE

Mike, Chuck, and their friend Alex were shooting dice on the wall of the elementary
school. It was approaching midnight and quite cool for mid-September in Philadelphia.
Between throws, Chuck cupped his hands together and blew heat into his fingers.

Mike usually won when the guys played craps, and tonight he was rubbing their noses
in it, shrugging into a little victory dance when he scooped the dollar bills off
the ground. After a pair of nines, Alex started in on Mike.

“You a selfish, skinny motherfucker, man.”

“Niggas is always gonna hate,” Mike grinned.

“You think you better than everybody, man. You ain’t shit!”

Chuck laughed softly at his two best friends. Then he yawned and told Alex to shut
his fat ass up before the neighbors called the law. A short time later, Chuck called
it a night. Mike announced he was going to get cheesesteaks with his winnings and
asked if I wanted to come with.

“Can
I
get a cheesesteak?” Alex interjected.

“Man, take your fat ass in the house,” Chuck laughed.

“Oh, so I’m walking?!”

.   .   .

Mike and I were halfway to the store in his car when his cell phone started ringing.
When he picked up I could hear screams on the other end. Mike shouted, “Where you
at? Where you at?”

He screeched the old Lincoln around and headed back to 6th Street,
pulling up in front of the corner store. There in the headlights we saw Alex, all
250 pounds of him, squatting by the curb, apparently looking for something. When he
glanced up at us, blood streamed from his face, down his white T-shirt, and onto his
pants and boots. Alex mumbled something I couldn’t decipher, and then I realized he
was looking for his teeth. I started searching on the ground with him.

“Alex,” I said, “we have to take you to the hospital.”

Alex shook his head and put up his hand, struggling to form words with his mangled
lips. I kept pleading until finally Mike said, “He’s not fucking going, so stop pushing.”

At this point I remembered that Alex was still on parole. In fact, he was quite close
to completing his two years of supervision. He feared that the cops who crowd the
local emergency room and run through their database the names of Black young men walking
in the door would arrest him on the spot, or at least issue him a violation for breaking
the terms of his parole. If that happened, he’d be back in prison, his two years of
compliance on the outside wiped away. A number of his friends had been taken into
custody at the hospital when they sought care for serious injuries or attempted to
attend the birth of their children.

Mike took off his shirt and gave it to Alex to soak up the blood from his face. Chuck
had come back around by this point, and carefully helped him into the front seat of
Mike’s car. We drove to my apartment a few blocks away. We cleaned Alex up a bit,
and then he began to explain what had happened. On his way home from the dice game,
a man in a black hoodie stepped out from behind the corner store and walked him into
the alley with a gun at his back. This man pistol-whipped him several times, took
his money, and smashed his face into a concrete wall. Later, Alex found out that this
man had mistaken him for his younger brother, who’d apparently robbed the man the
week before.

Over the next three hours, Mike and Chuck made a series of futile calls to locate
someone with basic medical knowledge. Mike’s baby-mom, Marie, was in school to become
a nurse’s aide, but she hadn’t been speaking to him lately—not since she’d caught
him cheating and put a brick through his car window. Finally, at around six in the
morning, Alex contacted his cousin, who came over with a plastic bag full of gauze
and needles and iodine, and stitched up his chin and the skin
around his eyebrow. His jaw was surely broken, she said, as well as his nose, but
there was nothing she could do about it.

The next afternoon, Alex returned to the apartment he shared with his girlfriend and
young son. Mike and I went to visit him that evening. I again pleaded with Alex to
seek medical treatment, and he again refused.

All the bullshit I done been through [to finish his parole sentence], it’s like, I’m
not just going to check into emergency and there come the cops asking me all types
of questions and writing my information down, and before you know it I’m back in there
[in prison]. Even if they not there for me, some of them probably going to recognize
me, then they going to come over, run my shit [check for his name in the police database
under open arrest warrants]. I ain’t supposed to be up there [his parole terms forbade
him to be near 6th Street, where he was injured]; I can’t be out at no two o’clock
[his curfew was 10:00 p.m.]. Plus, they might still got that little jawn [warrant]
on me in Bucks County [for court fees he did not pay at the end of a trial two years
earlier]. I don’t want them running my name, and then I got to go to court or I get
locked back up.

At this point his girlfriend emerged from the bedroom, ran her hands over her jeans,
and said, “He needs to go to the hospital. Better he spends six months in jail than
he can’t talk or chew food. That’s the rest of his life.”

.   .   .

Alex’s attack occurred over ten years ago. He still finds it difficult to breathe
through his nose and speaks with a muffled lisp. His eyes don’t appear at quite the
same level in his face. But he didn’t go back to prison. Alex successfully completed
his parole sentence, a feat of luck and determination that only one other guy in his
group of friends ever achieved.

PREFACE

The number of people imprisoned in the United States remained fairly stable for most
of the twentieth century, at about one person for every thousand in the population.
¹
In the 1970s this rate began to rise, and continued a steep upward climb for the
next thirty years.
²
By the 2000s, the number of people behind bars stood at a rate never before seen
in US history: about 1 for every 107 people in the adult population.
³
The United States currently imprisons five to nine times more people than western
European nations, and significantly more than China and Russia.
⁴
Roughly 3 percent of adults in the nation are now under correctional supervision:
2.2 million people in prisons and jails, and an additional 4.8 million on probation
or parole.
⁵
In modern history, only the forced labor camps of the former USSR under Stalin approached
these levels of penal confinement.
⁶

The fivefold increase in the number of people sitting in US jails and prisons over
the last forty years has prompted little public outcry. In fact, many people scarcely
notice this shift, because the growing numbers of prisoners are drawn disproportionately
from poor and segregated Black communities. Black people make up 13 percent of the
US population, but account for 37 percent of the prison population.
⁷
Among Black young men, one in nine are in prison, compared with less than 2 percent
of white young men.
⁸
These racial differences are reinforced by class differences. It is poor Black young
men who are being sent to prison at truly astounding rates: approximately 60 percent
of those who did not finish high school will go to prison by their midthirties.
⁹

This book is an on-the-ground account of the US prison boom: a close-up look at young
men and women living in one poor and segregated Black community transformed by unprecedented
levels of imprisonment and by the more hidden systems of policing and supervision
that have accompanied them. Because the fear of capture and confinement has seeped
into the basic activities of daily living—work, family, romance, friendship, and even
much-needed medical care—it is an account of a community
on the run
.

.   .   .

I stumbled onto this project as a student at the University of Pennsylvania. During
my sophomore year I began tutoring Aisha, a high school student who lived with her
mother and siblings in a lower-income Black neighborhood not far from the campus.
In the evenings we would sit at the plastic and metal kitchen table in her family’s
bare-walled, two-bedroom apartment, the old TV blaring, and work on her English or
math homework. Afterward her mom and aunts would gather on the stoop of their building
and talk about their kids or watch people go by. Gradually, I got to know Aisha’s
relatives, friends, and neighbors. When my lease was up, Aisha and her mother suggested
that I take an apartment nearby.

Aisha’s fourteen-year-old cousin Ronny came home from a juvenile detention center
that winter. He lived with his grandmother about ten minutes away by car. We started
taking the bus to visit him there.

Soon Ronny introduced me to his cousin Mike, a thin young man with a scruffy beard
and an intense gaze. At twenty-two, Mike was a year older than I was. He quickly explained
that he was in a temporary financial rut, living at his uncle’s house and with no
car to drive. Last year he had his own car and his own apartment, and he planned to
get back on his feet very soon. Mike seemed to command some respect from other young
men in the neighborhood. When a neighbor asked what a white woman was doing hanging
out on the back porch with him, he replied that I was Aisha’s tutor who lived nearby.
Other times, he explained that I was Aisha’s godsister.

Over the next few weeks, Mike introduced me to his mother, his aunt, his uncle, and
his close friend Alex. Many inches shorter and nearly twice Mike’s weight, Alex seemed
tired and defeated, as if he weren’t
trying to succeed in life so much as avoid major tragedy. Gradually I learned that
Mike and Alex were two members of a close-knit group of friends. The third member,
Chuck, was spending his senior year of high school in county jail awaiting trial on
an aggravated assault charge for a school yard fight. Mike missed him keenly, explaining
that Chuck was the glass-half-full member of the trio. As Chuck later told me on the
phone from jail, “I ain’t got shit but I’m healthy, I ain’t bad looking, you feel
me? I’m a happy person.”

That first month with Mike and Alex was calm—boring even. We would sit on Mike’s uncle’s
stoop and share a beer, or hang out in various houses of his friends and neighbors.
Some evenings we headed over to Chuck’s mother’s house so Mike could catch his friend’s
nightly phone call from jail.