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On the run alice goffman book review6/2/2023 ![]() ![]() On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City (The University of Chicago Press: 2014) By one estimate, 60 percent of Black men without high school certificate serve prison term by their 30s. ![]() The poor Black American community became – and still is – a particular victim of the tough-on-crime and war on drugs policies, because millions of young Black men have been sent to jails and prisons since 1980s and “returned…to society with felony charges” (p. Though 1990s saw a decline in incidents of crime and violence, yet the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act 1994 added new offences to the list, increased the sentence periods, and also bolstered the crime control and law enforcement agencies through extra funding now there was increase in the number of new law enforcement agencies and units. ![]() By the 1980s crime rate had spiked which invited newer and tougher measures from the authorities. ![]() Goffman informs us that since mid-1970s, the US federal and state governments brought in new laws which increased penalties for possession and sale of drugs and also beefed up police presence around the poor Black neighborhoods. ALICE Goffman begins her book by historically contextualizing her research subject: how Black Americans have been dealt with by the American system for many years and how even after getting their full citizenship rights in the 1960s their freedoms still remained vulnerable to the arbitrariness of the authorities in the name of war on drugs. ![]()
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