On The Run: Fugitive Life in an American City

by Alice Goffman

  Mike then explains that he wouldn’t have done this for just anyone; in fact, if Chuck had been the only other person with him, he wouldn’t have admitted to anything. But he felt like I had really been there for him, and so he wanted to do this thing for me, to show me that I was appreciated. He seems angry that I don’t understand the weight of this gesture, and frustrated that he has to explain it to me.

  The next day, Chuck and I discuss what happened, and when I mention that Mike had taken the blame on our behalf, Chuck frowns and says, “That’s what he’s saying?” He then explains that when Mike said he could have tossed the drugs in the car, leading me, the driver, to potentially take the blame, he was lying, because he hadn’t actually thought of that at the time. Chuck claims that Mike hadn’t remembered he was carrying the weed bag until it dropped out of his pocket while the cop searched him. He hadn’t remembered he had the small bag of cocaine, either, until he was in the back of the police car. If he had remembered these items before he was searched, Chuck says, he probably would have tossed them both in the car, no matter what the consequences.

  “But what about when he said that we didn’t have anything on us, when he said it was his weed?” I ask. Clearly this was an instance of Mike’s taking the blame squarely and gallantly on his shoulders, saving the rest of us from a potential arrest. Chuck then explains that Mike’s speaking up actually didn’t protect us. If he hadn’t spoken up, we might all have been taken to the police station and questioned. But my girlfriend and I wouldn’t have been charged with anything, Chuck says, since we were clean—we had no drugs on us, we didn’t have any warrants, we weren’t on probation (which we would be violating by driving), and no drugs were in fact found in the car. He says, “They was going to let you go regardless.” He then explains that Mike probably figured that since I’d been questioned only once before, and wasn’t practiced in withstanding threats from police, he couldn’t count on my silence. Especially not my girlfriend’s, Chuck points out. “Who is Mike to her?”

  “Now he wants to act like he did that shit for you,” Chuck says. “But think about it: like, if you going to get booked, it’s better to get booked alone.”

  To work out whether Chuck’s account is valid, I try to think of what my friend from school could have possibly told the police about Mike. Well, at least his real name. In the hope that his other cases wouldn’t come into play and to make it harder for them to find him once he made bail, Mike had given the two officers a fake name and had scraped his fingertips off on a metal grate in the cell so that they couldn’t find him through his prints.

  After a few days, Mike still seems angry with me that I didn’t express gratitude for the sacrifice he’d made on my behalf, and that I didn’t accept his version of events. I speak to Aisha on the phone, relaying the events of the past days to her, describing what Mike had done and how close we had come to being arrested. I make sure Mike is within earshot while I talk to her, and this seems to patch things up between us. Chuck says nothing else to me about it.

  From these field notes, we can see that it can be quite unclear who has taken the blame for whom, or how much risk there really was in the first place. I believed that Mike had taken blame that was rightfully his, but he felt that he had made a significant sacrifice for me, and that I didn’t understand the situation enough to appropriately value his gesture. I began to be convinced by Mike’s arguments until I talked with Chuck, who had a different interpretation from either of us. Chuck agreed with Mike that keeping drugs on you instead of throwing them in the car should be understood as a gesture of sacrifice, protecting the driver at your personal expense. That is, he didn’t dispute that passengers in a car ordinarily drop the drugs, leaving the driver holding the bag. What Chuck was disputing was whether Mike had remembered that he had drugs on him. If he’d actually forgotten, then he’d kept the rest of us safe unintentionally and was now trying to get credit for it. Furthermore, by quickly admitting to the police that he was carrying the marijuana and we weren’t, Mike actually wasn’t preventing our arrest. According to Chuck, what he was preventing was the possibility that we’d talk. Mike was trying to avoid putting us in a position where we’d compromise his freedom.

  Added to these interpretations is a fourth, which I came up with while rereading my field notes a few days later. The person who actually may have benefited from Mike’s impromptu confession was not me or my friend from school but Chuck, who did have drugs on him, and likely would have been searched next if Mike hadn’t spoken up and claimed responsibility when he did. Chuck would have been in a much more vulnerable position to inform on Mike to reduce his own charges, so Mike’s taking the blame prevented that from happening. Neither Chuck nor Mike mentioned this, at least not while I was present. In fact, Mike specifically told me that he wouldn’t have taken the blame if only Chuck had been in the car.

  From this single police stop, a great many interpretations of the risks involved and the motivations behind the actions of the parties present can be put forth. One reason it may have been important for Mike to provide a version of the events that involved his taking the blame for us is that a person’s character is defined in part by whether he will risk arrest to protect the people he cares about. Residents of the 6th Street neighborhood tend to downplay how much they put others at risk, and to exaggerate their acts of protection and sacrifice. Men spread the news widely when they testify on behalf of a friend on trial, wanting others to know of their loyalty and good character. On the other hand, people suspected of caving under police pressure vehemently deny having done so, though the strength of the denial is at times taken as a sign of guilt in itself.

  The inherent ambiguity and uncertainty of encounters with the police, trial dates, probation hearings, and the like make these events difficult ones on which to base decisions about people’s characters, feelings, or motivations. And yet, in part because these events are so uncertain and ambiguous, they leave considerable room for interpretation, sometimes allowing those involved to construct a version of events in which they behaved bravely and honorably.

  THE CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM AS A SOCIAL WORLD FOR YOUNG ADULTS

  In the hyper-policed Black neighborhood of 6th Street, the penal system has become a central institution in the lives of young people and their families, coordinating social life and creating a meaningful moral framework through which young people carve out their identities, demonstrate their attachment to one another, and judge one another’s character.

  The events marking a young man’s passage through the system come to serve as collective rituals that confer identity and establish relationships. The sentencing hearing, initial jail visits, and homecomings serve as important social events, indicating how popular he is or how much status he has, as well as where people stand in his life.

  By protecting one another from the authorities or risking arrest on one another’s behalf, members of the 6th Street community demonstrate their attachment to their family and friends and lay claim to decency and honor. Risking arrest to attend a family function or hiding a wanted relative or partner in one’s home becomes an act of love and devotion, binding people together. Such risk-taking can also serve as an apology, healing the wounds of a past wrong. Indeed, how people conduct themselves given their own legal entanglements and those of others becomes a source of distinction, marking them as brave or weak, responsible or reckless, loyal or disloyal, or at least providing the resources for so claiming. In the 6th Street neighborhood and many like it, the criminal justice system now sets the terms for coming of age; it is a key stage on which the drama of young adulthood is played, not only for the young men moving through it but for their parents as well.

  To be sure, around 6th Street and other segregated Black neighborhoods like it, the drama of youth continues to play out on the street corner, in class, and on the football field. But it also plays out—and for some it mainly plays out—in bail offices, courtrooms, and jail visiting halls. As boys around 6th Street
become young men, many make the transition from home and school to detention centers and jails. The police and the courts increasingly take up their time and dictate their activities; their daily round consists of writing letters to the parole board or waiting in line at the probation office, making phone calls to the house arrest monitor, and meeting with the “back judge” from prior cases.

  But to say that the penal system has become a central institutional basis for adolescence and young adulthood is not to say that it is equal to the other institutions which might occupy young people’s time and form the basis of their social identities and relationships.

  The events marking a man’s passage through the penal system may become occasions for his girlfriend to dress up and do her nails, but a trial is not a school dance. These are rituals of diminishment and degradation, not celebration or accomplishment. Even if a young woman can emerge proudly from a sentencing hearing because she sat in the first row with the young man’s mother, this doesn’t change the fact that she is watching the young man she loves being taken away to prison.

  Mothers may express their parental care and support by attending their son’s court dates and by visiting him in jail, but these activities don’t provide the same gratification they might experience attending a school basketball game, recital, or play. Even a mother who can take some pride in the attention she pays to her son’s legal matters must face other, unpleasant emotions: distress for this to be happening, pain for what her son will go through in jail or prison, shame for what the boy has gotten himself into, guilt for having failed to prevent it. While families certainly celebrate a young man’s homecoming from jail, dismissed case, or successful completion of a probation or parole term, they rarely do so with a cake and balloons. These happy moments are tinged with the unavoidable fact that even good news from the courts isn’t something to be truly proud of. Unlike a graduation or a first day on the job, they aren’t moves up so much as a clearing of legal en tanglements, a resetting of the young man’s life at zero. Now perhaps he might begin to make some progress in the domains that afford him some standing and stability—the domains of school, work, and family, in which he has fallen woefully behind.

  The issue of agency also persists. Teenagers everywhere may feel that decisions are being made for them, and that they don’t have as much control over their lives as they would like. But school and jobs do afford them some chance to work hard and reap the benefits of their efforts. In contrast, much of a young man’s passage through the penal system reminds him every day that he is at the mercy of larger forces that do not wish him well.

  The seemingly arbitrary nature of the criminal justice system, from the moment the police stop a man to the moment his parole sentence ends, leaves a young man feeling that he cannot actively determine how his life turns out. At any moment he may be taken into custody, while the man standing next to him is not. Once he catches a case, he begins attending court dates, perhaps one a month for what may turn into more than a year of continuances and postponements. Each time he enters the courthouse, he has little idea whether the authorities will decide he should be taken into custody on the spot and continue his case from jail, or whether he will simply be given a new court date and sent home. Uncertainty persists as to whether this day will mark an ending to his legal woes or his last day as a free man. The difference between a case getting thrown out and moving forward may have very little to do with the young man’s conduct—he has only to wait and worry. If he is sitting in jail, he often has no idea how long he’ll be there. Even when issued a fixed sentence, he doesn’t know when he’ll be paroled, and if granted parole, he may wait months for his papers to come through.

  Young men cannot control when or where the criminal justice system may take them, nor can they control who attends the events marking their passage through it. Though surely high school offers significant opportunities for humiliation and conflict, a man sitting in jail or prison has less say over who attends the major events in his life than he would in, say, planning his prom date. And so these occasions become times of tension and humiliation, not just for the man in question but for his significant others, creating problems in relationships perhaps more often than do the rituals that we typically associate with coming of age.

  The criminal justice system furnishes a good deal of expressive equipment for a man to demonstrate his love, honor, attachment, or open hostility, but upon closer inspection these are also wanting. The uncertainty of encounters with the police makes it hard for these to become the moments when his character is decided on, and the looming threat of prison makes it difficult for him to conduct himself as he might wish.

  The act of informing, when done freely and without pressure, can be rightfully taken as an act of aggression, or a payback for some wrong. But people aren’t always given the free choice to inform or to keep silent. Rather, informing happens under duress, so people are betraying those they’d rather protect, and their character is becoming established during a situation over which they have little control and certainly haven’t freely entered into. Whereas many of us living in other communities are able to construct an identity as a good person without risking much of our safety or security to do so, young people on 6th Street find that their character becomes fixed in moments of fear and desperation, when under the threat of violence and confinement they must choose between their own safety and the security of someone they hold dear.

  . . .

  Thus, the moral world that people weave around the courts, the police, and the threat of prison involves suspicion, betrayal, and disappointment. To repair the damages that so frequently occur to the self and to relationships, young men and women try to cover up the bad things they are made to do, or spin them in a positive light. Relationships between friends, partners, and family members require a good deal of forgiving and forgetting. Still, people create a meaningful social world and moral life from whatever cards they have been dealt, and young people growing up in poor and segregated Black neighborhoods, under heavy policing and the threat of prison, are no exception.

  SIX

  The Market in Protections and Privileges

  Most of this book has concerned young men who are the targets of the vast criminal justice apparatus, and those very close to them. But the movement of large numbers of these young men through the courts, the jails, and the prisons touches many more people beyond those directly involved. In the 6th Street neighborhood, a lively market has emerged to cater to the needs and wants of those living under various legal restrictions. A good number of young people have found economic opportunity by selling their friends and neighbors sought-after goods and services for hiding from the police or circumventing various legal constraints.

  Some of these young people got their start by doing a favor for a friend or relative, and later realizing they could charge for it. Others found that their legitimate jobs furnished the opportunity to help legally precarious people in a particular kind of way. Meanwhile, some young people working from within the criminal justice system earned additional income under the table by smuggling a number of restricted goods and services to inmates. Taken together, the underground market catering to the needs and wants of those living under various legal restrictions has created substantial economic opportunity for young people living in communities where money and jobs are scarce.

  TURNING A PERSONAL CONNECTION INTO A LITTLE INCOME

  When I met Jevon, he was a charming eight-year-old who wanted to be a movie star. He’d quote whole sections of The Godfather or Donnie Brasco and swear he’d make it big one day. People often said that Jevon sounded like his older relatives. He would entertain himself by pretending to be his cousin Reggie or his uncle when their girlfriends phoned, causing a number of misunderstandings and, in one case, a big argument. Shortly after Jevon turned thirteen, his muscles started to grow, and to his great satisfaction, a thin mustache began to form on his upper lip. Most important, his voice broke. This was the key thing, his voice
dropping. Now he could impersonate his relatives and neighbors with astonishing accuracy.

  Around this time, Jevon’s older cousin Reggie got released from jail and placed on probation at his mother’s house. His probation officer would call a few evenings each week to make sure Reggie was in the house for his nine o’clock curfew, a constraint on his freedom he deeply resented, particularly after he met and fell for a girl living a few blocks away. Reggie started paying a neighbor ten dollars per night to sit in Miss Linda’s house and answer the phone when his probation officer called, so that he could go out with his new girlfriend. This scheme had been successful once, but on the second phone call the PO had grown suspicious and had asked where Reggie had been sent as a juvenile offender. Reggie’s neighbor couldn’t answer that question, so the PO told him that the next time Reggie was caught out after curfew, he’d be going back to jail.

  Reggie and I were sitting on the stoop facing the alleyway and discussing this while some younger boys played a pickup game with the alley basket. Hearing the tail end of our conversation, Jevon left the game and came over to us. With impressive confidence, he told Reggie that he could take the PO calls for him: not only could he do Reggie’s voice better than anyone, but he already knew most of the details of his cousin’s life, and could quickly learn the rest.

  “What’s my date of birth?” Reggie asked.

  “February 12, 1987.”

  “What was the first case I caught?”