On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City (2 page)

Then the cops raided Mike’s uncle’s house in the middle of the night. They were looking
for Mike on a shooting charge, though he vehemently denied any involvement. With a
warrant out for his arrest, he spent the next few weeks hiding in the houses of friends
and relatives. Then he turned himself in, made bail, and began the lengthy court proceedings.

I had never known a man facing criminal charges before, and assumed this was a grave
and significant event in Mike’s life. I soon learned that he had gone through two
other criminal cases within the past year: one for possession of drugs and the other
for possession of an unlicensed gun. Chuck was in county jail awaiting trial, and
Alex was completing two years of parole after serving a year upstate for drugs. Mike’s
cousin was out on bail. His neighbor was living under house arrest. Another friend,
who was homeless and sleeping in his car, had a warrant out for unpaid court fees.

Near the end of my sophomore year, I asked Mike what he thought of my writing about
his life for my senior thesis in the Sociology Department at Penn. He readily agreed,
with the caveat that I leave out anything he asked me to keep secret. When Chuck came
home from jail that spring, I received his permission to include him as well. Over
time, I asked other young men and their families to take part.

For the next year, I spent much of every day with Mike, Chuck, and their friends and
neighbors. I went along to lawyers’ offices, courthouses, the probation and parole
office, the visiting rooms of county jails, halfway houses, the local hospital, and
neighborhood bars and parties.

Having grown up in a wealthy white neighborhood in downtown Philadelphia, I did not
yet know that incarceration rates in the United States had climbed so dramatically
in recent decades. I had only a vague sense of the War on Crime and the War on Drugs,
and no sense at all of what these federal government initiatives meant for Black young
people living in poor and segregated neighborhoods. I struggled to make sense of the
police helicopters circling overhead and the young men getting searched and cuffed
in the streets. I worked hard to learn basic legal terminology and process.

That spring, Mike’s gun case ended and a judge sentenced him to one to three years
in state prison. A short time later, I was accepted into a PhD program at Princeton.
Through four years of graduate school I continued to live in Aisha’s neighborhood,
commuting to school and spending many of the remaining hours hanging out around 6th
Street with whichever of the 6th Street Boys were home. On the weekends I visited
Mike, Chuck, and other young men from the neighborhood in prisons across the state.
Over time, I got to know family members and girlfriends as we cleaned up after police
raids, attended court dates, and made long drives upstate for prison visiting hours.

The families described here agreed to let me take notes for the purpose of one day
publishing the material, and we discussed the project at length many times. I generally
did not ask formal, interview-style questions, and most of what I recount here comes
from firsthand observations of people, events, and conversations. People’s names and
identifying characteristics have been changed, along with the name of the neighborhood.
Mike initially suggested that in notes and term papers I call his neighborhood 6th
Street, and I kept this pseudonym as the project grew into a book.

Though I gratefully draw on information that a number of police officers, judges,
parole officers, and prison guards provided in interviews, this book takes the perspective
of 6th Street residents. In doing so, it provides an account of the prison boom and
its more hidden practices of policing and surveillance as young people living in one
relatively poor Black neighborhood in Philadelphia experience and understand them.
Perhaps these perspectives will come to matter in the debate about criminal justice
policy that now seems to be brewing.

INTRODUCTION

In the 1960s and 1970s, Black Americans achieved the full rights of citizenship that
had eluded them for centuries. As they successfully defended the right to vote, to
move freely, to attend college, and to practice their chosen profession, the United
States simultaneously began building up a penal system with no historic precedent
or international comparison.

Beginning in the mid-1970s, federal and state governments enacted a series of laws
that increased the penalties for possessing, buying, and selling drugs; instituted
steeper sentences for violent crime; and ramped up the number of police on the streets
and the number of arrests these officers made. Street crime had risen dramatically
in urban areas in the 1960s and 1970s, and politicians on both sides of the aisle
saw a heavy crackdown on drugs and violence as the political and practical solution.
By the 1980s, crack cocaine led to waves of crime in poor minority communities that
further fueled the punitive crime policies begun years earlier.

In the 1990s, crime and violence in the United States began a prolonged decline, yet
tough criminal policies continued. In 1994 the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement
Act poured billions of federal dollars into urban police departments across the nation
and created fifty new federal offenses. Under the second Bush administration, the
near unanimous endorsement of tough-on-crime policies by police and civic leaders
accompanied the mushrooming of federal and state police agencies, special units, and
bureaus.
¹
These policies increased the sen
tences for violent offenses, but they also increased the sentences for prostitution,
vagrancy, gambling, and drug possession.
²

The tough-on-crime era ushered in a profound change in how the United States manages
ghettoized areas of its cities. For most of the twentieth century, the police ignored
poor and segregated Black neighborhoods such as 6th Street. Between the 1930s and
the 1980s, an era which saw the Great Migration, restrictive racial housing covenants,
the Civil Rights Movement, growing unemployment, the erosion of social services, an
expanding drug trade, and the departure of much of the Black middle class from the
poor and segregated areas of major cities,
³
reports from firsthand observers paint the police in segregated Black neighborhoods
as uninterested, absent, and corrupt.
⁴

This began to change in the 1960s, when riots in major cities and a surge in violence
and drug use spurred national concern about crime, particularly in urban areas. The
number of police officers per capita increased dramatically in the second half of
the twentieth century in cities nationwide.
⁵
In Philadelphia between 1960 and 2000, the number of police officers increased by
69 percent, from 2.76 officers for every 1,000 citizens to 4.66 officers.
⁶
The 1980s brought stronger drug laws and steeper sentences. In the 1990s, the tough-on-crime
movement continued, with urban police departments across the nation adopting what
became known as zero-tolerance policing, and then CompStat to track their progress.
⁷

For many decades, the Philadelphia police had turned a fairly blind eye to the prostitution,
drug dealing, and gambling that went on in poor Black communities. But in the late
1980s, they and members of other urban police forces began to refuse bribes and payoffs.
In fact, corruption seems to have been largely eliminated as a general practice, at
least in the sense of people working at the lower levels of the drug trade paying
the police to leave them in peace. Also during this period, large numbers of people
were arrested for using or possessing drugs, and sent to jails and prisons.

The crackdown on the drug economy in poor Black neighborhoods came at the same time
that welfare reform cut the assistance that poor families received and the length
of time they could receive it. As welfare support evaporated, the War on Drugs arrested
those seeking work in the drug trade on a grand scale.

By 2000, the US prison population swelled to five times what it had been in the early
1970s. An overwhelming majority of men going to prison are poor, and a disproportionate
number are Black. Today, 30 percent of Black men without college educations have been
to prison by their midthirties. One in four Black children born in 1990 had an imprisoned
father by the time he or she turned fourteen.
⁸

Sociologist David Garland has termed this phenomenon
mass imprisonment
: a level of incarceration markedly above the historical and comparative norm, and
concentrated among certain segments of the population such that it “ceases to be the
incarceration of individual offenders and becomes the systematic imprisonment of whole
groups.”
⁹
Sociologist Loïc Wacquant and legal scholar Michelle Alexander have argued that current
levels of targeted imprisonment represent a new chapter in American racial oppression.
¹⁰

Since the 1980s, the War on Crime and the War on Drugs have taken millions of Black
young men out of school, work, and family life, sent them to jails and prisons, and
returned them to society with felony convictions. Spending time in jail and prison
means lower wages and gaps in employment. This time away comes during the critical
years in which other young people are completing degrees and getting married. Laws
in many states deny those with felony convictions the right to vote and the right
to run for office, as well as access to many government jobs, public housing, and
other benefits. Black people with criminal records are so discriminated against in
the labor market that the jobs for which they are legally permitted to apply are quite
difficult to obtain.
¹¹
These restrictions and disadvantages affect not only the men moving through the prison
system but their families and communities. So many Black men have been imprisoned
and returned home with felony convictions that the prison now plays a central role
in the production of unequal groups in US society, setting back the gains in citizenship
and socioeconomic position that Black people made during the Civil Rights Movement.
¹²

.   .   .

6th Street is a wide commercial avenue, and the five residential blocks that connect
to it from the south form an eponymous little neighborhood. In the 1950s and 1960s,
the 6th Street neighborhood had been a
middle-class Jewish area; by the early 1970s it was just opening up to Black residents.

When I first came to the neighborhood in 2002, 93 percent of its residents were Black.
Men and boys stood at its busiest intersection, offering bootleg CDs and DVDs, stolen
goods, and food to drivers and passersby. The main commercial street included a bulletproofed
Chinese takeout store that sold fried chicken wings, single cigarettes called loosies,
condoms, baby food, and glassines for smoking crack. The street also included a check-cashing
store, a hair salon, a payday loan store, a Crown Fried Chicken restaurant, and a
pawnshop. On the next block, a Puerto Rican family ran a corner grocery. Roughly one-fourth
of the neighborhood’s households received housing vouchers, and in all but two households,
families received some type of government assistance.
¹³

6th Street is not the poorest or the most dangerous neighborhood in the large Black
section of Philadelphia of which it is a part—far from it. In interviews with police
officers, I discovered that it was hardly a top priority of theirs, nor did they consider
the neighborhood particularly dangerous or crime ridden. Residents in adjacent neighborhoods
spoke about 6th Street as quiet and peaceful—a neighborhood they would gladly move
to if they ever had enough money.

Still, 6th Street has not escaped three decades of punitive drug and crime policy.
By 2002, police curfews had been established around the area for those under age eighteen,
and police video cameras had been placed on major streets. In the first eighteen months
that I spent in the neighborhood, at least once a day I watched the police stop pedestrians
or people in cars, search them, run their names for warrants, ask them to come in
for questioning, or make an arrest.
¹⁴
In that same eighteen-month period, I watched the police break down doors, search
houses, and question, arrest, or chase people through houses fifty-two times. Nine
times, police helicopters circled overhead and beamed searchlights onto local streets.
I noted blocks taped off and traffic redirected as police searched for evidence—or,
in police language, secured a crime scene—seventeen times. Fourteen times during my
first eighteen months of near daily observation, I watched the police punch, choke,
kick, stomp on, or beat young men with their nightsticks.

The problems of drugs and gun violence are real ones in the 6th
Street community, and the police who come into the neighborhood are trying to solve
them with the few powers that have been granted to them: the powers of intimidation
and arrest. Their efforts do not seem to be stopping young men like Mike and Chuck
from attempting to earn money selling drugs or from getting into violent conflicts;
whether they are helping to reduce overall crime rates is beyond the scope of this
study.

Whatever their effect on crime, the sheer scope of policing and imprisonment in poor
Black neighborhoods is transforming community life in ways that are deep and enduring,
not only for the young men who are their targets but for their family members, partners,
and neighbors.

CLEAN AND DIRTY PEOPLE

With decent, well-paying jobs in perennial short supply, Black communities have long
been divided between those able to obtain respectable employment and those making
their money doing dangerous, profaned work. In the 1890s, W. E. B. DuBois dubbed this
latter group the submerged tenth.
¹⁵
In the 1940s, Chicago sociologists St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton referred to
these groups as the respectables and the shadies. Drawing on terms used frequently
in the Black community, sociologist Elijah Anderson famously dubbed this distinction
the divide between
decent
and
street
.
¹⁶
Though the line between decent and street has been recognized and elaborated by academics,
those divides first emerged as folk categories that residents of segregated Black
neighborhoods used to draw distinctions among themselves.