Alice Goffman. On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City

A Fugitive Adolescence: Growing Up Under The US Crime War 

Forty years in, the War on Crime and Drugs has done almost nothing to prevent drugs from being sold or used, but it has nonetheless created a little-known surveillance state in America’s most disadvantaged neighborhoods. Goffman spent six years living in one such neighborhood in Philadelphia; her book On the Run recounts young men and women coming of age as they attend court dates and parole meetings, survive interrogations and beatings, and dip and dodge the police.

Alice Goffman is an urban ethnographer who grew up in Philadelphia. She attended graduate school at Princeton and now teaches in the sociology department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.