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 livings 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.
