On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City. By Alice Goffman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014. 261 pp. $25.00 hardcover.

Abstract

On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City. By Alice Goffman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014. 261 pp. $25.00 hardcover.For an undergraduate ethnography class, author Alice Goffman chose to work in a campus cafeteria where she met Miss Deena, a 30 year employee who supervised it. Goffman quit her job once the class concluded, but she remained in touch with Miss Deena and even offered to tutor her grandchildren Ray and Aisha who were high school students. She began to tutor them two or three nights per week in Miss Deena's home, which afforded her a close personal relationship with the teenagers and over the ensuing months their family members. Goffman furthered her relationship with these family members from tutor to neighbor and friend by moving into the neighborhood of Aisha's mother. Goffman eventually met Aisha's cousin Ronny, a 14-year-old freshly released from a juvenile detention facility, who lived about 15 blocks away on 6th Street. Ronny played matchmaker and set up a date between Goffman and Mike who grew up on 6th Street next door to Ronny's grandmother. Goffman primarily agreed to go on the date to pacify the concerns of Aisha's family as to her motivation for spending so much time with the adolescent, but Mike continued to remain in contact with her afterward even though there was no romantic link. Goffman soon began visiting Mike and his circle of friends on 6th Street, and in March 2003 Mike agreed to Goffman's request of allowing her to use his life as the subject of her undergraduate thesis due the next year. Eventually, she spent 8 years on 6th Street living and socializing with young urban black males who are the subjects of this fascinating book.In an Introduction that references Sociologists David Garland, Loic Waquant, and legal scholar Michelle Alexander, Goffman links the rise of mass imprisonment to life on 6th Street with special emphasis on the distinction between clean and people. The difference pertains to the risk of arrest, and those who assist or remain with dirty people such as grandmothers, mothers, and girlfriends who are called riders. The first opening chapters revolve around people considered dirty as they consistently face arrest for various reasons. Chapter One introduces the young men she observed-Chuck, Tim, Mike, Reggie, Anthony, Ronny, and Alex who are all African American living at or below the poverty level. Goffman informs readers about the scope of this problem- living on the run-by reporting on a household survey she conducted of the 6th Street neighborhood. Of the 308 men between 18 and 30 years old she interviewed, 144 had a warrant issued for their arrest due to delinquencies with court fines and fees or missed court dates. The City of Philadelphia had roughly 80,000 open warrants in the winter of 2010 with a small percent due to new criminal activity (called body warrants) and the vast majority due to missing court, unpaid court fees, or technical violations of probation or parole (called bench warrants). Warrants alter the lives of these young men in ways described throughout the book.The physical art of running from the police is covered in Chapter Two. …