Forty years in, the War on Drugs has done almost nothing to prevent
drugs from being sold or used, but it has nonetheless created a
little-known surveillance state in America's most disadvantaged
neighborhoods. Arrest quotas and high-tech surveillance techniques
criminalize entire blocks, and transform the very associations that
should stabilize young lives--family, relationships, jobs--into
liabilities, as the police use such relationships to track down
suspects, demand information, and threaten consequences.
Alice Goffman spent six years living in one such neighborhood in
Philadelphia, and her close observations and often harrowing stories
reveal the pernicious effects of this pervasive policing. Goffman
introduces us to an unforgettable cast of young African American men who
are caught up in this web of warrants and surveillance--some of them
small-time drug dealers, others just ordinary guys dealing with limited
choices. All find the web of presumed criminality, built as it is on the
very associations and friendships that make up a life, nearly impossible
to escape. We watch as the pleasures of summer-evening stoop-sitting are
shattered by the arrival of a carful of cops looking to serve a warrant;
we watch--and can't help but be shocked--as teenagers teach their
younger siblings and cousins how to run from the police (and, crucially,
to keep away from friends and family so they can stay hidden); and we
see, over and over, the relentless toll that the presumption of
criminality takes on families--and futures.
While not denying the problems of the drug trade, and the violence that
often accompanies it, through her gripping accounts of daily life in the
forgotten neighborhoods of America's cities, Goffman makes it impossible
for us to ignore the very real human costs of our failed response--the
blighting of entire neighborhoods, and the needless sacrifice of whole
generations.
