Alice Goffman’s On the Run: Fugitive Life in America is about young African-American boys and men on the run from the police in Philadelphia. The situation is a product of the United States’ skyrocketing incarceration rates—in the poor undereducated black neighborhood Goffman studies, something like 10% of the young men are incarcerated at any one time. More are on probation and parole—in short everyone in the neighborhood is themselves enmeshed in the criminal justice system, or someone close to them is.…
