Throughout most of the 20th century, incarceration rates in the United States remained consistently low, but after the 1970s and the beginning of the war on drugs, these rates climbed significantly. The level of detail in this book and Goffman's ability to understand her subjects' motivations are astonishingâ€”and riveting.The dramatic rise of incarceration rates among African Americans since the 1970s has become more visible to the nation as a whole partly because of television shows like the widely popular HBO series “The Wire,” which ran from 2002 to 2008, the current Netflix series “Orange Is the New Black” and books such as Michelle Alexander’s “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness,” published in 2010. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.Īlice 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. It has also torn at the lives of those on the outside. TORN APART INNER-CITY COMMUNITIESForty years in, the tough on crime turn in American politics has spurred a prison boom of historic proportions that disproportionately affects Black communities. A RIVETING, GROUNDBREAKING ACCOUNT OF HOW THE WAR ON CRIME HAS

On the run alice goffman book review