On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City (43 page)

4
. Writing about Philadelphia in the 1960s, Jonathan Rubinstein (
City Police
[
New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1973]) discusses the need for police officers to
show “activity”: the work the officers do that can be statistically counted and used
informally to judge performance and merit.

CHAPTER TWO

1
. It is noteworthy that in pursuits involving men and women, the women were, at least
in all instances I observed, the hunters. That is, they took on the role of the police.
The houses they were attempting to get the man back to were referred to by both parties
as jail or prison, and when the men did get taken home, they and others referred to
their girlfriends’ having them on lockdown. That is, women were both the police and
the wardens. This game version of the women getting the men home strongly parallels
the serious role women play, both voluntarily and involuntarily, in the capture and
imprisonment of the men in their lives, discussed in the next chapter.

2
. The 111 occasions are not counted separately per man; some escapes from the police
involved two or more people running away.

3
. These numbers and descriptions of young men running from the police come from cases
that I observed with my own eyes. I heard recounted far more chases than I observed,
but I did not use these narratives as data. Comparing my observations with people’s
descriptions of the same incidents retold after the fact, I concluded that there is
a bias toward reporting chases and getaways that involve known people, that involve
elaborate attempts to get away, and that end in the police catching the person. From
my observations, in most cases when men see the police and take flight, the police
do not chase them at all. Those times the police do give chase, the man typically
gets away rather than gets caught, and his successful getaway usually does not involve
any creative or herculean efforts. Rather, he typically gets away in a quite mundane
way, because the officer in pursuit runs slower or gives up faster. Accounts of chases
are interesting in their own right, but are not good data for learning how men actually
go about running from the police and the resulting success rates.

4
. In Philadelphia, the courts can issue an arrest warrant if a person fails to pay
fines for traffic violations or misses a court date in regard to these violations.
A person can also be imprisoned for failing to pay these moving violations (Philadelphia
County, 33 Pa.B. Doc. No. 2745 and Pa.B. Doc. No. 03–1110).

5
. There are many reasons why people do not turn to the law when some crime has been
perpetrated against them; having a precarious legal status is simply one of them.
For a discussion of legal cynicism, see David S. Kirk and Andrew V. Papachristos,
“Cultural Mechanisms and the Persistence
of Neighborhood Violence,”
American Journal of Sociology
116, no. 4 (2011): 1197–1205.

6
. When a wanted man fearful of calling the police instead settles disputes with his
own hands, this violence is
secondary deviance
—the additional crime a person commits because he has been labeled a criminal. Here
the warrant serves as the label, creating more reason to commit crime and get into
trouble than the reasons a man already had. For a discussion of secondary deviance
in the labeling literature, see Howard Becker,
Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance
(New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1963), chap. 1, and Edwin M. Lemert,
Social Pathology: A Systematic Approach to the Theory of Sociopathic Behavior
(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1951), 75.

7
. Ronny’s cousin died during the summer, when I was out of town. Reggie called me
a few times on the day of the funeral and gave me these updates.

8
. Viviana A. Zelizer,
The Purchase of Intimacy
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007).

9
. Prisons and jails offer food, toiletries, clothing, phone cards, books, and other
items through commissary accounts. The families and friends of inmates may send money
to their loved one’s account via the US mail or via online money transfer companies,
such as jpay.com, that charge a fee for the service. The cash a man has in his pockets
when taken into custody may also be moved into this account. Because the inmate is
not permitted to possess or exchange currency, he or she never sees this money, and
can use it only for items offered for sale by the prison. Typically, inmates are permitted
to make purchases from their commissary account once a week. Child support and other
court fines and fees are deducted automatically. In some jurisdictions, prisons require
inmates to purchase their bus ticket home from this account, so the inmate may scramble
to raise these funds from friends and family before he or she is granted release.
This account is referred to as the books, as in “Can you please put some money on
my books?”

10
. Robberies during or after dice games were quite common around 6th Street at the
time I was there. This makes sense, because men would be carrying large amounts of
cash and were typically the sort who would not be able to go to the police. Chuck
once described a two-man team who robbed dice games as their primary form of income
and had been doing so for years, but I never met them personally.

11
. Though wet was popular in many parts of Philadelphia, Steve was the only member
of the 6th Street Boys who took it regularly. Around 6th Street, wet came in the form
of dark crystallized leaves with a little shine sold in small glass vials and smoked
in a cigarette or cigar wrapper (called a blunt). Its chemical composition is not
at all clear to me, but I believe it involved tea or marijuana leaves soaked in embalming
fluid and mixed with PCP.

12
. Paying for a witness’s hotel stay on the night before court is a typical way
to get a person not to show up. It serves as a way to compensate him or her, but more
important, it ensures that the person won’t be home if the police should try to drag
him or her in to testify.

CHAPTER THREE

1
. While conducting fieldwork, I became attentive to the particular moment that women
discover a partner or son is wanted by the police by reading studies of people receiving
life-altering news in hospitals and doctors’ offices. There, family members learn
that a loved one has a disease, not a warrant for arrest, but the shock and confusion
are common to both, and the news may have a similarly transformative effect on relationships.
For two excellent studies of hospital patients and their families receiving life-altering
news, see David Sudnow,
Passing On: The Social Organization of Dying
(Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1967), chap. 5; and Doug Maynard,
Bad News, Good News: Conversational Order in Everyday Talk and Clinical Settings
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 9.

2
. This conversation was recorded with permission on my iPhone. Some off-topic pieces
of the discussion were omitted.

3
. The way others tell it, Mike’s mother didn’t exactly tell his father to stop coming
around—he did that all on his own.

4
. The term
rider
has been discussed by Jeff Duncan-Andrade, who uses the spelling
rida
. He defines it as a “popular cultural term that refers to people who can be counted
on in extreme duress.” Jeff Duncan-Andrade, “Gangstas, Wankstas, and Ridas: Defining,
Developing, and Supporting Effective Teachers in Urban Schools,”
International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education
20, no. 6 (2007): 623.

5
. There are few systematic studies of the legal and financial obligations incurred
by people moving through the courts. In a unique study, Harris, Evans, and Beckett
quantify the financial burden for a sample of people in Washington State. They find
that those who have been convicted of misdemeanor or felony charges will owe on average
more than $11,000 to the courts over their life span, and likely will pay significantly
more than that because of the interest accruing on their legal debts. See Alexes Harris,
Heather Evans, and Katherine Beckett, “Drawing Blood from Stones: Monetary Sanctions,
Punishment and Inequality in the Contemporary United States,”
American Journal of Sociology
115 (2010): 1753–99.

6
. Gresham Sykes,
Society of Captives
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, [1958] 2007), 63–83.

7
. From a taped interview with two former members of the Philadelphia Warrant Unit,
2010.

8
. These techniques as I describe them represent the women’s perspective on
the police’s efforts to secure their cooperation. For a contemporary treatment of
police work from the officers’ perspective, see Peter Moskos,
Cop in the Hood: My Year Policing Baltimore’s Eastern District
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008).

9
. In Philadelphia, a man cannot visit a jail where he has been an inmate for six months
after his release. In practice, this paperwork takes quite a while to go through,
so that men who have ever been an inmate at a county jail are often denied visitation
rights to any of the local jails. Prisons also run the names of visitors, making it
dangerous for men with warrants or other legal entanglements to go there for visits.
A third barrier to visitation is the canine unit, which is occasionally stationed
in the prison or jail parking lot. Though visitors can refuse to allow the dogs to
search their vehicles, they will be denied entrance to the facility.

10
. For a detailed account of evictions among poor families in the United States, see
Matthew Desmond, “Disposable Ties and the Urban Poor,”
American Journal of Sociology
117 (2012): 1295–1335; and Matthew Desmond, “Eviction and the Reproduction of Urban
Poverty,”
American Journal of Sociology
118 (2012): 88–133.

11
. Research suggests these are quite realistic fears. Incarceration increases the likelihood
of infectious disease and stress-related illnesses, according to Michael Massoglia,
“Incarceration as Exposure: The Prison, Infectious Disease, and Other Stress-Related
Illnesses,”
Journal of Health and Social Behavior
49 (2008): 56–71. The same researcher has shown that incarceration causes long-term
negative health effects. See Michael Massoglia, “Incarceration, Health, and Racial
Disparities in Health,”
Law and Society Review
42 (2008): 275–306.

12
. Of course, that Miss Linda was good at protecting Chuck, Reggie, and Tim from the
police may also have contributed to the frequency of police raids, as her firm protectionist
stance likely encouraged her sons’ continued residency in the house. Other neighbors
explained her ability to ride by the fact that in comparison with other women, Miss
Linda had little to lose. Since her father owned the house, it wasn’t as easy to evict
her. Since the house was already in quite poor condition, she didn’t fear the destruction
caused by the raid as much as other women did. And since she held no job, the police
couldn’t threaten to notify her employer.

13
. Michelle never admitted to this; Mike’s lawyer showed his mother and me the statement
at the arraignment.

14
. For a nuanced account of the many excitements and pleasures to be found in breaking
the law, see Jack Katz,
Seductions of Crime: Moral and Sensual Attractions in Doing Evil
(New York: Basic Books, 1990).

15
. For an illuminating account of the complex ways in which women view the confinement
of a loved one, including some surprising upsides to romantic involvement with a man
sitting in prison, see Megan Comfort,
Doing Time
Together: Love and Family in the Shadow of the Prison
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), chap. 5, especially 126–27, 174.

CHAPTER FOUR

1
. Victor Rios, writing about Oakland, California, documents young people’s efforts
to push back against an expansive and putative criminal justice system, and describes
young men’s resistance to their criminalization. See Victor M. Rios,
Punished: Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys
(New York: New York University Press, 2011). Here young people are not resisting
so much as making use of the police, the courts, and the prisons for their own purposes:
they appropriate and manipulate criminal justice personnel and process for their own
ends. This is perhaps more akin to the subtle transgressions and sub rosa dissent
long documented in repressive regimes, from slaves on plantations—see John Blassingame,
The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South
(New York: Oxford University Press, [1972] 1979)—to peasants in authoritarian states—see
James C. Scott,
Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987).

2
. Georg Rusche and Otto Kirchheimer discuss the pressing problem that early politicians
and prison designers faced of making prisons sufficiently unpleasant as to deter even
the lowest strata of society from crime.
Punishment and Social Structure
(New York, 1939), 105–6. For a thorough treatment of their work, see David Garland,
Punishment and Modern Society: A Study in Social Theory
(University of Chicago Press, 1990), 94.

3
. Jack Katz discusses how would-be robbers risk that a victim may fight back. Randall
Collins refers to this as the robber’s failure to establish situational dominance.
See Jack Katz,
Seductions of Crime: Moral and Sensual Attractions in Doing Evil
(New York: Basic Books, 1990); Randall Collins,
Violence: A Micro-Sociological Theory
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 185.