Alice Goffman On The Run Summary

To say that this book was compelling might be an understatement of how enthralling and thought-provoking the effort and reporting was in Alice Goffman’s work. “On the Run” seemed to have everything in it: stories of heartbreak, struggle, and physical and psychological turmoil, the propensity and pressures of urban youths to engage in risky and illicit activities, a stark, slap-in-the-face look at the injustices and prejudices police departments and task forces have assumed since the Civil Rights Movement and the beginning of the War on Drugs and the War on Crime, and how surveillance and policing have “transformed poor Black neighborhoods into communities of suspects and fugitives” (Goffman, 2015, p. 7). And while this study provided powerful descriptions and detailed …show more content…
Yes, at first glance, “On the Run” was a glaring and gritty look into the lives of young African American men and how systems have been set into place to keep these men from escaping the ever-turning cycle of arrests, pursuits, persecutions, prosecutions, and imprisonments. This book was a story told through the eyes of an outsider who was welcomed into a tightknit group of individuals—Mike, Chuck, Alex, Ronnie, Tim, Reggie, and Anthony—and an account of one woman’s personal change from a White, middleclass college student in her early twenties, to a member of the gang, a friend, and a confidant—a transition that was difficult to adopt as Goffman, herself, felt it was necessary to assume the practices and ways of life (i.e., the dress, entertainment, and acts of police evasion) of the 6th Street Boys instead of retaining her own identity. And all of this, every bit of it, was done in order to provide “an on-the-ground account of the US prison boom: a close-up look at young men and women living in one poor and segregated Black community transformed by unprecedented levels of imprisonment and by the more hidden systems of policing and supervision that have accompanied them” (Goffman, 2015,