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Alice Goffman, On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City: Goffman, first as an undergraduate at Penn and then as a grad student, studied a group of mostly young black men in inner-city Philadelphia whose constant encounters with the law shaped every aspect of their lives. In order to avoid what they believed to be the threat of arrest in almost any formal situation and from any predictable behavior, they avoided hospitals (missing the birth of their children and avoiding treatment for serious injuries), calling the police, regular employment, etc. A second economy served them—with everyone taking a taste, of course—providing fake documents, clean urine, unlicensed healthcare, contraband in prison (being incarcerated is expensive), etc. She argues that these strategies for staying out of prison were incompatible with maintaining family, work, and friendships. Even the nature of the underground economy wasn’t conducive to strong relationships within that economy—people provided individual services like cell phones but didn’t act collectively.
Meanwhile, the women in these men’s lives routinely faced threats of arrest, eviction, and loss of child custody if they didn’t help the police—putting them in a position where they had to choose between their security or men’s freedom. “In this community, there is simply not enough safety from the authorities to go around.” Arrest was a scarier threat for women on average, because fewer women in the community did go to jail, and other people offered less support to women in jail than to men in jail—“visiting people in prison is considered women’s work.” Jails ran ID checks, so people who were wanted even on misdemeanor warrants didn’t dare come visit. Also, former inmates weren’t allowed to visit jails, and paperwork delays meant that supposedly short exclusion periods could become permanent.
Becoming a snitch risked condemnation from neighbors and family, while staying loyal to a man on the run meant strengthening commitment to a man “just as he ceases to play an active role in her daily life, to furnish her with any concrete future, or to assist her financially.” The police actively worked to destroy relationships, telling women that men had cheated and showing men statements that women had made about them. At the same time, women could use a man’s warrant or probation status to achieve goals of their own—to threaten men for straying, for example. For both men and women, “[g]iving up another person under pressure is seen as a shameful act of betrayal. Doing so voluntarily is considered an act of retribution, or the start of an open conflict. The unintentional bringing of ‘heat’ is taken as a sign of negligence or bad character.” But putting oneself at risk for someone else without a close enough relationship can look desperate and mockable. The overall result was a culture of fear and suspicion, destroying already-fragile family and romantic relationships. “Under the threat of prison, a new and more paranoid social fabric is emerging—one built on the expectation that loved ones may become wanted by the police or may inform on one another to save their own skin.”
The police were routinely brutal: “a little more than twice a month, we watched the police beat up people as they were arresting them.” The police were more violent towards men, but women saw it and knew what the police could do. State violence was therefore commonplace, and the state couldn’t protect people from private violence. Prison guards and other employees of the justice system were often corrupt, and justified themselves as helping people in untenable situations while also recognizing that they were taking money from people who had almost nothing. Along with the costs of being isolated from lawful services, mere interaction with the criminal justice system could cost tens of thousands of dollars, based only on court costs and fines. And, further complicating matters, many criminally involved men were involved with women who worked in the criminal justice system, given women’s generally better educational and employment prospects.
Much of these men’s lives were organized around prison as well as staying out of it. Jail was such a constant part of these men’s lives that some people left money at the bail office until they needed it, using the bail office as a short-term bank that offered no interest but was safer than having the money outside. Being wanted could even be used to explain personal failures, such as failure to find work. Trials/sentencings were moments at which relationship status could be publicly recognized: the woman sitting next to a defendant’s mother is his main partner; the person who’s trusted to manage a man’s possessions when he’s inside is also socially important.
Goffman didn’t spend as much time with the many men in the neighborhood who stayed out of the prison system, but she did talk to them about their experiences—often they stayed indoors as much as possible, playing video games and drinking beer instead of smoking pot in order to avoid failing the urine tests common at their jobs.
Goffman argues that the result of punitive policies is to foster escalating illegality, such as the underground economy and fake papers men use to avoid warrants, and to disrupt the social bonds that could otherwise have controlled disorder. Law-abiding residents want violent young men to change their ways, but they don’t trust the police and have good reason not to do so; the violence and forced betrayals of today’s policing make the cops an additional problem instead of a solution. Instead of social programs and jobs, we have arrests. Goffman argues that the ghetto offers a clear example of the social and cultural effects of living under a repressive regime.
Near the end, Goffman discusses her own personal involvement in great detail. As a young white woman getting a college education, she had freedoms her interviewees didn’t have. She ended up identifying so completely with them, though, that she describes automatically perceiving white men as threats in the way they did. A friend of one of her key informant’s was shot and killed while exiting her car; “one of the bullets pierced my windshield, and the man’s blood spattered my shoes and pants as we ran away.” She went on a car ride with others looking for revenge after that informant was ultimately killed.
Slate published Dwayne Betts’ critique of Goffman as a kind of racial tourist, arguing that her emphasis on black criminality is likely to backfire and further entrench the police state she argues is producing criminality. Meanwhile, police overpolicing petty offenses, resulting in snowballing fines and jail time for poor black people who couldn’t pay in the first place, is a big part of the Ferguson story, which makes clear that Goffman’s account is not some unique feature of Philadelphia policing. I share Betts’ concern that deeply entrenched racist attitudes make backlash rather than reform a more probable outcome from publicizing how discriminatory current practices are; yet what is the alternative? (He also argues that she overstated how much surveillance goes on in places like hospitals—I’m not sure that fully answers her argument, which I read as being that many young men believe that they could be arrested essentially at any time if they interact with hospitals, regular jobs, etc., so that they are further alienated from non-criminal alternatives.)
Meanwhile, the women in these men’s lives routinely faced threats of arrest, eviction, and loss of child custody if they didn’t help the police—putting them in a position where they had to choose between their security or men’s freedom. “In this community, there is simply not enough safety from the authorities to go around.” Arrest was a scarier threat for women on average, because fewer women in the community did go to jail, and other people offered less support to women in jail than to men in jail—“visiting people in prison is considered women’s work.” Jails ran ID checks, so people who were wanted even on misdemeanor warrants didn’t dare come visit. Also, former inmates weren’t allowed to visit jails, and paperwork delays meant that supposedly short exclusion periods could become permanent.
Becoming a snitch risked condemnation from neighbors and family, while staying loyal to a man on the run meant strengthening commitment to a man “just as he ceases to play an active role in her daily life, to furnish her with any concrete future, or to assist her financially.” The police actively worked to destroy relationships, telling women that men had cheated and showing men statements that women had made about them. At the same time, women could use a man’s warrant or probation status to achieve goals of their own—to threaten men for straying, for example. For both men and women, “[g]iving up another person under pressure is seen as a shameful act of betrayal. Doing so voluntarily is considered an act of retribution, or the start of an open conflict. The unintentional bringing of ‘heat’ is taken as a sign of negligence or bad character.” But putting oneself at risk for someone else without a close enough relationship can look desperate and mockable. The overall result was a culture of fear and suspicion, destroying already-fragile family and romantic relationships. “Under the threat of prison, a new and more paranoid social fabric is emerging—one built on the expectation that loved ones may become wanted by the police or may inform on one another to save their own skin.”
The police were routinely brutal: “a little more than twice a month, we watched the police beat up people as they were arresting them.” The police were more violent towards men, but women saw it and knew what the police could do. State violence was therefore commonplace, and the state couldn’t protect people from private violence. Prison guards and other employees of the justice system were often corrupt, and justified themselves as helping people in untenable situations while also recognizing that they were taking money from people who had almost nothing. Along with the costs of being isolated from lawful services, mere interaction with the criminal justice system could cost tens of thousands of dollars, based only on court costs and fines. And, further complicating matters, many criminally involved men were involved with women who worked in the criminal justice system, given women’s generally better educational and employment prospects.
Much of these men’s lives were organized around prison as well as staying out of it. Jail was such a constant part of these men’s lives that some people left money at the bail office until they needed it, using the bail office as a short-term bank that offered no interest but was safer than having the money outside. Being wanted could even be used to explain personal failures, such as failure to find work. Trials/sentencings were moments at which relationship status could be publicly recognized: the woman sitting next to a defendant’s mother is his main partner; the person who’s trusted to manage a man’s possessions when he’s inside is also socially important.
Goffman didn’t spend as much time with the many men in the neighborhood who stayed out of the prison system, but she did talk to them about their experiences—often they stayed indoors as much as possible, playing video games and drinking beer instead of smoking pot in order to avoid failing the urine tests common at their jobs.
Goffman argues that the result of punitive policies is to foster escalating illegality, such as the underground economy and fake papers men use to avoid warrants, and to disrupt the social bonds that could otherwise have controlled disorder. Law-abiding residents want violent young men to change their ways, but they don’t trust the police and have good reason not to do so; the violence and forced betrayals of today’s policing make the cops an additional problem instead of a solution. Instead of social programs and jobs, we have arrests. Goffman argues that the ghetto offers a clear example of the social and cultural effects of living under a repressive regime.
Near the end, Goffman discusses her own personal involvement in great detail. As a young white woman getting a college education, she had freedoms her interviewees didn’t have. She ended up identifying so completely with them, though, that she describes automatically perceiving white men as threats in the way they did. A friend of one of her key informant’s was shot and killed while exiting her car; “one of the bullets pierced my windshield, and the man’s blood spattered my shoes and pants as we ran away.” She went on a car ride with others looking for revenge after that informant was ultimately killed.
Slate published Dwayne Betts’ critique of Goffman as a kind of racial tourist, arguing that her emphasis on black criminality is likely to backfire and further entrench the police state she argues is producing criminality. Meanwhile, police overpolicing petty offenses, resulting in snowballing fines and jail time for poor black people who couldn’t pay in the first place, is a big part of the Ferguson story, which makes clear that Goffman’s account is not some unique feature of Philadelphia policing. I share Betts’ concern that deeply entrenched racist attitudes make backlash rather than reform a more probable outcome from publicizing how discriminatory current practices are; yet what is the alternative? (He also argues that she overstated how much surveillance goes on in places like hospitals—I’m not sure that fully answers her argument, which I read as being that many young men believe that they could be arrested essentially at any time if they interact with hospitals, regular jobs, etc., so that they are further alienated from non-criminal alternatives.)
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I think those fears are not so overblown!
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I also think that focusing on whether cops, as a policy, run names at the hospital through a warrant check is a weirdly formalistic way of looking at things. (Actually, I am kind of sympathetic to the critic's flight to respectability politics, given his own story, but still.) *Could* they, in any given case? Certainly. As anyone who's ever lived under a police state knows, a single petty authority figure with a lot of discretion in his actions can cause a lot of trouble, even if his actions aren't predictable or consistent.