On the Run

Wanted Men in a Philadelphia Ghetto

Bibliographic Data

ID4522308
AuthorsAlice Goffman (Princeton University, corresponding author)
Year2009
Volume74
Issue3
Pages339-357
Publication date2009-06-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueAmerican Sociological Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0003-1224 • E-ISSN: 1939-8271
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/000312240907400301
OpenAlexW2132561508
LanguageEN
Citations received240
References cited26

Although recent increases in imprisonment are concentrated in poor Black communities, we know little about how daily life within these neighborhoods is affected. Almost all ethnographic work in poor minority neighborhoods was written before the expansion of the criminal justice system, and the bulk of research on "mass imprisonment" relies on survey data, field experiments, or interviews, conceptualizing its impact in terms of current or former felons and their families. Drawing on six years of fieldwork in Philadelphia, this article shifts the focus from imprisonment and criminal records to the increase in policing and supervision in poor Black neighborhoods, and what this has meant for a growing status group of wanted people. For many young men, avoiding jail has become a daily preoccupation: they have warrants out for minor infractions, like failing to pay court fees or breaking curfew, and will be detained if they are identified. Such threat of imprisonment transforms social relations by undermining already tenuous attachments to family, work, and community. But young men also rely on their precarious legal standing to explain failures that would have occurred anyway, while girlfriends and neighbors exploit their wanted status as an instrument of social control. I discuss the implications of my ethnographic observations relative to prior treatments of the poor and policing, and with regard to broader sociological questions about punishment and surveillance in the modern era

Criminal justice · Criminology · Ethnography · Imprisonment · Mass incarceration · Political science · Punishment (psychology · Sociology · Vagrancy · Crime Patterns and Interventions · Criminal Justice and Corrections Analysis · Homelessness and Social Issues · Law · Psychology · Social Psychology

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