Alice Goffman on Fugitive Life in an American City
2014-06-15 · Guest: Alice Goffman (Sociologist) · 53:15
Fugitive life and aggressive policing in Philadelphia
Bob Zadek interviews sociologist Alice Goffman about her book On the Run, which documents her decade-long immersion in a Philadelphia neighborhood. They discuss the pervasive surveillance and aggressive policing that creates a “fugitive” class of citizens living outside mainstream society, the disparity in criminal justice outcomes between social classes, and the root causes of inner-city violence.
Topics: Criminal Justice Reform, Policing, Surveillance, Inner-City Communities, War on Drugs, Bipartisan Reform, Sociology
Speakers: Bob Zadek, Alice Goffman
Section 1: Introduction to Alice Goffman and “On the Run” [00:00]
Bob Zadek: Hello everyone, welcome to the Bob Zadek Show every Sunday at 9:00 AM. Thank you so much for listening. I’m your host, of course, Bob Zadek. 800-345-5639 to join the conversation. This morning, I’m happy to welcome to the show—this is a show I’ve been looking forward to for quite some time—I’m happy to welcome Alice Goffman. Alice is a sociologist who has written a fascinating book, fascinating for many reasons, called On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City.
Alice spent almost a decade—I’ll use a word that she probably wouldn’t use—embedded in, living in an inner-city community in Philadelphia, getting to know what life was like. Not so much what life was like in general, but what life was like among the citizens living in Philadelphia in this inner-city, somewhat lower-income part of Philadelphia. What life was like when you are on the run, on the lam, hiding from the law, when there is a warrant out for you, when the police are looking for you or looking for somebody who you may know, may love, part of your family, and how different life is when you have to live exclusively in the shadows. It’s almost as if you don’t exist, and in many ways, these residents do not exist. Alice explores both what these targets of law enforcement have done to make them targets, why the law, law enforcement, government in the broadest sense is so interested in them, and asks the question whether or not these criminal acts should be criminalized. What’s wrong with the criminal justice system, the social service system, that forces so many humans to have to live this horrible off-the-grid life? Alice’s book is a wonderful contribution to our knowledge on the subject.
And what I find to be of special interest to me is, although Alice, I suspect, will probably identify herself—we’ll leave that to her—as somewhat of a progressive, a liberal, whatever label one wants to put, but this book, in my opinion, could have been written by a libertarian. It is, more than any other book that I can think of recently, a book that defines where libertarian beliefs join hands, unite with progressive beliefs, and have as a common target the overreaching surveillance, aggressive criminal justice system. Alice, thank you for joining me on this Sunday morning.
Alice Goffman: It’s great to be here, Bob. Thanks so much for having me on.
Section 2: From Privilege to the Inner City [04:05]
Bob Zadek: And Alice, tell us a bit about—you lived in an inner-city neighborhood in Philadelphia. What motivated you to do this? Was your plan all along to write a book, to write this book? What drove you to live this, for you, unusual life for so long?
Alice Goffman: That’s a great question. I didn’t mean to write this book because I didn’t even know that any of this was happening. I grew up in a middle-class white neighborhood in Philadelphia.
Bob Zadek: Privileged. You grew up privileged.
Alice Goffman: Absolutely. Yeah. My parents are professors and they teach at the University of Pennsylvania where I went to college. And in my neighborhood, the police were, you know, people who you called when you got in trouble, but that was very rare. You know, they weren’t around much. And when they were around, you know, that was good. You know, they were protecting people from criminals and stuff.
So I started—I took an ethnography class at Penn, which is like the sociology method that’s about first-hand observation over time, kind of like embedded journalism. And I took a job in a cafeteria on campus, then I met the woman who was my boss at that cafeteria. She was an African-American woman in her 60s who lived in a neighborhood not that far from campus. So then I started tutoring the grandchildren of my boss at the cafeteria. And after a couple months of tutoring this young woman named Aisha, her cousin Ronnie came home from a juvenile detention center. He was 15. And then he introduced me to his cousin Mike, who was 22. I at the time was 21.
And within a few weeks of meeting Mike, he caught this case for a shooting case, a very serious case, a gun case. And the police raided his uncle’s house in the middle of the night. He had been staying at his girlfriend’s house, so his uncle called them to say, called him to say, “Leave immediately, they will be there next.” He had not been involved. He said, at least he said he had not been involved in any shooting, didn’t know who, you know, was the person who really had been involved. But so then he lived on the run with this warrant out for a few weeks. And then he got the money together to pay a lawyer, turned himself in. His mom posted his bail after he spent a week in solitary confinement. She just couldn’t take that anymore. She thought he would go crazy in there. So his mom made his bail, and then he came out and started attending these court dates.
And we had just met and, you know, were just becoming friends. And I thought this court date was like a really big deal in his life. You know, like, oh my gosh, this is a shooting charge, this could be, you could go to prison for a really long time, this is a very significant moment, you know, for you and your family, and probably the whole neighborhood is talking about this. Well, when we went into the courthouse, before we even got there, he saw someone outside that he knew, another young man from the same neighborhood. And then we went in, he greeted, he knew like half the people on the defendant’s side of the courtroom. And I started to realize, okay, this is where young men are spending their time growing up. They’re not in high school, they’re in courtrooms. Some people were there for probation violations, some people were there for minor drug charges, but they were on their way out of prison or into prison and just dealing with the courts. So that’s what got me interested in this whole story.
Bob Zadek: Sorry, that was really long.
Alice Goffman: It’s okay. No, we all have to get to know each other, don’t we? In your book, you describe in exquisite detail—the prose is wonderful as well as the content—what life is like for huge segments which to me are, frankly, invisible, regretfully, but not anymore. This huge swath of invisible people, invisible Americans who are living where their life is built around being off the grid and being invisible and hiding because warrants are out for their arrest, they have run afoul of law enforcement. And it affects their life in so many ways.
And we’re going to get into—we’ll spend roughly sort of 10 or 15 minutes discussing what life is like and then the rest discussing what are the lessons that you learned. Because obviously writing about the life is one thing, but one wants to affect what we would hope we can affect change. And what I’ll ask you and we’ll discuss, what are the lessons? How—what we’ll cover this after the half-hour break—what would you teach us about what’s wrong with the system and how it should be fixed? And we will discover how much we are in sync, I dare say, when we discuss that. But first, life is different, and different from any life that you and I—I grew up of course middle class in Queens—life is so different in terms of how we grew up in our relationship with authority. So tell us with a few bullet points how personal relationships are different when you’re on the lam, earning a living, providing for yourself, just what life is like living on the lam.
Section 3: The Pervasiveness of Policing [10:05]
Alice Goffman: Yeah, so by the time I got to this neighborhood, this working-class to poor African-American neighborhood in the early 2000s, police curfews had been established around the area for people under age 18, and police video cameras were placed on major streets. So what it meant, this curfew, was that anybody who was out after 9:00 could be stopped and searched, anybody who looked under 30, without any reasonable cause. And then when stop and frisk came in, that became much more legitimated.
In the first 18 months I spent in the neighborhood, I wrote down what I observed with the police every day. And so I watched the police stop people walking around or people in cars, search them, search cars, run people’s names for warrants or pending court cases, ask people to come in for questioning or make an arrest every day in this four-block radius with five exceptions. So I watched the police, like, break down doors, search houses, chase people through houses 52 times in the first 18 months of research. So that’s a level of police activity that I think is kind of unimaginable to many of us. And I should also say this isn’t a neighborhood that’s particularly violent or crime-ridden or poor. It’s actually one of the nicer neighborhoods in this large African-American section of Philadelphia. It’s a neighborhood that lots of people from poorer parts of this section would love to move if they had enough money. It has nice lawns and larger homes. But still, the level of police activity reflects this tough-on-crime turn that we have been in for the past decades that’s really focused on black communities.
So like nine times in the first year and a half, police helicopters circled overhead, beamed searchlights onto local streets. 14 times I watched the police punch, choke, kick, beat, strangle, beat with their nightsticks young men after they had caught them. So this was just a level of police activity and a form of police activity that was completely unknown to me from the neighborhood that I lived in.
Section 4: A Personal Encounter with Police Raids [12:23]
Bob Zadek: Now Alice, you were, of course, a working sociologist all of this, taking copious notes, organizing them and trying to see what lessons can be learned. But you were still Alice. And you describe growing up and your experience was the same as mine. The police were sort of benign and it was nice to have around, nice to know they were there in case you needed them, but rarely needed them. That was your and my relationship growing up in a middle-class safe neighborhood. Now, did you find that Alice’s opinion towards relationship with the police changed? Was there a difference as a result of doing the work on a personal level? Forgetting about what lessons you may want to help us understand sociologically or politically, what about you? Do you look at policemen differently now? Do you cringe at all when you see the police, or can you just put that aside and live a middle-class life and have it all be behind you? You were just a working sociologist then and now you’re Alice, the middle-class citizen with no relationship to them.
Alice Goffman: Yeah, I mean, so picture, you know, so like one night I’m at Mike’s mother’s house and Mike and his best friend Chuck are there and I’m asleep on the couch. And Mike has like a low-level warrant, like a technical violation warrant, I believe for missing a court date. And the police, three police officers break down the door in the middle of the night, SWAT gear, guns on the sides of their legs. One officer pushes me off the couch onto the ground, sticks his foot on me, puts me in plastic handcuffs and screams at me to tell him where the men in the house are hiding. Then one other officer goes upstairs and I can hear Mike’s mother screaming to let her get dressed, screaming not to shoot her. The third officer is in the kitchen opening up the contents of the fridge, taking everything out of the cabinets. Then he comes into the living room with a knife, opens up the couch, takes the squares of the drop ceiling out, throws out everything in the closet. So after a number of these experiences, like many people in the neighborhood, I came to fear the police and to resent them, frankly, for the way that they are acting and treating people.
Section 5: Disparities in Justice: Penn vs. The Neighborhood [15:12]
Bob Zadek: And do you find that, does that, were you traumatized? Does that stay with you today? Do you see the police differently now? Do you cringe at all when you see the police, or can you just put that aside and live a middle-class life and have it all be behind you? You were just a working sociologist then and now you’re Alice, the middle-class citizen with no relationship to them.
Alice Goffman: Yeah, I mean, so unlike the people that I’m writing about, I just got to leave when the project was done. I got to get a job and, you know, go off and be a professor and kind of go back into a world where the police are not doing this kind of violence or making these kinds of arrests. And, you know, it was also just striking to be back and forth between these two contexts because I went to college and then grad school the whole time I was doing this research. So I was commuting to, I was driving into Penn for class and then going back to this neighborhood where I was living. And then I was also going to grad school in Princeton, which was an hour away. So I was a commuter student in grad school. So I got to see all the things that the Princeton kids were doing and sort of compare that to the things that were happening to the people in this neighborhood that I was living in.
And I got to tell you, you know, the Princeton kids and the Penn kids, there’s like a lot of drugs on campus and there’s a lot of fighting and there’s a lot of rape, like we hear more and more about. And there’s drunk driving. And, you know, a lot of the crimes that I saw the young men I was getting to know be first arrested for that sort of set them down this whole path, they were really the same as what the young people that I got to know on these college campuses were doing. But those people were, they, you know, the people who were graduating from Penn and Princeton, they did not have felony convictions when they graduated. You know, they’d never been arrested ever. The police had never searched their pockets. They’d never raided their parties. They’d never turned their fights into an aggravated assault charge. So that contrast, I think, is also sort of tough emotionally, but also kind of very striking in terms of just how the police and the courts are operating for black people and for white people, for poor people and rich people in this country.
Bob Zadek: I never thought of that until you mentioned it. That’s quite interesting. That you would say if you take sort of a social profile of just the activities, the diary of a privileged white person at Princeton and a non-privileged black living in the inner city, the diary of their day has a fair amount of similarity between drug use and violence and abuse and bad behavior and bad driving and drunk driving. And yet, while you draw a parallel and similarities in this hypothetical diary of a privileged middle-class, upper-middle-class Princeton student and an inner-city black, their activities are the same, the degree of punishment and stigmatization and interaction with law enforcement is profoundly different. I hadn’t thought of that until you just mentioned it.
This is Bob Zadek, I’m talking with Alice Goffman. Alice has written a wonderful book, On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City, where Alice spent almost a decade living in an inner-city neighborhood to experience firsthand the effect of surveillance and law enforcement on the lives of these inner-city blacks. 800-345-5639 to join the conversation. Alice will be with us for the entire hour. I’ll be back in 60 really short seconds.
[Break]
Section 6: The Underground Society and the Roots of Violence [19:48]
Bob Zadek: Welcome back to the Bob Zadek Show every Sunday at 9:00 AM. We are the only, the only live libertarian talk radio show on the air all weekend. This is it. 800-345-5639 to join my conversation with Alice Goffman. Alice has written On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City, where Alice describes with in great detail, with beautiful, beautifully executed prose, what it is like to live—to say off the grid is a gross understatement—to live totally outside of American civil society, living a life where you must totally avoid any contact with federal, state, and local government, with almost, with no contact with all of the institutions that the rest of us take for granted.
And Alice, the question, the question that jumps off, that jumps out at me is the lessons, the cause and effect. Now what we have is we have, of course, the inner cities, to get a tad political—what would life be like if we didn’t get a tad political?—the inner cities are basically governed by progressive politicians. Detroit, Philadelphia, now New York, Los Angeles, many inner cities are governed by single parties and progressives. And they are, and you wrote about one inner city, where has progressive, or has it, where have progressive politics, indeed politics in general, gone astray? If you could sit one-on-one with progressive politicians and just take them and shake them by the collar and say, “Don’t you see what you are doing?” What would you want them to know?
Alice Goffman: I mean, I think, you know, on one level it’s like I sort of hope in writing this book that people don’t know and that if they are made aware, they will change the policies that are kind of creating these circumstances for people. You know, on the other hand, it’s like you can’t be that naive, right? I think that Republicans and Democrats got behind the tough-on-crime turn in American criminal justice for 40 years. We’ve been building up this system, people on both sides of the aisle, people at the state level, at city level, at the federal level. You know, under Clinton, there were like billions of federal dollars pouring into urban police departments in cities across the country, creating this whole kind of militarization of the police, these special task forces that were in neighborhoods like in the neighborhoods like I’m writing about.
Bob Zadek: Radley Balko on my show—I should just mention you mentioned militarization, of course. I was privileged to have a couple of months ago Radley Balko on the show who wrote a wonderful book about the militarization of the police force, which is quite scary where police forces now become paramilitary units with army equipment.
Alice Goffman: Right, right, his work, yeah.
Bob Zadek: So you and I, of course, agree 100% on that issue. And the criminal—what’s interesting is you mentioned the Clinton when he wanted to famously put 100,000 more police on the street. I think the bill was called, there was an acronym, I think it was called COPS, but community something policing, I forgot what the acronym stands for. But so this is, this is something which both Democrats and Republicans of all stripes, they share this common aggressive policing power. And of course, those who don’t are libertarians. And so those of Americans who—this is not, this is going to sound like a commercial for libertarian politics, I’m just making the observation. Libertarian politics do not need commercials. But of course, us libertarians, maybe I include you, Alice, us libertarians would agree 100% and your book could have been written by and would be required reading in any course on libertarian philosophy because the overreach of the police and the prisons is, I mean, it’s just on incredible display in the kinds of neighborhoods that I’m writing about. I mean, you know, it goes to all of us who are worried about, you know, the government looking at our email and stuff. I mean, that’s just such small beans compared to what’s going on in these neighborhoods in terms of the intervention of the courts and the prisons and the police into everyday life.
Bob Zadek: And what’s interesting when you wrote a lot about the level of surveillance that goes on, while in the mainstream media there are complaints about the NSA and the intrusiveness of being searched at the airports, as you just mentioned, that’s small potatoes. That’s a middle-class minor inconvenience compared with the level of surveillance that the inner cities experience.
Alice Goffman: Yeah, so I mean, when I was doing this research in Philly, what I got from interviews with police officers was that there were 80,000 people with warrants out in the city. And this was low-level warrants as well as higher warrants, like for new crimes, but also like failing to pay court fines and fees or missing curfew. And what the police are doing is rounding up people by going to their, they’re trying to make their stats, right? So they’re rounding up as many people as possible in poor communities of color in particular. And they do that not just by going to people’s workplaces or homes, but going to the hospital. The hospitals that are serving poor black neighborhoods are great places to round people up. So young men are scared, too scared to go to the hospital even when they’ve been shot or when they’ve been severely beaten. So I watched a lot of young men have kind of at-home medical care by people who were janitors at the hospital or people who were nurses’ assistants who were bringing back supplies and fixing people on the dining room table who were too scared to go to the hospital.
So yeah, we’re talking about a kind of level of surveillance and of kind of creating of a fugitive class, really, of people. Not just people with warrants, but anybody on probation, parole, who has a pending court date. All these people can be taken into custody kind of at any moment. So they’re living underground. And the other thing is, like, another major way the police round up people is by going to women and pressuring them to provide information, not just through raids, but by telling women that their houses will be taken away, civil forfeiture, telling women that their children will be taken away, that they will no longer, you know, or that they will be charged for the man’s crimes. So a lot of what I observed was just like how the police are turning men and women against each other as a kind of basic technique to round up all these men to make their stats.
Section 8: Surveillance and the Destruction of Trust [33:01]
Bob Zadek: When you wrote about that, that really struck a chord with me. It’s because what the police are doing is they are, I’ll say encouraging, but that’s too benign. They are almost compelling people to turn on each other. I almost thought of, well, a society, and you when you see depictions of life in East Germany before the wall came down with the Stasi, where everybody is, or in Nazi Germany where young children were encouraged to spy on their parents, it destroys the whole fabric of society and a family life when you can’t trust those people who are close to you, you have to worry about them.
And Alice, I thought back when you talked about, and you do it beautifully, about how family members, people, friends are encouraged, if not required, to turn on each other. It made my skin crawl. But yet, I thought back and I did a little bit of work. I remember that President Obama in October of 2011, he by executive order, he drafted something called the Insider Threat Program, where he encouraged those working in government to spy on each other and to report if people were getting a divorce, had financial problems, and therefore were possible threats to their employment in the government. So this concept of turning people on each other just undoes the entire society. And to think that that program is on steroids in the inner city, oh my goodness.
Alice Goffman: Yeah, and it’s infuriating too because so many people from outside, so many people talk about the kind of like the fabric of community life in the inner city being, you know, frayed or the family, right, or the culture is bad, problematic, you know, people are not, there isn’t basic, you know, trust and people are, you know, it’s like, well, we’re doing a pretty good job of making that happen through all these policies, you know. I mean, if we could just change these policies, things would get a lot better.
Bob Zadek: Yeah, and you mentioned the word trust. I’m a business guy and I’m old school and I couldn’t imagine transacting financial transactions without that element of trust. And here we have at the federal and local level trust being legislated out of the process.
Alice Goffman: Yeah, and you’re right. I mean, this is a lot like, I mean, so one of the police officers that I interviewed that is a local FBI officer, he did take, he was like watching a documentary on the Stasi and then implemented a lot of what they had been doing.
Bob Zadek: The Stasi was the secret police in East Germany, infamous for the degree by which they intruded into private life and compelled people to spy on each other. The Stasi has been written about extensively in contemporary literature. Sorry, Alice.
Alice Goffman: Yeah, no, thank you. So he had seen this documentary and so one of the programs that he implemented was this program that made it possible to see every person in the neighborhood who either has a low-level warrant or is on probation or parole or has a pending court case kind of in real time on the computer, like by following people’s cell phones and also by plotting their people’s residences. So then he could go to those people and threaten them with arrest, people who are in legal jeopardy already, could threaten them with arrest unless they told him where to find, you know, whoever he was looking for. And then that program got taken up by the warrant units in Philadelphia. So it’s interesting the kind of pulling of strategies from places like East Germany that are, you know, that are sort of being rolled out in the American inner city.
Section 9: The Human Cost of the Punitive System [40:09]
Bob Zadek: In a New York Times op-ed piece you wrote, you mentioned, and I’m just going to read the one sentence quote: “The question we might also ask is not whether an individual should be punished for an act of violence, but where this violence is coming from and how we might prevent it.” That’s Alice the sociologist speaking, of course. And what you raise the question, and what is, if you were to drill down, wearing your sociologist hat, which perhaps you never take off, as I never take off my lawyer hat—I wouldn’t want to, I like being a lawyer too much—but when you wear your sociologist hat, what is the answer? After all, these individuals did at the core commit violence. They do carry guns in the inner city. You and I probably grew up and never saw a gun, except in the holster of a policeman or on television. I never knew anybody who owned a gun in my life until I was an adult. So what is there, where does it all start? And what are the takeaways, the policy takeaways about the problem? The problem isn’t simply tell the police to back off. That’s far too simplistic. And so what are the takeaways? What have you learned that you can teach those people who are in a position to affect policy?
Alice Goffman: Well, I think, so let’s take Tim. His first arrest came at age 11 when he was stopped in a car that his brother Chuck was driving. His brother Chuck was driving Tim to school and the police officer ran the car and the car came up as stolen in California. Neither brother had ever been to California. Chuck was borrowing the car from his girlfriend, so he had no idea that it was stolen. The cop charged, took both brothers into custody and charged Chuck with receiving stolen property and then he charged Tim, age 11, with accessory and later a judge in the juvenile court put him on three years of probation.
Mike, the first guy that I got to know in this neighborhood, his first arrest came at age 13 when the police stopped and searched and arrested him for carrying a small quantity of marijuana and he was put on probation. The arrest that really pushed Chuck off the good path he was on was when he was 18, he was a senior in high school and he got into a fight outside in the schoolyard with another student who had called his mom a crack whore. And he pushed his face into the snow, didn’t hurt the other guy much, but the school cops charged him with aggravated assault. So then he was sitting in county jail, not juvenile detention, but county jail because he was already 18, so he was tried as an adult. And he was sitting there for nine months as this case dragged on. So he missed his whole senior year of high school and then almost all the charges were dropped. He came home that summer, he tried in the fall to re-enroll so that he could complete high school and the people at the school said, “Well, you’re 19 now, you can’t re-enroll.” So then he was a high school dropout. And then he had court fines and fees to pay at the end of this court case which he could not afford. So then he had a bench warrant out for his arrest. So then he was a high school dropout living on the run.
Oh my god. I think right now in terms of policy change, Bob, I think the way the police and the probation and parole and the courts and the prisons are currently operating in neighborhoods like this, we’re asking young people with the fewest resources who live in the poorest communities who have the least amount of family support, the lowest levels of education, to walk the thinnest line, to basically never do anything wrong. We’re asking young people to walk a line thinner than the line I was asked to walk. And I think that’s just unfair. I think we need to turn that around.
Bob Zadek: But the story you’ve just told is so outrageous to me. Why does this happen? Why does anybody care? And why is a young man’s life permanently altered because he pushed somebody’s head in the snow? It’s like a death sentence for pushing somebody’s head in the snow. It just can’t be.
Alice Goffman: I think, you know, we’ve—Bart Lubow, who’s a great reformer of the juvenile courts, has talked about the insatiable thirst for punishment in American society and not just a thirst for punishment, but an insatiable thirst for punishing black boys and men. And I think, you know, from what I’ve seen in Philadelphia and from also the failure of the American public and politicians on both sides to do something about this a long time ago, I think, you know, I’m kind of a believer in that.
On the other hand, like, we are really at a moment of change right now. There’s for the first time in four decades, we’ve seen these modest decreases in incarceration coming out of New Jersey, New York, and California for the past three years. You know, politicians on both sides of the aisle are talking about how there are too many people in prison. The libertarians are really leading the charge here on the right along with fiscal conservatives and evangelicals. A lot of people are starting to think that this is too costly and is not serving the public good and is doing considerable harm in poor communities of color in particular. So I think we just have to seize that moment. We have to do everything we can in this moment of change where the American public does seem to actually care what’s happening. So I’m hopeful. I’m more hopeful than I have been in the past.
Section 10: The Path Toward Reform [45:01]
Bob Zadek: Why are there—the libertarians you’re right are leading the charge. But this would seem to me to be such an important issue to the core liberals, the progressives, the major civil rights organizations where civil rights battles for the most part have been happily won. Why isn’t this decriminalization of so many of these minor offenses and the just backing down, why isn’t that a leading progressive cause? And of course I’m asking you a hard question, you’re not a politician, you’re a sociologist, but just as somebody who reads the paper every day and obviously thinks and cares about the issue, why is this not as important to progressives as it is to libertarians or the libertarian wing of the Republican Party, if there is such a thing? Why are so few people leading the charge?
Alice Goffman: Well, I mean, there’s, you know, it’s—yeah, that’s a really tough question. I mean, on the one hand, I think we’ve been thinking very narrowly about justice in this country for a long time. You know, we’ve been thinking about justice as like, well, it’s unjust if you’re wrongfully accused. If you’re accused of something that you actually did do, then you should be punished for it. That’s like a kind of fundamental understanding about justice in American society. And I think that’s hard to shake, you know, especially when the people who are committing crimes are people who we sort of members of the public are very find it very easily to associate with the kind of criminal label, you know. We’re talking about African-American young men, poor young men. I also think, you know, public safety’s an issue, right? I mean, as long as there’s crime, you know, who wants to come out in sort of support of criminals? So I think it’s taken a long time for people to see this as a civil rights issue, as a major civil rights issue. I think Michelle Alexander has done a ton in that regard to kind of change the public conversation and to understand this not as like, you know, like people trying to defend criminals, but like, you know, as injustice, as racial injustice, as a civil rights issue that’s affecting poor communities and preventing people from achieving upward mobility. So I think it’s disheartening that it’s taken so long, but I’m glad we’re here now.
Bob Zadek: Another area—and I believe you mentioned this in your book, we certainly mentioned it when we spoke—is this concept that I abhor of zero tolerance. The words, the words just get me so angry, where there’s no room for judgment and flexibility and you have a student suspended from school for pointing his fingers in the shape of a gun or for eating a Pop-Tart into approximately the shape of a gun. And we’ve lost all common sense and everything we are just so ridden with rules that it is impossible. I had on the show a couple of years ago an author of a book, Three Felonies a Day, Harvey Silverglate, who talked about how every American probably commits three federal felonies a day without knowing about it. So we have become so absorbed and governed by all of these rules, you can’t help but run afoul of them. And now we have the rules being aggressively enforced in the inner cities and less aggressively enforced in Princeton. And is that the kind of country we want to live in?
Alice Goffman: Right. No, I couldn’t agree more. Yeah. I mean, I think what we really need is, you know, reform of sentencing and reform of policing. So like Mike’s mother used to talk about the police as an occupying force. They were these anonymous SWAT teams, task forces that swooped in with the sole goal of arresting as many men in the neighborhood as possible. We need to get back to a place where police in poor communities who really need them are people you can reason with, people you can talk to about your problems, people who can help you mediate disputes, find solutions that are not violent. You know, the combination of this aggressive arrest-based policing and the mandatory minimums, you know, and three strikes and all this have created a lot of perverse incentives for people and also just massive incarceration and violation of personal liberty.
Bob Zadek: We have only about a minute, Alice. How did we get here? We weren’t always this way. We America weren’t always this way. How did we get here?
Alice Goffman: We had this, you know, people tell different stories about this. So we had this rising crime in the 60s and 70s that was very concerning. We had riots, we had civil unrest. And the solution that we decided on across the aisle was to crack down on crime and to incarcerate largely. So the solution that we found to higher rates of violence and property crime was to lock people up sort of en masse and then also to produce this less well-known system that I’ve been describing of probation and parole and warrants and policing. There could have been many solutions at that point to a rise in crime. There could have been solutions like, you know, job creation or, you know, helping people with their drug addictions, right? I mean, we could have maybe made it a health issue, not a criminal justice issue. Right, exactly. Right. So there could have been many solutions, but this was overwhelmingly the solution that we chose, this focus on punishment through incarceration. So I’m hoping now that our budgets are broken and we’re seeing really the devastation that this has caused that we can start coming up with new solutions.
Bob Zadek: Welcome to libertarian philosophy, Alice. Thank you so much. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the hour, I know my audience has as well. Thank you so much for your book and please keep up the good work.
Alice Goffman: Likewise, Bob. Real pleasure. Thanks so much for this.
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