Financial Hazards of a Fugitive Life

“Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” Thomas Piketty’s new book, has received a great deal of attention. But we shouldn’t neglect another important new book on income inequality, from a much different perspective. Titled “On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City,” and written by Alice Goffman, a sociologist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, it offers a fascinating and disturbing portrait of the economic constraints and incentives faced by a large subset of Americans: those who are hiding from the law.

You may think of being on the run as a quandary for only a small group of recalcitrant, hardened criminals. But in her study of one Philadelphia neighborhood, Professor Goffman shows that it is a common way of life for many nonviolent Americans. These people often face charges related to possession or sale of small amounts of drugs, or offenses like hiding relatives from the law. Whatever the negative moral implications of such crimes, they don’t merit having one’s life ruined.

A core point of “On the Run” is that “young men’s compromised legal status transforms the basic institutions of work, friendship and family into a net of entrapment.” For instance, the police round up fugitives by monitoring and contacting their relatives — and that frays family relations. A young man might avoid showing up at the hospital to witness the birth of his child because he knows he could be caught or turned in. Family gatherings become another hazard, so in-person appearances are often surprise visits. People stuck in this kind of limbo are also reluctant to visit hospitals when they need treatment, and a result, the book says, is a “lifestyle of secrecy and evasion,” driven by the unfavorable incentives set in motion by the law.

For all the recent talk of a surveillance state created through the National Security Agency, an oppressive low-tech surveillance state has been in place for decades — and it’s been directed at many of America’s poorest people.

As every friend or relative becomes a potential informant, cooperation plummets and life degenerates into a day-to-day struggle to remain outside the reaches of the law. Professor Goffman offers a chilling portrait of tactics used to encourage relatives to turn in possible lawbreakers: For example, the police may tell mothers that if they don’t report their errant men, the authorities will yank their children, a threat that may be backed by a charge of harboring or aiding and abetting a fugitive. “Squealing” thus becomes more likely. A community becomes divided between those who are on the clean side of the law and those who are not. And trust breaks down in personal relationships.

For people on the run, attending or finishing school is usually out of the question, and finding and keeping employment is tough. Fugitives avoid jobs that require legitimate identification or that can make their whereabouts known to the authorities. The alternatives are unemployment, black-market or gray-market jobs, or, at best, low-paying part-time jobs in the service sector. Professor Goffman shows that “to be on the run is also to be at a standstill,” for reasons that may be seen as negative economic incentives.

The lives of those on the wrong side of the law become dominated by market transactions, but not the kind that accumulate into useful business experience for the future. Local underground markets supply the goods and services that help people stay clear of the law and buy themselves some secrecy and protection. Business may boom for those selling false identification papers and driver’s licenses; other entrepreneurship may be directed, for example, toward helping people pass drug tests by providing bags of “clean” urine, to be taped to a leg before a test is taken.

The book can be read as an indictment of the war on drugs, though Professor Goffman doesn’t stress this implication. People who run afoul of drug laws face economic burdens and losses of liberty that are extremely destructive and go well beyond the risk of a prison sentence. The author refers to the American ghetto as “one of the last repressive regimes of the age.” Current drug laws have helped to create and maintain these social structures without appearing to have done much to limit substance abuse.

Economists are often skeptical of drug laws, favoring alternatives like legalization, decriminalization, or a combination of legalization and high taxation, to discourage use. (In an essay titled “Prohibition vs. Legalization: Do Economists Reach a Conclusion on Drug Policy?” Mark Thornton, a senior fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute, chronicles economists’ views of the war on drugs.) Drugs could be treated as more of a public health problem than a criminal matter.

It’s an urgent situation, because Professor Goffman’s book shows clearly that the microeconomics of a life on the run are grim indeed.