SIX

The Market in Protections and Privileges

Most of this book has concerned young men who are the targets of the vast criminal justice apparatus, and those very close to them. But the movement of large numbers of these young men through the courts, the jails, and the prisons touches many more people beyond those directly involved. In the 6th Street neighborhood, a lively market has emerged to cater to the needs and wants of those living under various legal restrictions. A good number of young people have found economic opportunity by selling their friends and neighbors sought-after goods and services for hiding from the police or circumventing various legal constraints.

Some of these young people got their start by doing a favor for a friend or relative, and later realizing they could charge for it. Others found that their legitimate jobs furnished the opportunity to help legally precarious people in a particular kind of way. Meanwhile, some young people working from within the criminal justice system earned additional income under the table by smuggling a number of restricted goods and services to inmates. Taken together, the underground market catering to the needs and wants of those living under various legal restrictions has created substantial economic opportunity for young people living in communities where money and jobs are scarce.

TURNING A PERSONAL CONNECTION INTO A LITTLE INCOME

When I met Jevon, he was a charming eight-year-old who wanted to be a movie star. He’d quote whole sections of The Godfather or Donnie Brasco and swear he’d make it big one day. People often said that Jevon sounded like his older relatives. He would entertain himself by pretending to be his cousin Reggie or his uncle when their girlfriends phoned, causing a number of misunderstandings and, in one case, a big argument. Shortly after Jevon turned thirteen, his muscles started to grow, and to his great satisfaction, a thin mustache began to form on his upper lip. Most important, his voice broke. This was the key thing, his voice dropping. Now he could impersonate his relatives and neighbors with astonishing accuracy.

Around this time, Jevon’s older cousin Reggie got released from jail and placed on probation at his mother’s house. His probation officer would call a few evenings each week to make sure Reggie was in the house for his nine o’clock curfew, a constraint on his freedom he deeply resented, particularly after he met and fell for a girl living a few blocks away. Reggie started paying a neighbor ten dollars per night to sit in Miss Linda’s house and answer the phone when his probation officer called, so that he could go out with his new girlfriend. This scheme had been successful once, but on the second phone call the PO had grown suspicious and had asked where Reggie had been sent as a juvenile offender. Reggie’s neighbor couldn’t answer that question, so the PO told him that the next time Reggie was caught out after curfew, he’d be going back to jail.

Reggie and I were sitting on the stoop facing the alleyway and discussing this while some younger boys played a pickup game with the alley basket. Hearing the tail end of our conversation, Jevon left the game and came over to us. With impressive confidence, he told Reggie that he could take the PO calls for him: not only could he do Reggie’s voice better than anyone, but he already knew most of the details of his cousin’s life, and could quickly learn the rest.

“What’s my date of birth?” Reggie asked.

“February 12, 1987.”

“What was the first case I caught?”

“For weed, when you was like ten.”

“How many months did I do up Forrest?”

“You never went to Forrest. You was in Mahanoy.”

“What’s the last birthday I spent home?”

“Shit. Probably when you was like nine.”

Reggie grinned. “What’s my social?”

“I don’t know.”

Reggie told Jevon his social security number.

“Okay,” Jevon said.

“Repeat it back,” Reggie insisted.

Jevon repeated it perfectly.

.   .   .

Reggie gave Jevon’s acting skills a try that night, leaving around seven and returning at two in the morning. Jevon reported that everything had gone according to plan: the PO had phoned, asked what halfway house he’d been sent to, what his first baby-mom’s mother’s name was, and what part of his body the guard had injured while Reggie was a teenager in county jail. Jevon had answered all these questions correctly.

Jevon launched his enterprise by charging his cousin five dollars a night, but at his mother’s urging switched to asking for five dollars an hour. Reggie seemed to resent this rate increase, but admitted that nobody else could come close to his voice, which had the heavy nasal quality of a young Biggie Smalls. When Reggie missed several payments, Jevon offered his services to his uncle and then to a neighbor, both of whom were also on parole, and eager for a stand-in to answer calls from their PO.

Responding to curfew calls required a number of skills beyond the mimicry of voices: punctuality, confidence, a good memory, and the ability to imagine what someone who has recently come home from a long sentence might sound like and say to his PO. Jevon took this all on as any professional actor might, and seemed to delight in his roles. He also took careful notes about the conversations in a little book, so that the next time a man saw his PO he’d know where their relationship stood.

Over time, Jevon developed quite a client base. In his sophomore and junior years of high school, I watched him bring in upwards of one hundred dollars a week. As his graduation neared, though, he seemed to grow tired of sitting in houses all evening and night. After a futile attempt to forward the calls to his cell phone, and another failed attempt to train one of his friends to do the job, he stopped “the phone hustle” and went to work as a mall security guard.

Like Jevon, a number of young people I got to know were making a little money by providing goods and services to friends and to friends of friends who were living under various legal restrictions. One important service was the smuggling of money and drugs to those constrained the most: inmates.

Twenty-four-year-old Shonda got her start by doing a favor for someone close to her.

“You have to wrap the bill around the weed,” she explained to me as we sat at her grandmother’s round kitchen table. “That way you keep the weed together and you cover the smell.”

“Okay.”

“And you have to do it a day, two days in advance, because they got the hand machines now.”¹

Shonda first smuggled drugs into jail at the age of eight, when she helped her mom pass a crack-filled balloon to her dad, a heavy user who was on trial for aggravated assault. Her mom’s method was to insert the balloon like a tampon, then adjust and pull it out in the visiting room. Shonda’s job was to watch the guards and give her mother the green light. Sometimes she handed the balloons from her mother to her father. Her dad would swallow them, and either throw them up or pass them once he got back to the cell block.

After her mom broke things off with her dad, Shonda stopped going to the prison to visit him. There followed a long stretch—about seven years—in which Shonda’s life was not punctuated by trips to jails or courthouses. Then during her junior year of high school, her boyfriend caught a gun case. She returned to county jail to visit him. When she was twenty-three, her baby-dad got booked for armed robbery, and she was back again.

Shonda was unemployed when her baby-dad got taken into custody, so her household income evaporated. In addition to taking over the groceries, the diapers, and all the bills, she now had the added expense of sending money to her baby-dad in jail so that he could buy soap, shower shoes, and better food inside. He also asked her to bring in marijuana and tobacco. After a few weeks, she started smuggling small quantities of marijuana into the visiting room along with cash, which he used for buying items like cigarettes from other inmates.

To offset the high costs of visiting him and keeping him in relative comfort while inside, Shonda began taking in packages for other men at the county jail; she either visited them herself or took a girlfriend with her while she visited her baby-dad. We met in this way. Reggie had been on trial for possession of drugs and for fleeing the police, and found out from his cellmate that a woman named Shonda would bring in marijuana for fifty dollars. His mother met up with her one Wednesday afternoon, paid her the money, and gave her a small bag of weed to smuggle in for him. I tagged along.

On one of the first days I spent with Shonda, she put together three packages: one for her baby-dad, one for his cellmate, and one for a man with a bullet lodged in his back who said that marijuana was the only drug that dulled the pain. Her younger sister came with us to the jail and called the cellmate out into the visiting room so that she could pass off the package for him at the same time Shonda was visiting with her baby-dad. After this half-hour visit, Shonda got a new ticket and waited another five hours to visit the third man. On this last visit of the day, she acted as if she were visiting an old family friend, and passed off the small bag of marijuana this man’s girlfriend had sent him for the week.

Assembling a package was a four-part process for Shonda. First, she pounded the marijuana down to get the air out, creating a tiny and dense cube. Next, she covered it in one layer of plastic wrap, taping the packet together to form a rectangle of about one inch by three-quarters of an inch. Then she took a dollar bill—though sometimes it was a ten, other times a twenty—and folded it tightly around the packet, making the total package about as thin as a Ritz cracker. Finally, using double-sided tape, she made the package sticky on both sides so that the man could hide it securely between his wrist and his jail ID band.

The sudden appearance of hand-screening machines at CFCF led Shonda to take extra precautions in planning her package deliveries. A few days after the machine appeared, I was visiting Reggie and watched as frightened women passed a bottle of hand sanitizer around the waiting area, scrubbing their hands and arms free of any incriminating specks of contraband. That day, the smell of sweat mixed with that of the ammonia used in cleaning the waiting room. Even women like Mike’s mother, who weren’t smuggling in packages, worried that they had touched drugs recently and would be denied entry or worse, get arrested.

The heightened risk didn’t stop Shonda from bringing in packages for cash: she needed the money. After the screening machines came in, she began placing the packages between the inner and outer lining of her panties, in that rectangular patch of cloth that seems made for small quantities of contraband. In the bus on another trip to jail, she explained to me that the guard on duty that afternoon wouldn’t touch your coochie, just the inner thighs. As she explained this, I remembered hearing Reggie and Mike describe how exciting it was, sitting in jail, to hold a tiny square containing a drug that would make you forget where you were, and smelling of woman.

“You have to put the package in before you go,” Shonda explained, “because you have to wash your hands enough times so that you pass the drug screen. And always put it in the lining, so it doesn’t fall out while you wait.”

“Do you get scared?”

“You have to control your fear,” she said. “You have to pretend that you don’t have anything on you, that you’re just a regular visitor. You have to get to the point where it’s normal.”

Shonda told me that she made enough money to support both her trips to jail and her baby-dad’s drug habit. Sometimes she could also afford to put money on his books, but it wasn’t really enough extra money to pay, for example, her phone bill.

If the money in smuggling is low, the risk of arrest is substantial, with or without the drug-screening machines. In my years visiting young men from 6th Street in jail and prison, I observed seven women get handcuffed and taken away after a guard found drugs on their person during the pat-down in the search room. Two of these women had come with their children, so Child Protective Services was called. One woman I knew from the neighborhood lost custody of her child and served a year in jail. Reggie seemed fairly unconcerned: “She should have been more careful. That’s on her.”

Like Jevon, Shonda began her business by doing a favor for someone close to her, and then started to charge a few people for the service. Neither one made a lot of money this way, but Jevon seemed to relish his acting roles, as well as the status it gave him around his older neighbors and kin. Shonda expressed her satisfaction at helping people in great need, like the man who smoked the marijuana she smuggled in to alleviate the pain of his bullet wounds. And they both really needed the money, however little it was.

OPPORTUNITIES AT WORK

Some residents of 6th Street become part of this underground network of support through opportunities provided by their legitimate jobs. They find that the skills in which they were trained or the particular goods or services their jobs make available prove useful to people with legal entanglements, and that they can earn a little or even a lot of extra money by helping these people out under the table.

Rakim, a rotund man in his forties, ran a photo stand in downtown Philadelphia. The stand (or rather, mobile office), sat near the Philadelphia customs office, and a large sign reading Passport Pictures, Cheapest in the City welcomed patrons inside. Rakim’s customers entered at the rear of the trailer and saw a row of plastic chairs, a tripod at one end, and a white backdrop hanging from the other. Rakim charged fifteen dollars for three passport-sized photos and took four shots, allowing customers to choose from among them before printing.

On the first afternoon I went to see him, a mother and her teenage son were sitting in the plastic chairs that formed a small waiting area. They came, she told me proudly, because her son was going to London for his junior year abroad. Ahead of her in line was an employee of a large company about to spend two weeks in Canada for training. A lawyer arrived next, needing a passport renewal for a vacation in Argentina.

When these customers left, another customer came in, wearing a torn jean jacket. Seeing me, he made a move to leave. Rakim said, “It’s cool, she’s cool.” The man smiled and said, “I wasn’t sure.” He handed Rakim a wad of crumpled bills, and Rakim passed him a small plastic bag full of yellow liquid. The man gingerly accepted the bag and walked into the tiny bathroom. He emerged a few minutes later, nodded to Rakim, and walked out.

Rakim had begun working at this photo stand in the mid-1990s, when he took over the business from his father. As he told it, the stand did fairly well until 9/11. “People did not want to cross a border,” he explained. “They did not want to get on a plane.”

During this slow period, Rakim’s cousin would stop by the trailer on his way back from his weekly parole meetings, since the offices of the Probation and Parole Board are located not two blocks away, and they would catch up for an hour or two. Then one week his cousin came in a day early, visibly upset. He asked Rakim if he had smoked weed or used any other drugs recently. When Rakim replied that he hadn’t, the cousin confessed that he’d slipped up with drugs, and begged Rakim for the use of his urine for the test the next morning.

“How would I give you my urine?” Rakim asked.

His cousin explained that he would heat it up at home, put it in a Baggie taped to his inner thigh, and release it into the sample cup at the parole office. Rakim agreed, so the next morning, his cousin took Rakim’s urine to the parole office meeting and passed the drug test with it. Later, when his cousin asked for the favor again, Rakim told him it would cost him twenty dollars. This arrangement went on for some months, until the police caught the cousin driving a car and the judge returned him to prison for the parole violation.

While inside, Rakim’s cousin told a friend about the photo booth, and when this friend came home he stopped by on the way to his parole appointment. News spread, and Rakim’s urine business grew.

I met Rakim through Chuck’s close friend Steve in 2007. At the time, Steve had been trying to complete a two-year probation sentence while battling a serious addiction to PCP. One afternoon, he came back to the block, favoring his left leg and wincing as he walked. When I asked what was wrong, he said simply, “The piss was too hot.” Mike explained that Steve had been buying urine from a guy downtown, and it had burned the skin on his inner thigh, where he had taped the bag.

I asked Rakim about this during our interview, and he knowingly nodded his head.

I had trouble with the temperature at first. Guys were burning their legs, because the coffee warmer was too hot. I had to keep antibiotic ointment and gauze bandages in here because guys were coming back with their skin peeling off on the plastic bag. So I got one with an adjustable temperature, and I keep it at 100 degrees. Problem solved.

A year into this side business, Rakim had three coffee heaters going, and was contracting out to two women to provide supplemental urine. He told me he didn’t know of anyone else who sold urine for use at this probation and parole office, noting that you needed a place where people could come inside and safely “put on” the urine. “So if you’ve got a hotdog stand, a lottery and magazine stand, you can’t do this.” He explained that most guys on probation or parole get urine from relatives or partners, but that this is an unsatisfactory solution:

Your girl can always give you her piss, right, but you’ve got to take it from West Philly, North Philly, all the way downtown. You’ve got to carry it on the bus, keep it warm, keep the bag from breaking. And then, you never know if the urine is clean. Your girl says she’s not using, but you can’t watch her every second. Maybe she doesn’t want to tell you she’s been using, so she gives you the urine and hopes it will come back okay. Then you’ve got problems with your PO and problems in your relationship. You’re back in jail, you’re blaming her, now ya’ll are on bad terms. . . . If you come to me, you don’t have any of that. Hell, I sometimes have women come to me for their boyfriends! Because they don’t want him to know what they’re doing, you know? So they buy it from me and give it to him like it’s theirs.

Another item that people with certain kinds of jobs are able to supply is fake documents. In 2006, a rumor started to circulate that a woman who had recently been transferred to the PennDOT (Pennsylvania Department of Transportation) nearest to 6th Street was accepting one thousand dollars for making driver’s licenses for people who didn’t actually qualify for them (or who were too concerned about their pending legal issues to try). Mike reasoned that since the tickets on his license amounted to more than three thousand dollars and his parole sentence prevented him from getting a license anyway, it made financial sense to pay this woman the thousand bucks. He never did save enough money to purchase the license, but through his negotiations with her I learned that a number of other men in the neighborhood had obtained one, including Chuck and Reggie’s uncle, who had a warrant out for a parole violation dating back to 1983. This woman never agreed to talk with me, but two years later, when she was discovered and arrested, she claimed she’d made over three hundred thousand dollars selling real identities to people who don’t otherwise qualify for them. Nobody could figure out who was carrying these phony licenses, or just how many people had them.

More commonly, people help those facing difficulties with obtaining formal identification by providing the goods and services that typically require ID, with no questions asked. That is, rather than supply the ID itself, they instead supply the goods and services otherwise denied to people without proper identification.

Pappi’s corner store sits at the corner of 6th and Mankin. A yellow neon sign above the entrance reads Hernandez Grocery, Cigarettes Milk Eggs Hoagies Lottery. A smaller sign below reads We Take Access Card. Mr. Hernandez was known as Pappi, and around 6th Street his store was the go-to place for loosie cigarettes, chips, drinks, and snacks. Since the nearest grocery store was eleven blocks away, neighbors who didn’t have a car or bus fare would do most of their grocery shopping at Pappi’s.

Bulletproof glass framed the counter, but Pappi kept a one-by-two-foot space open so he could pass customers their cigarettes and lottery tickets by hand.

“A turnstile,” he once told me, “would mean that I expect my customers to pull a gun on me. Nobody would ever do that.”

Pappi used the bulletproof glass as a giant frame on which to showcase pictures of his grandchildren and other children from the area. Alongside his granddaughter and three grandsons were the faces of his 6th Street customers and friends, in baby pictures, prom pictures, graduation pictures, funeral pictures, and even jail visiting-room pictures. Pappi prided himself that in fifteen years of business in an increasingly violent and impoverished Black section of the city, he had never been robbed.

Across from the main counter and perched above the doorway, a small TV broadcast sports or the news. Customers sometimes stopped to watch for a few minutes, commenting with Pappi on the stories. They also asked Pappi how their friends and relatives were doing. Indeed, the store served as a kind of informational hub for the 6th Street neighborhood. It was often the first place people went when they came home from jail or prison. Though Pappi seldom spoke more than a few words, he quietly kept up with a great many neighborhood residents, and possessed that rare ability to make people feel noticed and genuinely appreciated. He played baseball in high school, and forty years later still cut an impressive figure.

When Mike and Chuck and their friends were home from jail, we’d visit Pappi’s four or five times a day to buy a soda, a loosie, or a bag of chips. After a few months, Pappi gave me the nickname Vanilla, which he later shortened to Nil.

Most days, Pappi’s college-aged son ran the cash register in the front, taking lottery ticket numbers and selling drinks and snacks. His daughter worked the grill and meat counter in the back, serving up hoagies or grilled cheese. But in addition to common corner grocery store items, Pappi also sold prepaid cell phones under the table. Depending on the day, he might have a hookup for a used car rental with no questions asked, or a “connect” to a local motel where you could check in without showing ID or a credit card.

The goods and services Pappi sold under the table weren’t known by the store’s normal customers. You had to ask for them, and you had to be the right person asking in order to get them. But they weren’t exactly illegal, either. These items ordinarily required the purchasers to provide documentation of both their identity and their creditworthiness—a state-issued identification card, proof of insurance or credit, or a bank account.

Pappi supplied specialty goods and services to his customers, but he also acted as a broker between legally compromised people and individuals providing a range of goods and services they were seeking. One of the people he connected his customers to was Jahim, who worked at a garage a few blocks south. At this garage patrons could ask for Jahim, and get their car serviced or repaired without presenting ID, insurance, or any paperwork on the car whatsoever. Downtown on South Street, a man named Hussein sold stereos and other electronics on payment plans, allowing the customer to give any name whatsoever, and asking for no ID to set up the arrangement. Bobby M on Third Street rented out rooms without any proof of ID or credit. His rates were higher than elsewhere, but he accepted a handshake rather than a lease.

People working in the medical field also find that their jobs enable them to provide under-the-table support to legally compromised people. Indeed, a number of local women who worked in area hospitals and doctor’s offices provide medication and expertise to men too scared to seek treatment at a hospital, where their names might be run and warrants or other pending legal matters would come up.

The first time I witnessed this kind of underground health care was the day Steve’s fourteen-year-old cousin, Eddie, broke his arm while running from the police. An officer had stopped him on foot just outside Pappi’s, and after patting him down found a small amount of crack on his person. Eddie took off when the officer began taking out the handcuffs, and he soon lost him in the alleyways. In his efforts to escape, Eddie had scaled a fence and landed badly. He walked into his grandmother’s house panting and clutching his right forearm, the bone exposed.

After an hour on the phone, his grandmother told me triumphantly that a woman was coming over to fix Eddie’s arm.

“Is she a doctor?” I naively asked.

“She’s a janitor,” his grandmother laughed. “But she works at the hospital.”

.   .   .

Two hours later, Eddie’s arm was still bleeding, even though we’d wrapped it in dish towels and propped it up on the high back of the couch. Eddie had been taking swigs of Wild Irish Rose, and was now cursing and singing in about equal parts.

The woman finally arrived around midnight, wearing scrubs and carrying a large plastic bag full of medical supplies. She unwrapped Eddie’s arm and injected him with some kind of anesthetic. After a few minutes of cleaning the wound and catching up with Eddie’s grandmother, she told me to turn up the music. Then she asked his grandmother to hold on to Eddie’s torso while she clutched his broken arm between her thighs and pulled the bones back into place with both her hands. Eddie screamed and struggled to get away, then cried for a good ten minutes. The woman dropped two needles into boiling water on the stove and used them to sew up the broken skin. With Eddie quietly crying, she placed a bandage over the stitches, and then began wrapping his arm in white cotton padding, placing rolled gauze in his hand for him to cup in a loose fist. She took some tougher foam material from her bag and cut it to fit his forearm, then wrapped this in an ace bandage. After about an hour, Eddie’s arm sat in a sling, and the woman left instructions to change the bandages and check the wounds every day. For her service, Eddie’s grandmother paid the woman seventy dollars and a plastic bag filled with three plates of corn bread and chicken she had made that afternoon.

After this memorable event, I began to observe that a number of other local residents who worked in the medical field supplied various forms of off-the-books care to young men who avoided the hospital for fear of encountering the police.

Aisha and Mike’s cousin Ronny, sixteen, had been boarding a bus when the gun tucked into his waistband went off, sending a bullet into his thigh. (He had begun carrying the gun when, coming home from a two-year stint in juvenile detention, he found his neighbor and close friend slain and the 6th Street Boys in a series of shootouts with the 4th Street Boys.) Having recently returned from the juvenile detention center on three years of probation, Ronny refused to go to the hospital, convinced that the trip would land him back in juvenile on a violation. He spent the next five days bleeding on his grandmother’s couch, his friends and family pleading with him to go to the hospital, but to no avail. Then his grandmother located a woman working as a nurse’s aide who agreed to remove the bullet.

She performed this procedure on the kitchen table. Ronny’s grandmother shoved a dish towel into his mouth and asked me to turn up the music to cover his screams. When the nurse’s aide finished up and Ronny appeared likely to survive, his grandmother paid her $150, and the next day brought her some of her famous spicy fried chicken wings.

OPPORTUNITIES ON THE INSIDE

While some people supplying protections and privileges to legally compromised people launch this enterprise through their personal contacts, or by finding that their job opens up ways to help and profit from these people, others come into contact with people living under legal restrictions directly through their position within the criminal justice system. Certain court clerks, prison guards, case managers, and halfway house supervisors leverage their professional positions to grant special exemptions and privileges to defendants, inmates, and parolees who can come up with the cash. And like those brokers of goods and services who aren’t employed by the criminal justice system, these individuals occasionally assist for personal reasons or simply out of a desire to help.

Janine finished high school with great grades and then enrolled in a two-year college to earn a certificate in criminal justice. As she told it, a lifetime of watching her brothers and father deal with the police, the courts, and the prisons had convinced her that she’d be more qualified for this kind of job than for medical work—the other sector of the economy that seemed to be growing at the time. Upon graduation, she tried to get a job as a prison guard, since the benefits were great and the wages good, but instead was hired by the scheduling office at the Criminal Justice Center downtown. The job was pretty straightforward: handle the scheduling of court cases, and manage the calendars of the judges, district attorneys, and public defenders. Since each of the hundreds of cases that came through the criminal courts each month had upwards of twelve court dates before going to trial—or far more likely: settling with the defendant, making a deal—this scheduling provided fulltime work for Janine and two others.

Janine had been going through the cases one day when she came upon a name that looked very familiar to her: Benjamin Greene. Benny—if it was indeed the same person—had been the only guy who was nice to her in middle school, when she was overweight and her mother’s boyfriend was touching her at night. Benny would let her sneak into his basement bedroom to sleep without asking anything from her. She looked up his name on the court computer and saw his picture pop up on the screen. It was Benny, sure enough, now fifteen years older.

Janine had heard that Benny had become a major dealer after high school and was even wanted by the feds for a while. But this didn’t stop her from remembering his kindness. Benny had a preliminary hearing for a gun and drug case scheduled for the following week, so she waited out in the hallway for him, approaching him shyly as he was leaving the courtroom. “My heart was pounding,” she told me a couple of months later while we had coffee across the street from the courthouse. “I didn’t know if he was married, or had kids, or if he ever thought about me anymore. But he looked the same, just with more hair [on his face].”

Within minutes of their meeting, Benny asked Janine if she could help to get his case thrown out—if she could perhaps talk to the judge or the district attorney. She refused to do this, but realized she could arrange the judge’s schedule so that Benny’s court dates would be quite far apart—four months instead of one or one and a half.

I met Janine through Benny; he came through the block one day and told everybody listening that he’d gotten a girl who worked in the courthouse to push his dates back. He acted as if he thought nothing of exploiting her feelings for his own gain and spoke quite dismissively of her. But when I had coffee with Janine, she explained that Benny had offered to pay her handsomely for her efforts to muddle the schedules; in fact, he insisted on paying her each time she was successful.

“How much is he paying you?” I asked.

“Three hundred. Three hundred each time.”

“What are you doing with the money?”

“I’m paying off my student loans!”

Seeking additional verification that Janine was really receiving this money, I asked Benny about it in private one afternoon. He admitted he was paying her, and explained that this was in part because he didn’t want to be indebted to her for the great favor she was doing him, especially knowing how much she liked him.

A year later, Benny was still on the streets, thrilled to be spending time with his baby-mom and two children. In the end, his court case took three and a half years to process—a good year and a half longer than any other case I’d seen. When Benny was finally sent to state prison, Janine told me that he wrote her that same week, thanking her for giving him the extra time outside with his family.

If court clerks have a bit of leeway to grant certain defendants special privileges such as extra time between trial dates, jail and prison guards have considerably more. And though a number of legal restrictions are imposed on those who are on probation or parole or going through a court case, jail and prison inmates encounter a far greater list of rules and prohibitions, opening up a much larger window of economic opportunity for those working at correctional facilities. While certainly not all or perhaps even most guards participate in the informal penal economy, at least some profit from smuggling in everything from knives to drugs to cell phones.

Twice I accompanied Miss Linda to meet a guard whom she paid to smuggle in marijuana to one of her sons sitting in county jail. Another time I accompanied Mike’s girlfriend to a meeting with a prison guard who accepted a blow job and thirty-five dollars in exchange for smuggling in three pills of oxycodone to Mike, which he took to ease the pain from a severe beating received in the yard.

In 2011, I learned that Miss Linda had been paying a guard to smuggle Percocet to her son Reggie in the prison yard. He had been sitting in state prison for six months on a parole violation, this time for driving a car without a license. Shortly after his arrival, a female guard threw a bucketful of ammonia into his face, causing significant injury. My field notes from that visit:

First time seeing Reggie since the ammonia incident. Wasn’t her fault, he says—she was playing. The eyedrops the nurse provided weren’t working to dull the pain, so the same guard who ruined his eyes started selling him Percocet under the table for a small fortune. Three days ago, the guard got transferred—apparently unrelated to having injured Reggie or the drug smuggling—so now Reggie’s in severe withdrawal. “Like the flu,” he says, “but ’way worse.” That’ll pass, but his blindness likely won’t. He’s hoping to get another guard to sell him Percocet or oxycontin, but hasn’t found one yet.

In addition to drugs, some guards do a good business in cell phones. At CFCF in 2011, these were going for five hundred dollars. The family or girlfriend of an inmate would meet the guard and pay him or her in cash, which I observed on a number of occasions.

Guards also sell something less tangible to inmates and parolees: private time with women.

Mike and I were sitting in the visiting room at Camp Hill state prison, located two hours west of Philadelphia. We were eating microwaved chicken fingers from the turnstile snack machine and catching up on neighborhood gossip. Mike pointed to a small room near the drink machines. “See that?” he said. “There’s no camera in there. Niggas was taking they girls in there and smashing [having sex]; this guard was taking, like, a bean [one hundred dollars] for fifteen minutes. He left, like, right after I got here, so I never got to use it.”

When Mike finished his three-year prison term, he got paroled to a halfway house in North Philadelphia. There, too, certain guards were willing to extend special privileges, for a fee. This North Philadelphia halfway house held ten beds to a small room, but often twenty men slept there. On the second night, Mike told me that he’d gotten no sleep because one of his roommates had stabbed another, whom the man caught trying to steal his shoes. On my first visit, a dense crowd of young men greeted me as I walked through the doors of the compound, clamoring with one another against the glass for a look at the outside. After years behind bars, Mike found the halfway house untenable: “You get the smell of freedom, but you can’t touch it or taste it.”

During the few hours he was permitted to leave during the day, Mike began to get reacquainted with the city, learning what kinds of clothes people were wearing nowadays, signing up for Facebook, and acquiring an iPod. On the third day, he was given enough hours to visit his baby-mom, Marie, and their two children. He seemed nervous about it, and I tried to reassure him that after he saw them he’d feel more at ease.

When we spoke after the visit, Mike sounded worse. He learned that his children were staying with their maternal grandmother, who had also taken in her brother, a man in his sixties. Mike believed that this uncle had the habit of asking children to sit on his lap and touching them. Marie was employed by a local hospital as a nurse’s assistant and would leave for work at five in the morning; this meant that his seven-year-old daughter and ten-year-old son were alone with their uncle for two and a half hours before their grandmother would return from her night shift and take them to school. What Mike wanted was to stay at his baby-mom’s house overnight so that he could be there during those two critical hours when his children were left alone with their uncle. I imagine he also wanted to spend time with his baby-mom, though he didn’t voice this reason when we discussed the situation.

The solution came when Mike discovered that a number of the halfway house residents were paying a guard between one hundred and two hundred dollars a night to allow them to leave at midnight and return before the 8:00 a.m. count the next morning. In fact, so many of the men were paying off this guard for the privilege that when I would come to say hello to Mike in the evening, I’d see one after another jump into waiting cars outside the compound. I initially wondered if these men had special evening passes, possibly to work a night shift, or perhaps were choosing to leave the halfway house, violate their parole terms, and go on the run. When Mike explained about the guard, I realized that at least some of these men were paying to leave for the night and sneak back in the next morning.

At first Mike’s baby-mom agreed to contribute a significant portion of the payoff, telling me she’d give any amount to know her children were safe. By the second week, however, she refused to contribute any more, saying that she couldn’t give over her entire paycheck just to secure a night with Mike.

When Mike’s money for nightly payoffs ran out, I asked him if he’d introduce me to the halfway house guard who was taking the cash. Since the guard was single and around my age, Mike invited him to go for a beer with me, introducing me as his godsister, as he often did. He also told the guard that I was writing his biography and might want to talk with him about Mike’s experience in the halfway house.²

The guard agreed to meet me for drinks at the Five Points, a well-known “grown folks” bar. He wasn’t at all what I had expected: a quiet, thoughtful man who showed me pictures of his three children while sipping on an orange soda.

He began our conversation by saying that Mike was one of the guys he worried about the most. If Mike could just get through these first few weeks, he’d be okay.

The guard’s phone rang soon after we began talking. He picked up and said, “Yeah, he’s a go.” I asked what the calls were about, and he told me quite openly that he was helping some of the guys get out of the house at night.

“What do you charge?” I asked.

“It depends,” the guard said. “If the guy is going out to sell drugs and, you know, get the gun back that he left with his friend when he got locked up, I charge two hundred dollars. Most of that goes to my supervisor—they think he doesn’t pay attention, but he knows what it is; he’s taking his cut. If the guy’s going to work or looking after his kids—you know, he’s a good guy—I charge a lot less, or I let him go for free, and take care of my supervisor from the others.”

“Is it risky?”

“Put it this way: this is my third house. The first house got shut down because the toilets were stopped up; for months they weren’t working, and men were sleeping in their own shit, getting sick from it. The second got shut down because the guards were selling guns, not just guns—machine guns, M16s. [The guards were] using the men in the house to run guns out of state, okay? You have no idea what goes on.”

“So letting men out at night . . .”

“It’s against policy. It’s a violation of their parole. But show me a house in Philly where that’s not going on.”³

.   .   .

Faced with heavy surveillance and supervisory restrictions, some individuals tangled up with the police, the courts, and the prisons seek a number of specialty goods and services to evade the authorities or live with more comfort and freedom than their legal restrictions allow. A number of young people in the 6th Street neighborhood, as well as people working as court clerks, prison guards, and halfway house operators, are making a few extra dollars by providing an array of underground goods and services to those individuals moving through the criminal justice system. With the exception of prison guards, those working in this market tend not to know one another or form much of a collective body.

Some people sell specialty goods, such as drug-free urine or fake documents, that legally compromised people need to get through police stops or bypass their various restrictions. Others are finding underground ways to supply the basic goods and services that legally compromised people find too dangerous to access through standard channels, or are prevented from accessing because of their legal restrictions: car repair, cell phones, even health care. Moreover, many things that clean people hold as basic rights or free goods become highly sought-after privileges for those under various forms of confinement: fifteen minutes of intimacy with a spouse within the prison walls, an evening away from the home one is obligated through probation or parole restrictions to return to, or a few more months outside jail before a sentencing hearing. These, too, become commodities for which people with a compromised legal status will dearly pay.

What do people participating in this underground market make of what they are doing?

Rakim seemed to take a sympathetic attitude toward his clientele, viewing his urine business as a necessary correction to an unjust system:

I’m not trying to help people break the law, but the parole regulations are crazy. You fall off the wagon, have a drink, smoke weed, they grab you up; you’re in for three years. Even if you start using drugs again, real drugs, should you be sent back to prison for that? That’s not helpful at all. So you come to me. For those times when you drink a little too much, or smoke weed, you know, because anything at all in your system will set off the machine.

Jokingly, he noted that this side business encouraged him to stay away from drinking or using drugs: “When your urine is worth something, you can’t just put anything in your body. If you sell one dirty bag, you’re done.”

Rakim also described his efforts to help men on parole in quite political terms, insisting that the men he supplied with clean urine were being wrongfully deprived of full citizenship rights. Indeed, some of the other people helping to supply legally diminished young men regard themselves as resisting police who act as an occupying force in the Black community, and helping to combat a prison system that is a key site for racial injustice. One parole officer I interviewed referred to the Underground Railroad when describing his efforts to smuggle goods to inmates. Others, like Janine who worked at the courthouse, seemed moved by a personal relationship to make an exception for a particular person.

In contrast, some of the prison guards I spoke with expressed considerable hostility toward inmates, and frustration at the inherent tensions in their jobs. One guard reasoned that the risk of physical violence at the hands of prisoners justified the extra money he earned selling cell phones and drugs to them. He and his coworkers viewed the money they earned from inmates under the table as a way of sticking it to their employers and making lemonade out of lemons.

Still others may feel alternately sickened by the money they take from desperate inmates and parolees, justified on personal or political grounds, and guilty about the risks their services pose to people already so vulnerable. During our chat over a drink, the halfway house guard shared his complex and conflicting motives and feelings about taking money to sneak men out at night:

It’s a broken system. On a good day, I think I’m doing something for justice, something for the brothers. These men are locked up because they didn’t pay their court fees, or they got drunk and failed [their piss test]. They’ve been locked up since they were kids. Then they come home to this shit [the halfway house], sleeping one on top of the other, no money, no clothes. And the rules they have to follow—nobody could follow those rules. It’s a tragedy. It’s a crime against God. Sometimes I think, in fifty years we are going to look back on this and, you know, that this was wrong. And everybody who supported this—their judgment will come. So I think, each night I give a man is a night he remembers he’s a human being, not an animal. And most of these guys, they’ve got a few weeks or a few months before they go back in. You can say a night out is a small thing, but it’s a big thing, too. And each guy who sleeps out is one less guy in the rooms. We’re fifty-three over capacity now.

On a bad day I think I’m taking from men who have nothing; I’m taking from them to pay my kids’ tuition, pay the bills. That’s not right. And whatever happens [to them when they leave the halfway house], that’s on my head. They get rearrested, shot, I did that.

Regardless of the meaning that participants in the underground market apply to these exchanges, or the stated or unstated reasons they undertake them, we must acknowledge that the criminal justice arm of the state extends beyond the persons who are the direct targets of the police, the courts, or the prisons, and even beyond their families. A large number of people provide underground assistance to men running from the police or going through the courts and the jails. Through these illicit exchanges, they, too, become involved in the “dirty” world. The assistance they provide may give them some sense of contributing to those less fortunate, or even of participating in an underground political movement against the overreach of the police and the prisons. But they also come to rely on legally precarious people for income, and by extension on the criminal justice system that seeks these people and confines them. Through their financial dealings with people with warrants, or who are in jail, or going through a court case, or out on parole, these brokers of under-the-table goods and services also come to be partially swept up into the criminal justice system, to know about it, to interact with it, and to rely on it. And some find that their business with those caught up in the system renders them vulnerable to arrest. We might think of this as a kind of secondary legal jeopardy, a spilling over of the legal precariousness that the young men who are the main focus of this study face.⁴