On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City (32 page)

CONCLUSION

A Fugitive Community

In the last third of the twentieth century, the Civil Rights Movement helped forge
a new Black middle class with considerable political and economic power. At the same
time, the United States embarked on a new and highly punitive era in regard to poor
communities of color—a profound change in how American society governs segregated
urban areas and those living within them.

Around 6th Street, police helicopters circle overhead, police cameras monitor passersby,
and police routinely stop, search, and arrest people in the streets. Many young men
are going in and out of jail or attending court dates; many others are living under
probation or parole supervision, under house arrest, or with open warrants out for
their arrest. When these young men are home, they live as suspects and fugitives,
afraid that any encounter with the authorities will send them back to jail or prison.

In the popular imagination, to be on the run is a condition reserved for those exceptional
criminals who make the FBI’s Most Wanted lists. Fugitives are the stuff of action
movies and legends. Yet today, the United States’ tough-on-crime policies have turned
its poor and segregated Black neighborhoods into heavily policed places where many
young men are using fake names, looking over their shoulder, and living with the genuine
fear that those closest to them may bring them into the hands of the police.

Most of these men are out of work and spend some portion of their time trying and
failing to secure the lowest-paying part-time jobs. Some are intermittently involved
in the risky but ready drug trade, sell
ing small and sometimes larger amounts of marijuana, crack, or pills hand to hand.
Periodically they go hungry, and sleep in abandoned cars or their neighbors’ unfinished
basements.

Around 6th Street, young men’s compromised legal status transforms the basic institutions
of work, friendship, and family into a net of entrapment. Hospitals become dangerous
places to visit, as do jobs. Their mother’s home becomes a last-known address: the
first place the police will look. As the police track these men through their known
addresses, bill payments, and cell phone activity and round them up at the hospital,
at work, and at family gatherings, they learn to cultivate a lifestyle of secrecy
and evasion, and to see those closest to them as potential informants. As long as
a man is at risk of confinement, staying out of prison and routine participation in
family, work, and friendships become contradictory goals—doing one reduces his chance
of achieving the other.

To be on the run is a strange phrase for legally compromised people, because to be
on the run is also to be at a standstill. Indeed, many on 6th Street use the terms
caught up
and
on the run
interchangeably. On the one hand, young men are quite literally running from the
police, who chase them on foot or in cars, through houses, and over fences. They are
also running from the information in the police database that designates them as arrestable
on sight. At the same time, their legal entanglements leave them stuck or caught in
place. The policing technology now in use to track people with legal entanglements
means that leaving the city or the state will not enable them to escape their legal
woes. Possessing few resources or skills they can take with them to succeed elsewhere,
they remain in the neighborhood, dependent on the generosity of family and neighbors
to hide them and help them survive.

These young men are also at a standstill in the sense that their warrants and court
cases and probation and parole sentences loom over them as barriers to advancement.
They sense that they cannot proceed with school or work until their legal issues are
cleared up—until their warrant is lifted or their court cases end. While employers
hesitate to hire a man on parole, they are perhaps even less inclined to take on a
man with an arrest warrant or pending court cases, often advising him to come back
after these are dealt with. The likelihood of a man
with pending legal entanglements being sent back to jail or prison also makes it difficult
for partners and family members to build him into their future. Even if he doesn’t
get sent back to jail, the number of meetings, court dates, and other appointments
he must keep up with to continue in good standing with the legal system can feel like
a full-time job, or at least a part-time job with unpredictable hours that undermine
regular attendance at school or work. In this sense, living on the run is akin to
treading water—continual motion without getting anywhere.

The authorities’ efforts to hunt, capture, try, and confine large numbers of young
men in poor and segregated Black neighborhoods are not only changing the way these
men see themselves and orient to the world around them. The heavy police presence
and the looming threat of incarceration are spilling out past their targets and tearing
at the fabric of everyday life, sowing fear and suspicion into the networks of family
and friends that have long sustained poor Black communities. Under the threat of prison,
a new and more paranoid social fabric is emerging—one built on the expectation that
loved ones may become wanted by the police or may inform on one another to save their
own skin. It is woven in subterfuge and trickery; in moves and countermoves; in the
paranoiac practices of secrecy, elusion, misinformation, and unpredictability. If
there is solidarity, it is an occasional solidarity against the police.

The pressure the police put on young men’s partners and relatives to provide information
about their whereabouts places women under considerable duress. As officers raid women’s
houses, threaten to arrest them or get them evicted, and take their children away,
they must decide between their own safety and the freedom of the men they hold dear.
Women’s pledges to protect the men in their lives dissolve under sustained police
pressure, and some find they become the unwilling accomplices of the authorities.
This descent from trusted partner to snitch or abandoner causes considerable personal
anguish as well as public humiliation.

In ghettoized communities there has long been distrust between men and women, and
also between people living respectably and those living on the edge. The divide between
members of respectable society and those oriented toward the fast life or criminal
activity has long been noted. But generosity and trust, and bonds of family and friend
ship, also have endured through great duress. Around 6th Street, intensive policing
and the looming threat of prison are tearing at these bonds, shutting people up in
their homes, sowing suspicion and distrust into friendship and family life. In this
community, there is simply not enough safety from the authorities to go around. Staying
out of jail may mean giving up a son or brother or right-hand man. A central tension
in the relationships of men and women on 6th Street involves having to depend heavily
on those whom they cannot trust, and wanting to be trusted by people they may put
at risk or deceive.

The long-standing divide between the respectable and the shady members of the Black
community has been at least partially supplanted by a new line between
clean
and
dirty
people: those able to make it safely through a police stop, and those likely to be
seized. An underground market has emerged to supply those seeking protection from
the authorities or a bit more freedom than their legal restrictions allow. The buyers
and sellers of these protections and privileges forge new bonds together, though these
transactional relationships also become complicated by the threat of discovery and
arrest.

Men and women also turn the heavy presence of police, the courts, and the prisons
to their advantage in ways the authorities never intended. For young men, jail sometimes
serves as a safe haven when the streets get too dangerous. The bail office becomes
a de facto bank, and warrants become a ready excuse for failure. In times of anger
and desperation, women harness the threat of the police to control the men in their
lives; during calmer months, they build meaningful routines around their son’s or
partner’s bail payments, court dates, visiting hours, and parole meetings.

The threat of prison and the heavy presence of the police and the courts come to permeate
the social fabric of the community in more subtle ways, shifting the currency of love
and commitment and creating a new moral framework through which residents carve out
their identities and relationships. People express their devotion by refusing to tell
the police which way a friend went, or by offering a nephew wanted by the law a few
nights’ safety on the couch. The events marking a man’s passage through the criminal
justice system—his first jail visits, his bail posting, his sentencing—become de facto
rites of passage and collective events: the weddings, graduations, and school dances
of
the fugitive community. The threat of prison also creates opportunities for acts of
bravery and loyalty: by protecting one another from arrest, people make claims for
themselves as honorable and decent, and demonstrate the strength of their commitment
to others.

And yet, it is important to remember that the world the criminal justice system creates—of
stops and searches, of stints in jail, of warrants and court dates and parole meetings—is
not total. While many young people spend their days running from the police, making
court dates, and visiting their parole officers, some residents continue to go to
school or work every day. Those with a close personal connection to someone on the
run or sitting in jail can still build distance from this association, and carve out
a life with little connection to the world of cops, court dates, and jail time. Still,
these people often work very hard to avoid contact with the dirty world, and come
to think of themselves in relation to those enmeshed in it.

THE PROBLEM WITH INTENSIVE POLICING IN POOR URBAN NEIGHBORHOODS

Crime and violence are undeniable problems in poor urban communities. Levels of homicide
and gun-related violence in particular set poor minority communities apart, creating
pressure for some kind of government action. Around 6th Street, the problems of drugs
and violence are real ones, and the young men described here are intimately connected
to them.

Some might say that in neighborhoods plagued by drugs and violence, the police have
little choice but to arrest large numbers of young men and zealously run down outstanding
warrants, particularly when those on the run may carry guns, become involved in serious
violence, and/or deal drugs in the neighborhood. But around 6th Street the street
trade in drugs, neighborhood rivalries, and their potential for violence are all deeply
woven into community life. Under these conditions, the role of law enforcement changes
from keeping communities safe from a few offenders to bringing an entire neighborhood
under suspicion and surveillance.

In this context, the highly punitive approach to crime control winds up being counterproductive,
creating entirely new domains of criminal
ity. The level of social control that tough-on-crime policy envisions—particularly
in a liberal state—is so extreme and difficult to implement that it has led to a flourishing
black market to ease the pains of supervision. A new realm of criminal activity is
produced as young people supply the goods and services that legally compromised people
seek to evade the authorities or live with more freedom and comfort than their legal
restrictions permit. This black market runs second to the fugitive status as a kind
of corollary illegality. Moreover, mothers and girlfriends find themselves committing
a seemingly endless series of crimes as they attempt to hide, protect, and provide
for their legally entangled sons and partners. Thus, the great paradox of a highly
punitive approach to crime control is that it winds up criminalizing so much of daily
life as to foster widespread illegality as people work to circumvent it. Intensive
policing and the crime it intends to control become mutually reinforcing. The extent
to which crime elicits harsh policing, or policing itself contributes to a climate
of violence and illegality, becomes impossible to sort out.

Another irony of tough-on-crime policies is that they are so disruptive to the bonds
of family, friendship, and community that they have united drug dealers and working
people around what all can agree is the unjust overreach of the police, the courts,
and the prisons. This is not to say that law-abiding residents of the 6th Street neighborhood
are untroubled by the violence and drug selling in which many young men in the neighborhood
become engaged. They
are
troubled, and they wish these young men would either leave or change their ways.
Some residents insist that their sons and nephews could get legitimate jobs if they
simply tried hard enough to find them. But police officers’ public violence and efforts
to pit neighbors and family members against one another have caused working residents
to regard them as an additional problem, not a solution, and in this they find considerable
common ground with dirty members of the community.

From the perspective of 6th Street residents, distrust and anger at the police are
understandable. The police (along with courts, the jails, and the prisons) are not
solving the significant problems of crime and violence but instead are piling on additional
problems to the ones residents already face.

This justifiable anger does not mean that we should view the po
lice as bad people, or their actions as driven by racist or otherwise malevolent motives.
The police are in an impossible position: they are essentially the only governmental
body charged with addressing the significant social problems of able-bodied young
men in the jobless ghetto, and with only the powers of intimidation and arrest to
do so. Many in law enforcement recognize that poverty, unemployment, and the drugs
and violence that accompany them are social problems that cannot be solved by arresting
people. But the police and the courts are not equipped with social solutions. They
are equipped with handcuffs and jail time.