I'm years late to the party, but On the Run is a tour de force. Based on ethnographic research done in the early 2000s, Goffman describes the lives of a handful of young men and their families under the full repressive apparatus of the war on drugs. The obvious parallel is with Simon and Burns' The Corner, but while Simon and Burns are journalists and look for the story, Goffman is an academic and she's looking for the theory. There's no hope that any of her protagonists will escape.

What this book is about is about being on the run. The protagonists, Mike, Alex, Chuck, and Reggie, are in their late teens or early 20s. They've all been in and out of jail. Most have outstanding warrants. They've never had basic parts of the straight world like a driver's license or a bank account. If they have money, it's because they're selling drugs. And any stability in their lives is purely provisional before they have to run from the cops in earnest, spend years in jail, or wind up dead or crippled from violence that is their stock in trade.

Fugitive life as Goffman describes it is a life of paranoia, of knowing how to spot the cops and outrun them. It's a pattern of unpatterns, since stable residences, relationships, and jobs are just places to get caught. It's knowing that friends, lovers, and relatives will turn you in to the police, and trying to figure out who can be relied on in extremity.

I'm a Foucauldian by training and orientation, so for me the purpose of power is to normalize deviance; to correct it and render it safe. Instead, what Goffman reveals is the opposite of a panopticon. State power for these young men operates in a kind of wrath of god mode, where any interaction is liable to be negative, given that they're by default wanted men for anything from unpaid court fees to possession of drugs to attempted murder. You can run for a long time, for years even, but the odds of making it to 30 free and alive are basically nil. And the path starts at a very young age. Power here, the police and courts, don't deter or correct anyone. They just let you keep going until a bad break, and then it flattens you.

A lot of the negative reviews seem to misunderstand both the scope and limits of this book. While the topic is adjacent to a study of race in America or the sociology of mass incarceration, what this actually is is an ethnography of a few young men and their relations at the bottom of the war on drugs. Goffman did most of the primary fieldwork as an undergraduate; she started tutoring a young woman on the border of the street and got sucked in to the primary. And yeah, she's the white child of academics writing about black criminal men, but this book is nowhere near as unreflective as the critics claim. She got as a close as a person could get, and if it's not the Truth, I dare you to find a better mirror. The official story from the police ain't it. The self-posing gangster biographies (apparently an enter genre of literature I was unaware of) aren't it either. On the Run is fascinating and challenging and well worth the read.