On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City (23 page)

THE CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM AS A SOCIAL WORLD FOR YOUNG ADULTS

In the hyper-policed Black neighborhood of 6th Street, the penal system has become
a central institution in the lives of young people and their families, coordinating
social life and creating a meaningful moral framework through which young people carve
out their identities, demonstrate their attachment to one another, and judge one another’s
character.

The events marking a young man’s passage through the system come to serve as collective
rituals that confer identity and establish relationships. The sentencing hearing,
initial jail visits, and homecomings serve as important social events, indicating
how popular he is or how much status he has, as well as where people stand in his
life.

By protecting one another from the authorities or risking arrest on one another’s
behalf, members of the 6th Street community demonstrate their attachment to their
family and friends and lay claim to decency and honor. Risking arrest to attend a
family function or hiding a wanted relative or partner in one’s home becomes an act
of love and devotion, binding people together. Such risk-taking can also serve as
an apology, healing the wounds of a past wrong. Indeed, how people conduct themselves
given their own legal entanglements and those of others becomes a source of distinction,
marking them as brave or weak, responsible or reckless, loyal or disloyal, or at least
providing the resources for so claiming. In the 6th Street neighborhood and many like
it, the criminal justice system now sets the terms for coming of age; it is a key
stage on which the drama of young adulthood is played, not only for the young men
moving through it but for their parents as well.

To be sure, around 6th Street and other segregated Black neighborhoods like it, the
drama of youth continues to play out on the street corner, in class, and on the football
field. But it also plays out—and for
some it mainly plays out—in bail offices, courtrooms, and jail visiting halls. As
boys around 6th Street become young men, many make the transition from home and school
to detention centers and jails. The police and the courts increasingly take up their
time and dictate their activities; their daily round consists of writing letters to
the parole board or waiting in line at the probation office, making phone calls to
the house arrest monitor, and meeting with the “back judge” from prior cases.

But to say that the penal system has become a central institutional basis for adolescence
and young adulthood is not to say that it is equal to the other institutions which
might occupy young people’s time and form the basis of their social identities and
relationships.

The events marking a man’s passage through the penal system may become occasions for
his girlfriend to dress up and do her nails, but a trial is not a school dance. These
are rituals of diminishment and degradation, not celebration or accomplishment. Even
if a young woman can emerge proudly from a sentencing hearing because she sat in the
first row with the young man’s mother, this doesn’t change the fact that she is watching
the young man she loves being taken away to prison.

Mothers may express their parental care and support by attending their son’s court
dates and by visiting him in jail, but these activities don’t provide the same gratification
they might experience attending a school basketball game, recital, or play. Even a
mother who can take some pride in the attention she pays to her son’s legal matters
must face other, unpleasant emotions: distress for this to be happening, pain for
what her son will go through in jail or prison, shame for what the boy has gotten
himself into, guilt for having failed to prevent it. While families certainly celebrate
a young man’s homecoming from jail, dismissed case, or successful completion of a
probation or parole term, they rarely do so with a cake and balloons. These happy
moments are tinged with the unavoidable fact that even good news from the courts isn’t
something to be truly proud of. Unlike a graduation or a first day on the job, they
aren’t moves up so much as a clearing of legal en tanglements, a resetting of the
young man’s life at zero. Now perhaps he might begin to make some progress in the
domains that afford him some standing and stability—the domains of school, work, and
family, in which he has fallen woefully behind.

The issue of agency also persists. Teenagers everywhere may feel that decisions are
being made for them, and that they don’t have as much control over their lives as
they would like. But school and jobs do afford them some chance to work hard and reap
the benefits of their efforts. In contrast, much of a young man’s passage through
the penal system reminds him every day that he is at the mercy of larger forces that
do not wish him well.

The seemingly arbitrary nature of the criminal justice system, from the moment the
police stop a man to the moment his parole sentence ends, leaves a young man feeling
that he cannot actively determine how his life turns out. At any moment he may be
taken into custody, while the man standing next to him is not. Once he catches a case,
he begins attending court dates, perhaps one a month for what may turn into more than
a year of continuances and postponements. Each time he enters the courthouse, he has
little idea whether the authorities will decide he should be taken into custody on
the spot and continue his case from jail, or whether he will simply be given a new
court date and sent home. Uncertainty persists as to whether this day will mark an
ending to his legal woes or his last day as a free man. The difference between a case
getting thrown out and moving forward may have very little to do with the young man’s
conduct—he has only to wait and worry. If he is sitting in jail, he often has no idea
how long he’ll be there. Even when issued a fixed sentence, he doesn’t know when he’ll
be paroled, and if granted parole, he may wait months for his papers to come through.

Young men cannot control when or where the criminal justice system may take them,
nor can they control who attends the events marking their passage through it. Though
surely high school offers significant opportunities for humiliation and conflict,
a man sitting in jail or prison has less say over who attends the major events in
his life than he would in, say, planning his prom date. And so these occasions become
times of tension and humiliation, not just for the man in question but for his significant
others, creating problems in relationships perhaps more often than do the rituals
that we typically associate with coming of age.

The criminal justice system furnishes a good deal of expressive equipment for a man
to demonstrate his love, honor, attachment, or
open hostility, but upon closer inspection these are also wanting. The uncertainty
of encounters with the police makes it hard for these to become the moments when his
character is decided on, and the looming threat of prison makes it difficult for him
to conduct himself as he might wish.

The act of informing, when done freely and without pressure, can be rightfully taken
as an act of aggression, or a payback for some wrong. But people aren’t always given
the free choice to inform or to keep silent. Rather, informing happens under duress,
so people are betraying those they’d rather protect, and their character is becoming
established during a situation over which they have little control and certainly haven’t
freely entered into. Whereas many of us living in other communities are able to construct
an identity as a good person without risking much of our safety or security to do
so, young people on 6th Street find that their character becomes fixed in moments
of fear and desperation, when under the threat of violence and confinement they must
choose between their own safety and the security of someone they hold dear.

.   .   .

Thus, the moral world that people weave around the courts, the police, and the threat
of prison involves suspicion, betrayal, and disappointment. To repair the damages
that so frequently occur to the self and to relationships, young men and women try
to cover up the bad things they are made to do, or spin them in a positive light.
Relationships between friends, partners, and family members require a good deal of
forgiving and forgetting. Still, people create a meaningful social world and moral
life from whatever cards they have been dealt, and young people growing up in poor
and segregated Black neighborhoods, under heavy policing and the threat of prison,
are no exception.

SIX

The Market in Protections and Privileges

Most of this book has concerned young men who are the targets of the vast criminal
justice apparatus, and those very close to them. But the movement of large numbers
of these young men through the courts, the jails, and the prisons touches many more
people beyond those directly involved. In the 6th Street neighborhood, a lively market
has emerged to cater to the needs and wants of those living under various legal restrictions.
A good number of young people have found economic opportunity by selling their friends
and neighbors sought-after goods and services for hiding from the police or circumventing
various legal constraints.

Some of these young people got their start by doing a favor for a friend or relative,
and later realizing they could charge for it. Others found that their legitimate jobs
furnished the opportunity to help legally precarious people in a particular kind of
way. Meanwhile, some young people working from within the criminal justice system
earned additional income under the table by smuggling a number of restricted goods
and services to inmates. Taken together, the underground market catering to the needs
and wants of those living under various legal restrictions has created substantial
economic opportunity for young people living in communities where money and jobs are
scarce.

TURNING A PERSONAL CONNECTION INTO A LITTLE INCOME

When I met Jevon, he was a charming eight-year-old who wanted to be a movie star.
He’d quote whole sections of
The Godfather
or
Donnie
Brasco
and swear he’d make it big one day. People often said that Jevon sounded like his
older relatives. He would entertain himself by pretending to be his cousin Reggie
or his uncle when their girlfriends phoned, causing a number of misunderstandings
and, in one case, a big argument. Shortly after Jevon turned thirteen, his muscles
started to grow, and to his great satisfaction, a thin mustache began to form on his
upper lip. Most important, his voice broke. This was the key thing, his voice dropping.
Now he could impersonate his relatives and neighbors with astonishing accuracy.

Around this time, Jevon’s older cousin Reggie got released from jail and placed on
probation at his mother’s house. His probation officer would call a few evenings each
week to make sure Reggie was in the house for his nine o’clock curfew, a constraint
on his freedom he deeply resented, particularly after he met and fell for a girl living
a few blocks away. Reggie started paying a neighbor ten dollars per night to sit in
Miss Linda’s house and answer the phone when his probation officer called, so that
he could go out with his new girlfriend. This scheme had been successful once, but
on the second phone call the PO had grown suspicious and had asked where Reggie had
been sent as a juvenile offender. Reggie’s neighbor couldn’t answer that question,
so the PO told him that the next time Reggie was caught out after curfew, he’d be
going back to jail.

Reggie and I were sitting on the stoop facing the alleyway and discussing this while
some younger boys played a pickup game with the alley basket. Hearing the tail end
of our conversation, Jevon left the game and came over to us. With impressive confidence,
he told Reggie that he could take the PO calls for him: not only could he do Reggie’s
voice better than anyone, but he already knew most of the details of his cousin’s
life, and could quickly learn the rest.

“What’s my date of birth?” Reggie asked.

“February 12, 1987.”

“What was the first case I caught?”

“For weed, when you was like ten.”

“How many months did I do up Forrest?”

“You never went to Forrest. You was in Mahanoy.”

“What’s the last birthday I spent home?”

“Shit. Probably when you was like nine.”

Reggie grinned. “What’s my social?”

“I don’t know.”

Reggie told Jevon his social security number.

“Okay,” Jevon said.

“Repeat it back,” Reggie insisted.

Jevon repeated it perfectly.

.   .   .

Reggie gave Jevon’s acting skills a try that night, leaving around seven and returning
at two in the morning. Jevon reported that everything had gone according to plan:
the PO had phoned, asked what halfway house he’d been sent to, what his first baby-mom’s
mother’s name was, and what part of his body the guard had injured while Reggie was
a teenager in county jail. Jevon had answered all these questions correctly.

Jevon launched his enterprise by charging his cousin five dollars a night, but at
his mother’s urging switched to asking for five dollars an hour. Reggie seemed to
resent this rate increase, but admitted that nobody else could come close to his voice,
which had the heavy nasal quality of a young Biggie Smalls. When Reggie missed several
payments, Jevon offered his services to his uncle and then to a neighbor, both of
whom were also on parole, and eager for a stand-in to answer calls from their PO.

Responding to curfew calls required a number of skills beyond the mimicry of voices:
punctuality, confidence, a good memory, and the ability to imagine what someone who
has recently come home from a long sentence might sound like and say to his PO. Jevon
took this all on as any professional actor might, and seemed to delight in his roles.
He also took careful notes about the conversations in a little book, so that the next
time a man saw his PO he’d know where their relationship stood.