On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City (42 page)

Tanesha promptly informed Miss Linda that I had just hugged Chuck’s father, and Miss
Linda came over to yell at me and at him. He tried to laugh it off and calm her down,
but she didn’t calm down, not for fifteen minutes. “You know I don’t play that!” she
yelled.

How could I have forgotten that it’s simply not appropriate for a young woman like
me to embrace an older man who’s not a family member? And no less the father of Miss
Linda’s firstborn? To think that I had compounded Miss Linda’s grief with jealousy
and conflict—I left that evening and planned to stay away until the day of the funeral.
But Miss Linda phoned me at five in the morning to say that she couldn’t sleep, and
asked me to come back and sit with her.

The family didn’t have enough money for the funeral home expenses, so we called the
morgue and asked them to keep the body for a
little longer. Days passed, and Reggie didn’t get the furlough—the cops said it was
too risky, given the circumstances of his brother’s death.

.   .   .

After most of the extra cops had left the neighborhood, the hunt was on to find the
man who had killed Chuck. Since Tim had seen the shooter from only a few feet away,
many knew the man’s name and the guys he hung out with. But the man had gone deep
underground—nobody could figure out where he was hiding. As Reggie berated his boys
each day from jail—what they weren’t doing, how slow they were to avenge his brother’s
murder, what he would do if he were home—the 6th Street Boys acquired more and more
guns, gearing up for what they assumed would be coming: part three of the 4th Street
War.

Many nights, Mike and Steve drove around looking for the shooter, the guys who were
part of his crew, or women connected to them who might be able to provide a good lead.
On a few of these nights, Mike had nobody to ride along with him, so I volunteered.
We started out around 3:00 a.m., with Mike in the passenger seat, his hand on his
Glock as he directed me around the area. We peered into dark houses and looked at
license plates and car models as Mike spoke on the phone with others who had information
about the 4th Street Boys’ whereabouts.

One night Mike thought he saw a 4th Street guy walk into a Chinese restaurant. He
tucked his gun in his jeans, got out of the car, and hid in the adjacent alleyway.
I waited in the car with the engine running, ready to speed off as soon as Mike ran
back and got inside. But when the man came out with his food, Mike seemed to think
this wasn’t the man he’d thought it was. He walked back to the car and we drove on.

.   .   .

During the period surrounding Chuck’s death, I started studying shootouts in earnest:
how and when they happened and what the ongoing conflicts looked like over time. But
I don’t believe that I got into the car with Mike because I wanted to learn firsthand
about violence, or even because I wanted to prove myself loyal or brave. I got into
the car because, like Mike and Reggie, I wanted Chuck’s killer to die.

Perhaps Chuck’s death had broken something inside me. I stopped seeing the man who
shot him as a man who, like the men I knew, was
jobless and trying to make it at the bottom rung of a shrinking drug trade while dodging
the police. I didn’t care whether this man had believed his life was threatened when
he came upon Chuck outside the Chinese takeout store, or felt that he couldn’t afford
to back down. I simply wanted him to pay for what he’d done, for what he’d taken away
from us.

Looking back, I’m glad that I learned what it feels like to want a man to die—not
simply to understand the desire for vengeance in others, but to feel it in my bones,
at an emotional level eclipsing my own reason or sense of right and wrong. But to
go out looking for this man, in a car with someone holding a gun? At the time and
certainly in retrospect, my desire for vengeance scared me, more than the shootings
I’d witnessed, more even than my ongoing fears for Mike’s and Tim’s safety, and certainly
more than any fears for my own.

NOTES

PREFACE

1
. US Department of Justice, “Prisoners 1925–81” (Washington, DC: Government Printing
Office, 1982), 3.

2
. Christopher Uggen, Jeff Manza, and Melissa Thompson, “Democracy and the Civil Reintegration
of Criminal Offenders,”
Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science
605 (2006): 285, 287–88.

3
. US Department of Justice, “Correctional Populations in the United States, 2011”
(Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 2012), 1.

4
. Roy Walmsley, “World Prison Population List,” 9th ed. (London: International Centre
for Prison Studies, 2011), 3, 5.

5
. US Department of Justice, “Correctional Populations in the United States, 2011”
(Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 2012), 3.

6
. Alexandr Solzhenitsyn,
The Gulag Archipelago
(New York: Harper and Row, 1973).

7
. On the first page of his landmark study of social conditions in Philadelphia’s 7th
Ward, W. E. B. DuBois included the footnote, “I shall throughout this study use the
term ‘Negro,’ to designate all persons of Negro descent, although the appellation
is to some extent illogical. I shall, moreover, capitalize the word, because I believe
that eight million Americans are entitled to a capital letter.” I have capitalized
the word Black in this work for the same reasons, and to follow him. W. E. B. DuBois,
The Philadelphia Negro
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1899), 1.

8
. The Pew Center on the States, “One in 100: Behind Bars in America 2008” (Washington,
DC: Pew Charitable Trusts), 6.

9
. Becky Pettit and Bruce Western, “Mass Imprisonment and the Life-Course: Race and
Class Inequality in U.S. Incarceration,”
American Sociological Review
69 (2004): 151, 164.

INTRODUCTION

1
. Katherine Beckett,
Making Crime Pay
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 73; Jonathan Simon,
Governing through Crime
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 241.

2
. Katherine Beckett and Theodore Sasson,
The Politics of Injustice: Crime and Punishment in America
(Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press, 2000), 5.

3
. On the increasing economic hardship and spatial isolation faced by residents of
segregated Black neighborhoods in US cities after 1970, see Loïc Wacquant and William
Julius Wilson, “The Cost of Racial and Class Exclusion in the Inner City,”
Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science
501 (1989): 8–25.

4
. Urban ethnographies have documented laissez-faire and corrupt policing in segregated
Black neighborhoods from the late 1800s up until the 1980s. On the police turning
a blind eye to gambling and prostitution in the Black community in the 1930s and 1940s,
see St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton,
Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, [1945] 1993), 524. On widespread corruption
among city police during the 1960s, see Jonathan Rubinstein,
City Police
(New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1973). On the failure of the police to intervene
when disputes arose among Black young men in the 1970s, see Elijah Anderson,
A Place on the Corner
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 2. On police allowing open-air drug
markets to flourish in Black neighborhoods in the 1980s, see Terry Williams,
Crackhouse
(Reading, MA: Addison Wesley, 1992), 84. On the de facto system of justice that housing
project leaders, drug dealers, and a few corrupt police officers enforced in the Chicago
projects in the 1980s and 1990s, see Sudhir Venkatesh,
Off the Books: The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006).

5
. Albert J. Reiss Jr., “Police Organization in the 20th Century,”
Crime and Justice
15 (1992): 56.

6
. Data on the number of police officers in Philadelphia are taken from the Federal
Bureau of Investigation, Uniform Crime Reports (1960 through 2000). Population estimates
of Philadelphia are taken from the US Bureau of the Census.

7
. For a detailed investigation of the creation and spread of tough crime policy and
its connection to welfare retrenchment and market deregulation in the United States,
see Loïc Wacquant,
Prisons of Poverty
(Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2009).

8
. Christopher Wildeman, “Parental Imprisonment, the Prison Boom, and the Concentration
of Childhood Disadvantage,”
Demography
46 (2009): 270.

9
. David Garland, “Introduction: The Meaning of Mass Imprisonment,” in
Mass Imprisonment: Social Causes and Consequences
, ed. David Garland (London: Sage, 2001), 1–2.

10
. On hyperincarceration specifically, see Loïc Wacquant, “Race, Class, and Hyperincarceration
in Revanchist America,”
Daedalus
139, no. 3 (2010): 74–90. Wacquant’s theoretical and empirical work on the expanding
US penal system and its significance for American politics and race relations was
a significant inspiration for this volume, and can be sampled in “The New Peculiar
Institution: On the Prison as Surrogate Ghetto,”
Theoretical Criminology
4, no. 3 (2000): 377–88; “Deadly Symbiosis: When Ghetto and Prison Meet and Mesh,”
Punishment & Society
3, no. 1 (2001): 95–133;
Urban Outcasts: A Comparative Sociology of Advanced Marginality
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008); and
Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009).

11
. Devah Pager,
Marked: Race, Crime, and Finding Work in an Era of Mass Incarceration
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 4–5.

12
. Bruce Western,
Punishment and Inequality in America
(New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2006), especially 191.

13
. Of the 217 households surveyed by Chuck and me in 2007.

14
. In these eighteen months of daily fieldwork, there were only five days in which
I observed no police activity.

15
. W. E. B. DuBois,
The Philadelphia Negro
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press [1899] 1996).

16
. This key social divide in the Black community can be seen in Anderson’s earliest
book,
A Place on the Corner
. A further and more formal development can be found in “Decent and Street Families,”
chapter 1 in
Code of the Street
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), 35–65.

17
. Even middle-class, respectable, and well-connected Black people in Philadelphia
are aware of these distinctions to some extent. In 2007, I was asked to be in a working
group writing a policy brief for congressional representative Chaka Fattah, who was
running for mayor. The group was composed of me and six distinguished Black Philadelphians,
including three attorneys, two long-established community organizers, and one writer
for the
Philadelphia Daily News
. The first meeting was held in a high-rise building in Center City. When it wrapped,
the elevator wasn’t working, so we took the stairs. Nearing the second floor, we heard
banging noises, and after a bit of discussion and more listening, we concluded that
someone must be stuck inside the elevator. One of the lawyers suggested we call the
fire department. At this suggestion to alert the authorities, the journalist quipped,
“Hope nobody has any warrants!” There were chuckles all around.

CHAPTER ONE

1
. An expression of affirmation, meaning roughly “Did I ever.”

2
. The terms
young boy
and
old head
have been used in the African Ameri
can community at least since the 1970s. The words denote a mentoring relationship
between an older and a younger man or boy, and imply some level of commitment to the
welfare of the young boy from the old head and some level of deference and duty on
the part of the young boy. Elijah Anderson first mentions the term
old head
in a footnote in
A Place on the Corner
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 225, then elaborates on the relationship
between old heads and young boys in
Streetwise
: “The old head/young boy relationship was essentially one of mentor/protégé. The
old head might be only two years older than the young boy or as much as thirty of
forty years older; the boy was usually at least ten. The young boy readily deferred
to the old head’s chronological age and worldly experience” (Elijah Anderson,
Streetwise: Race, Class, and Change in an Urban Community
[Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990], 69). Anderson goes on to explain that
traditional old heads who preached respectability are struggling to maintain their
role with a new generation of young men facing a labor market with few decent jobs
available to them. New old heads who grew up in street life are replacing the traditional
male role models of previous decades (see also Elijah Anderson,
Code of the Street
[New York: W. W. Norton, 1999], 145–46). In keeping with Anderson’s discussion, the
old heads around 6th Street mentored young boys not on how to make it in respectable
jobs but on the strategies for survival in a physically dangerous and heavily policed
drug trade.

3
. Mike and Chuck sometimes debated whether or not their group of friends could call
themselves a gang or even a collective group at all. Philadelphia does not have neighborhood
or citywide gangs like the Crips or Bloods, but instead has smaller street-based groups.
Mike, Chuck, and their friends were bound to each other by their identification with
6th Street: they either grew up on the blocks crossing 6th Street or spent time there
because a close relative had moved to the neighborhood. Five of them had “6th Street”
tattooed on their arms, and when they and others wrote me letters from jail, they
would end them with their nicknames, followed by “6th Street” or “4-ever-6.” They
sometimes called themselves the 6th Street Boys, the team, the squad, the clique,
or the block. At other times, they forcefully denied they were a collective or group
at all, although the fact that they bothered to discuss this might support their group
identity rather than call it into question. In Scott Brooks’s ethnography of Philadelphia
basketball players in middle and high school, Jermaine explains the city’s gang system
succinctly: “It go by street, really. You got D Street, they represent they block;
H street represent they block; K Street, J Street, like P Street. We ain’t really
got like Bloods and Crips. It just go by your street” (Scott N. Brooks,
Black Men Can’t Shoot
[Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009], 149).