On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City (26 page)

In 2011, I learned that Miss Linda had been paying a guard to smuggle Percocet to
her son Reggie in the prison yard. He had been sitting in state prison for six months
on a parole violation, this time for driving a car without a license. Shortly after
his arrival, a female guard threw a bucketful of ammonia into his face, causing significant
injury. My field notes from that visit:

First time seeing Reggie since the ammonia incident. Wasn’t her fault, he says—she
was playing. The eyedrops the nurse provided weren’t working to dull the pain, so
the same guard who ruined his eyes started selling him Percocet under the table for
a small fortune. Three days ago, the guard got transferred—apparently unrelated to
having injured Reggie or the drug smuggling—so now Reggie’s in severe withdrawal.
“Like the flu,” he says, “but ’way worse.” That’ll pass, but his blindness likely
won’t. He’s hoping to get another guard to sell him Percocet or oxycontin, but hasn’t
found one yet.

In addition to drugs, some guards do a good business in cell phones. At CFCF in 2011,
these were going for five hundred dollars. The family or girlfriend of an inmate would
meet the guard and pay him or her in cash, which I observed on a number of occasions.

Guards also sell something less tangible to inmates and parolees: private time with
women.

Mike and I were sitting in the visiting room at Camp Hill state prison, located two
hours west of Philadelphia. We were eating microwaved chicken fingers from the turnstile
snack machine and catching up on neighborhood gossip. Mike pointed to a small room
near the drink machines. “See that?” he said. “There’s no camera in there. Niggas
was taking they girls in there and smashing [having sex]; this guard was taking, like,
a bean [one hundred dollars] for fifteen minutes. He left, like, right after I got
here, so I never got to use it.”

When Mike finished his three-year prison term, he got paroled to a halfway house in
North Philadelphia. There, too, certain guards were willing to extend special privileges,
for a fee. This North Philadelphia halfway house held ten beds to a small room, but
often twenty men slept there. On the second night, Mike told me that he’d gotten no
sleep because one of his roommates had stabbed another, whom the man caught trying
to steal his shoes. On my first visit, a dense crowd of young men greeted me as I
walked through the doors of the compound, clamoring with one another against the glass
for a look at the outside. After years behind bars, Mike found the halfway house untenable:
“You get the smell of freedom, but you can’t touch it or taste it.”

During the few hours he was permitted to leave during the day, Mike began to get reacquainted
with the city, learning what kinds of clothes people were wearing nowadays, signing
up for Facebook, and acquiring an iPod. On the third day, he was given enough hours
to visit his baby-mom, Marie, and their two children. He seemed nervous about it,
and I tried to reassure him that after he saw them he’d feel more at ease.

When we spoke after the visit, Mike sounded worse. He learned that his children were
staying with their maternal grandmother, who had also taken in her brother, a man
in his sixties. Mike believed that this uncle had the habit of asking children to
sit on his lap and touching them. Marie was employed by a local hospital as a nurse’s
assistant and would leave for work at five in the morning; this meant that his seven-year-old
daughter and ten-year-old son were alone with their uncle for two and a half hours
before their grandmother would return from her night shift and take them to school.
What Mike wanted was to stay at his baby-mom’s house overnight so that he could be
there during those two critical hours when his children were left alone with their
uncle. I imagine he also wanted to spend time with his baby-mom, though he didn’t
voice this reason when we discussed the situation.

The solution came when Mike discovered that a number of the halfway house residents
were paying a guard between one hundred and two hundred dollars a night to allow them
to leave at midnight and return before the 8:00 a.m. count the next morning. In fact,
so many of
the men were paying off this guard for the privilege that when I would come to say
hello to Mike in the evening, I’d see one after another jump into waiting cars outside
the compound. I initially wondered if these men had special evening passes, possibly
to work a night shift, or perhaps were choosing to leave the halfway house, violate
their parole terms, and go on the run. When Mike explained about the guard, I realized
that at least some of these men were paying to leave for the night and sneak back
in the next morning.

At first Mike’s baby-mom agreed to contribute a significant portion of the payoff,
telling me she’d give any amount to know her children were safe. By the second week,
however, she refused to contribute any more, saying that she couldn’t give over her
entire paycheck just to secure a night with Mike.

When Mike’s money for nightly payoffs ran out, I asked him if he’d introduce me to
the halfway house guard who was taking the cash. Since the guard was single and around
my age, Mike invited him to go for a beer with me, introducing me as his godsister,
as he often did. He also told the guard that I was writing his biography and might
want to talk with him about Mike’s experience in the halfway house.
²

The guard agreed to meet me for drinks at the Five Points, a well-known “grown folks”
bar. He wasn’t at all what I had expected: a quiet, thoughtful man who showed me pictures
of his three children while sipping on an orange soda.

He began our conversation by saying that Mike was one of the guys he worried about
the most. If Mike could just get through these first few weeks, he’d be okay.

The guard’s phone rang soon after we began talking. He picked up and said, “Yeah,
he’s a go.” I asked what the calls were about, and he told me quite openly that he
was helping some of the guys get out of the house at night.

“What do you charge?” I asked.

“It depends,” the guard said. “If the guy is going out to sell drugs and, you know,
get the gun back that he left with his friend when he got locked up, I charge two
hundred dollars. Most of that goes to my supervisor—they think he doesn’t pay attention,
but he knows what it is; he’s taking his cut. If the guy’s going to work or looking
after his
kids—you know, he’s a good guy—I charge a lot less, or I let him go for free, and
take care of my supervisor from the others.”

“Is it risky?”

“Put it this way: this is my third house. The first house got shut down because the
toilets were stopped up; for months they weren’t working, and men were sleeping in
their own shit, getting sick from it. The second got shut down because the guards
were selling guns, not just guns—machine guns, M16s. [The guards were] using the men
in the house to run guns out of state, okay? You have no idea what goes on.”

“So letting men out at night . . .”

“It’s against policy. It’s a violation of their parole. But show me a house in Philly
where that’s
not
going on.”
³

.   .   .

Faced with heavy surveillance and supervisory restrictions, some individuals tangled
up with the police, the courts, and the prisons seek a number of specialty goods and
services to evade the authorities or live with more comfort and freedom than their
legal restrictions allow. A number of young people in the 6th Street neighborhood,
as well as people working as court clerks, prison guards, and halfway house operators,
are making a few extra dollars by providing an array of underground goods and services
to those individuals moving through the criminal justice system. With the exception
of prison guards, those working in this market tend not to know one another or form
much of a collective body.

Some people sell specialty goods, such as drug-free urine or fake documents, that
legally compromised people need to get through police stops or bypass their various
restrictions. Others are finding underground ways to supply the basic goods and services
that legally compromised people find too dangerous to access through standard channels,
or are prevented from accessing because of their legal restrictions: car repair, cell
phones, even health care. Moreover, many things that clean people hold as basic rights
or free goods become highly sought-after privileges for those under various forms
of confinement: fifteen minutes of intimacy with a spouse within the prison walls,
an evening away from the home one is obligated through probation or parole restric
tions to return to, or a few more months outside jail before a sentencing hearing.
These, too, become commodities for which people with a compromised legal status will
dearly pay.

What do people participating in this underground market make of what they are doing?

Rakim seemed to take a sympathetic attitude toward his clientele, viewing his urine
business as a necessary correction to an unjust system:

I’m not trying to help people break the law, but the parole regulations are crazy.
You fall off the wagon, have a drink, smoke weed, they grab you up; you’re in for
three years. Even if you start using drugs again, real drugs, should you be sent back
to prison for that? That’s not helpful at all. So you come to me. For those times
when you drink a little too much, or smoke weed, you know, because anything at all
in your system will set off the machine.

Jokingly, he noted that this side business encouraged him to stay away from drinking
or using drugs: “When your urine is worth something, you can’t just put anything in
your body. If you sell one dirty bag, you’re done.”

Rakim also described his efforts to help men on parole in quite political terms, insisting
that the men he supplied with clean urine were being wrongfully deprived of full citizenship
rights. Indeed, some of the other people helping to supply legally diminished young
men regard themselves as resisting police who act as an occupying force in the Black
community, and helping to combat a prison system that is a key site for racial injustice.
One parole officer I interviewed referred to the Underground Railroad when describing
his efforts to smuggle goods to inmates. Others, like Janine who worked at the courthouse,
seemed moved by a personal relationship to make an exception for a particular person.

In contrast, some of the prison guards I spoke with expressed considerable hostility
toward inmates, and frustration at the inherent tensions in their jobs. One guard
reasoned that the risk of physical violence at the hands of prisoners justified the
extra money he earned selling cell phones and drugs to them. He and his coworkers
viewed the
money they earned from inmates under the table as a way of sticking it to their employers
and making lemonade out of lemons.

Still others may feel alternately sickened by the money they take from desperate inmates
and parolees, justified on personal or political grounds, and guilty about the risks
their services pose to people already so vulnerable. During our chat over a drink,
the halfway house guard shared his complex and conflicting motives and feelings about
taking money to sneak men out at night:

It’s a broken system. On a good day, I think I’m doing something for justice, something
for the brothers. These men are locked up because they didn’t pay their court fees,
or they got drunk and failed [their piss test]. They’ve been locked up since they
were kids. Then they come home to this shit [the halfway house], sleeping one on top
of the other, no money, no clothes. And the rules they have to follow—nobody could
follow those rules. It’s a tragedy. It’s a crime against God. Sometimes I think, in
fifty years we are going to look back on this and, you know, that this was wrong.
And everybody who supported this—their judgment will come. So I think, each night
I give a man is a night he remembers he’s a human being, not an animal. And most of
these guys, they’ve got a few weeks or a few months before they go back in. You can
say a night out is a small thing, but it’s a big thing, too. And each guy who sleeps
out is one less guy in the rooms. We’re fifty-three over capacity now.

On a bad day I think I’m taking from men who have nothing; I’m taking from them to
pay my kids’ tuition, pay the bills. That’s not right. And whatever happens [to them
when they leave the halfway house], that’s on my head. They get rearrested, shot,
I did that.

Regardless of the meaning that participants in the underground market apply to these
exchanges, or the stated or unstated reasons they undertake them, we must acknowledge
that the criminal justice arm of the state extends beyond the persons who are the
direct targets of the police, the courts, or the prisons, and even beyond their families.
A large number of people provide underground assistance to men running from the police
or going through the courts and the jails. Through these illicit exchanges, they,
too, become involved in the “dirty” world.
The assistance they provide may give them some sense of contributing to those less
fortunate, or even of participating in an underground political movement against the
overreach of the police and the prisons. But they also come to rely on legally precarious
people for income, and by extension on the criminal justice system that seeks these
people and confines them. Through their financial dealings with people with warrants,
or who are in jail, or going through a court case, or out on parole, these brokers
of under-the-table goods and services also come to be partially swept up into the
criminal justice system, to know about it, to interact with it, and to rely on it.
And some find that their business with those caught up in the system renders them
vulnerable to arrest. We might think of this as a kind of secondary legal jeopardy,
a spilling over of the legal precariousness that the young men who are the main focus
of this study face.
⁴