Yes, at first glance, “On the Run” was a glaring and gritty look into the lives of young African American men and how systems have been set into place to keep these men from escaping the ever-turning cycle of arrests, pursuits, persecutions, prosecutions, and imprisonments. This book was a story told through the eyes of an outsider who was welcomed into a tightknit group of individuals—Mike, Chuck, Alex, Ronnie, Tim, Reggie, and Anthony—and an account of one woman’s personal change from a White, middleclass college student in her early twenties, to a member of the gang, a friend, and a confidant—a transition that was difficult to adopt as Goffman, herself, felt it was necessary to assume the practices and ways of life (i.e., the dress, entertainment, and acts of police evasion) of the 6th Street Boys instead of retaining her own identity. And all of this, every bit of it, was done in order to provide “an on-the-ground account of the US prison boom: a close-up look at young men and women living in one poor and segregated Black community transformed by unprecedented levels of imprisonment and by the more hidden systems of policing and supervision that have accompanied them” (Goffman, 2015,
Yes, at first glance, “On the Run” was a glaring and gritty look into the lives of young African American men and how systems have been set into place to keep these men from escaping the ever-turning cycle of arrests, pursuits, persecutions, prosecutions, and imprisonments. This book was a story told through the eyes of an outsider who was welcomed into a tightknit group of individuals—Mike, Chuck, Alex, Ronnie, Tim, Reggie, and Anthony—and an account of one woman’s personal change from a White, middleclass college student in her early twenties, to a member of the gang, a friend, and a confidant—a transition that was difficult to adopt as Goffman, herself, felt it was necessary to assume the practices and ways of life (i.e., the dress, entertainment, and acts of police evasion) of the 6th Street Boys instead of retaining her own identity. And all of this, every bit of it, was done in order to provide “an on-the-ground account of the US prison boom: a close-up look at young men and women living in one poor and segregated Black community transformed by unprecedented levels of imprisonment and by the more hidden systems of policing and supervision that have accompanied them” (Goffman, 2015,