On the Run. Fugitive Life in an American City

Abstract

Reviews the book, On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City by Alice Goffman (2014). What happens in the lives of individuals who are hyperpoliced and hypercriminalized in the era of mass incarceration? How does this policing and punitive social control operate, and how does it impact the social fabric of everyday life in marginalized communities? In On the Run, Alice Goffman gives us a nuanced sense of these processes through detailed ethnographic reporting of the day-to-day lives of legally entangled, criminally involved young men in Philadelphia. Well-written, detailed field notes throughout the book depict the precarious conditions in which young black men with criminal records live. The empirical goal of this project is to examine the process of being policed and incarcerated and life in a disorganized world in which one must constantly strategize to evade police. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved)