On the Run

Alice Goffman brings us right into the streets of Philadelphia and into the homes of the small-time hustlers, their girlfriends, and families. She shows us, at the same time, the long and destructive reach of the criminal justice system into the urban worlds of the black neighborhood she immersed herself in for nearly a decade. We meet a handful of vivid characters, undergo with them their scrapes on the street and their encounters with violence there, and come to feel in our bones, as these ghetto residents do, what the constant threat of arrest and incarceration feels like at the gut level. Goffman takes us also to jails, hospitals, and courts, and shows us how to identify undercover cops (by haircuts, car models, language), and how to run and hide when they're coming. The context is the 40-year federal War on Drugs and War on Crime, with their stronger sentencing guidelines and the ramping up of the number of police on the streets and number of arrests they make. (America's prison population has swelled to seven times what it had been before this federal initiative.) The regime of policing involves high-tech surveillance, also the quotas the cops have to fulfill in making a given number of arrests, and what happens to you, the fugitive, when a warrant is issued (with addresses of all your associates, their homes subject to raids, making even hospitals and schools unsafe for people being tracked). Arrests for minor infractions (like missing a court date) lead to issuance of new warrants, with the result that the young men in this study of 6th Street Philadelphia are "on the run," sometimes permanently. Meanwhile, we come to appreciate in depth the kinds of intimate relations that are formed, unsettled, and managed in life on 6th Street. And we find out, too, how a young middle-class white girl managed to gather all this information, including her accounts of the harrowing situations she sometimes found herself in, and what happened to her and to the people she worked with. In the end, what Goffman shows us is a world where the meaning of constancy, predictability, and strategic intelligence has become living.