A RIVETING, GROUNDBREAKING ACCOUNT OF HOW THE WAR ON CRIME HAS TORN
APART INNER-CITY COMMUNITIES
Forty years in, the tough on crime turn in American politics has spurred
a prison boom of historic proportions that disproportionately affects
Black communities. It has also torn at the lives of those on the
outside. As arrest quotas and high tech surveillance criminalize entire
blocks, a climate of fear and suspicion pervades daily life, not only
for young men entangled in the legal system, but for their family
members and working neighbors.
Alice Goffman spent six years in one Philadelphia neighborhood,
documenting the routine stops, searches, raids, and beatings that young
men navigate as they come of age. In the course of her research, she
became roommates with Mike and Chuck, two friends trying to make ends
meet between low wage jobs and the drug trade. Like many in the
neighborhood, Mike and Chuck were caught up in a cycle of court cases,
probation sentences, and low level warrants, with no clear way out. We
observe their girlfriends and mothers enduring raids and interrogations,
clean residents struggling to go to school and work every day as the
cops chase down neighbors in the streets, and others eking out a living
by providing clean urine, fake documents, and off the books medical
care.
This fugitive world is the hidden counterpoint to mass incarceration,
the grim underside of our nation's social experiment in punishing Black
men and their families. While recognizing the drug trade's damage, On
The Run reveals a justice system gone awry: it is an exemplary work of
scholarship highlighting the failures of the War on Crime, and a
compassionate chronicle of the families caught in the midst of it.
A remarkable feat of reporting . . . The level of detail in this book
and Goffman's ability to understand her subjects' motivations are
astonishing--and riveting.--***The New York Times Book Review
