On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City

TLDR

On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City is a landmark sociological work that has sparked widespread acclaim, debate, and controversy, with Goffman's TED Talk attracting over a million views. The study is an ethnographic investigation of a black Philadelphia neighborhood, following a small gang and their families over several years to document how escalating punitive policing—surveillance, beatings, arrests, court fees, and incarceration—shapes their everyday lives.

Abstract

Alice Goffman’s book On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City is one of the major events in sociology of the past few years, earning high-profile praise, criticism, and controversy. (And Goffman’s TED Talk has been viewed more than a million times.) The book—originally published by the University of Chicago Press, but issued in paperback by Picador—is an ethnography of a black neighborhood in Philadelphia, exploring how the residents there are subjected to a seemingly ever-increasing level of punitive policing, from electronic surveillance to beatings and arrests to bankrupting court fees and incarceration. Goffman spent some years with a small gang of young men from the neighborhood and their families, and describes their attempts at normal life, their criminal activities, and their brutal treatment by the carceral state. She places this in the context of mass incarceration policies, painting a vivid picture of a social life constrained and corrupted by an irrational and oppressive state.