PREFACE

The number of people imprisoned in the United States remained fairly stable for most of the twentieth century, at about one person for every thousand in the population.¹ In the 1970s this rate began to rise, and continued a steep upward climb for the next thirty years.² By the 2000s, the number of people behind bars stood at a rate never before seen in US history: about 1 for every 107 people in the adult population.³ The United States currently imprisons five to nine times more people than western European nations, and significantly more than China and Russia.⁴ Roughly 3 percent of adults in the nation are now under correctional supervision: 2.2 million people in prisons and jails, and an additional 4.8 million on probation or parole.⁵ In modern history, only the forced labor camps of the former USSR under Stalin approached these levels of penal confinement.⁶

The fivefold increase in the number of people sitting in US jails and prisons over the last forty years has prompted little public outcry. In fact, many people scarcely notice this shift, because the growing numbers of prisoners are drawn disproportionately from poor and segregated Black communities. Black people make up 13 percent of the US population, but account for 37 percent of the prison population.⁷ Among Black young men, one in nine are in prison, compared with less than 2 percent of white young men.⁸ These racial differences are reinforced by class differences. It is poor Black young men who are being sent to prison at truly astounding rates: approximately 60 percent of those who did not finish high school will go to prison by their midthirties.⁹

This book is 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. Because the fear of capture and confinement has seeped into the basic activities of daily living—work, family, romance, friendship, and even much-needed medical care—it is an account of a community on the run.

.   .   .

I stumbled onto this project as a student at the University of Pennsylvania. During my sophomore year I began tutoring Aisha, a high school student who lived with her mother and siblings in a lower-income Black neighborhood not far from the campus. In the evenings we would sit at the plastic and metal kitchen table in her family’s bare-walled, two-bedroom apartment, the old TV blaring, and work on her English or math homework. Afterward her mom and aunts would gather on the stoop of their building and talk about their kids or watch people go by. Gradually, I got to know Aisha’s relatives, friends, and neighbors. When my lease was up, Aisha and her mother suggested that I take an apartment nearby.

Aisha’s fourteen-year-old cousin Ronny came home from a juvenile detention center that winter. He lived with his grandmother about ten minutes away by car. We started taking the bus to visit him there.

Soon Ronny introduced me to his cousin Mike, a thin young man with a scruffy beard and an intense gaze. At twenty-two, Mike was a year older than I was. He quickly explained that he was in a temporary financial rut, living at his uncle’s house and with no car to drive. Last year he had his own car and his own apartment, and he planned to get back on his feet very soon. Mike seemed to command some respect from other young men in the neighborhood. When a neighbor asked what a white woman was doing hanging out on the back porch with him, he replied that I was Aisha’s tutor who lived nearby. Other times, he explained that I was Aisha’s godsister.

Over the next few weeks, Mike introduced me to his mother, his aunt, his uncle, and his close friend Alex. Many inches shorter and nearly twice Mike’s weight, Alex seemed tired and defeated, as if he weren’t trying to succeed in life so much as avoid major tragedy. Gradually I learned that Mike and Alex were two members of a close-knit group of friends. The third member, Chuck, was spending his senior year of high school in county jail awaiting trial on an aggravated assault charge for a school yard fight. Mike missed him keenly, explaining that Chuck was the glass-half-full member of the trio. As Chuck later told me on the phone from jail, “I ain’t got shit but I’m healthy, I ain’t bad looking, you feel me? I’m a happy person.”

That first month with Mike and Alex was calm—boring even. We would sit on Mike’s uncle’s stoop and share a beer, or hang out in various houses of his friends and neighbors. Some evenings we headed over to Chuck’s mother’s house so Mike could catch his friend’s nightly phone call from jail.

Then the cops raided Mike’s uncle’s house in the middle of the night. They were looking for Mike on a shooting charge, though he vehemently denied any involvement. With a warrant out for his arrest, he spent the next few weeks hiding in the houses of friends and relatives. Then he turned himself in, made bail, and began the lengthy court proceedings.

I had never known a man facing criminal charges before, and assumed this was a grave and significant event in Mike’s life. I soon learned that he had gone through two other criminal cases within the past year: one for possession of drugs and the other for possession of an unlicensed gun. Chuck was in county jail awaiting trial, and Alex was completing two years of parole after serving a year upstate for drugs. Mike’s cousin was out on bail. His neighbor was living under house arrest. Another friend, who was homeless and sleeping in his car, had a warrant out for unpaid court fees.

Near the end of my sophomore year, I asked Mike what he thought of my writing about his life for my senior thesis in the Sociology Department at Penn. He readily agreed, with the caveat that I leave out anything he asked me to keep secret. When Chuck came home from jail that spring, I received his permission to include him as well. Over time, I asked other young men and their families to take part.

For the next year, I spent much of every day with Mike, Chuck, and their friends and neighbors. I went along to lawyers’ offices, courthouses, the probation and parole office, the visiting rooms of county jails, halfway houses, the local hospital, and neighborhood bars and parties.

Having grown up in a wealthy white neighborhood in downtown Philadelphia, I did not yet know that incarceration rates in the United States had climbed so dramatically in recent decades. I had only a vague sense of the War on Crime and the War on Drugs, and no sense at all of what these federal government initiatives meant for Black young people living in poor and segregated neighborhoods. I struggled to make sense of the police helicopters circling overhead and the young men getting searched and cuffed in the streets. I worked hard to learn basic legal terminology and process.

That spring, Mike’s gun case ended and a judge sentenced him to one to three years in state prison. A short time later, I was accepted into a PhD program at Princeton. Through four years of graduate school I continued to live in Aisha’s neighborhood, commuting to school and spending many of the remaining hours hanging out around 6th Street with whichever of the 6th Street Boys were home. On the weekends I visited Mike, Chuck, and other young men from the neighborhood in prisons across the state. Over time, I got to know family members and girlfriends as we cleaned up after police raids, attended court dates, and made long drives upstate for prison visiting hours.

The families described here agreed to let me take notes for the purpose of one day publishing the material, and we discussed the project at length many times. I generally did not ask formal, interview-style questions, and most of what I recount here comes from firsthand observations of people, events, and conversations. People’s names and identifying characteristics have been changed, along with the name of the neighborhood. Mike initially suggested that in notes and term papers I call his neighborhood 6th Street, and I kept this pseudonym as the project grew into a book.

Though I gratefully draw on information that a number of police officers, judges, parole officers, and prison guards provided in interviews, this book takes the perspective of 6th Street residents. In doing so, it provides an account of the prison boom and its more hidden practices of policing and surveillance as young people living in one relatively poor Black neighborhood in Philadelphia experience and understand them. Perhaps these perspectives will come to matter in the debate about criminal justice policy that now seems to be brewing.