But let’s leave that for now and begin with the substance of the book itself.

The story of its genesis is almost as remarkable as the story at the heart of the book. On The Run is, by some distance, the most powerful work of ethnography that I have read for a very, very long time. Any such concerns are however quickly dispelled by Alice Goffman’s extraordinary new book. Indeed, such has been the scale of academic work prompted by American penal expansion you might be forgiven for thinking that there was little new to say, and few new ways in which it might be explored. This unprecedented social ‘experiment’ has generated some wonderful, critical scholarship, most recently in the form of Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow and Becky Pettit’s Invisible Men, both published in 2012. Such is the scale of imprisonment (America’s rate is close to five times that of England, and we are at record levels), and the disproportionate nature of its impact (one in 15 African-American males aged 18 or older is incarcerated compared with one in every 106 white males of the same age) that scholars have started to refer to what is occurring as mass incarceration. There are a further five million or more under some form of penal supervision – generally parole or probation. There are currently 2.3 million people incarcerated in American prisons and jails. On The Run: Fugitive Life in an American City. As a piece of social science it is refreshingly and gloriously readable –how often can one say that of sociology these days? And as an insight into the reach and effect of the contemporary penal state on the day-to-day lives of Black urban America it is unparalleled. As a work of ethnography it is outstanding. Tim Newburn is impressed by Alice Goffman’s book On The Run: a look at the lives of the young African American men who are caught up in a web of warrants and surveillance in a neighbourhood in Philadelphia.

On the run by alice goffman