How the War on Drugs Criminalizes Entire Neighborhoods

Alice Goffman discusses how The War on Drugs has created a surveillance state in America’s most disadvantaged neighborhoods. Goffman spent six years living in one such neighborhood in Philadelphia, and her close observations and often harrowing stories reveal the pernicious effects of this pervasive policing. In On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City, she describes how arrest quotas and high-tech surveillance techniques criminalize entire blocks, and transform the very associations that should stabilize young lives—family, relationships, jobs—into liabilities, as the police use such relationships to track down suspects, demand information, and threaten consequences.