Books like On the Run by Alice Goffman

Michelle Alexander argues that mass incarceration has become a contemporary system of racial control, striking disproportionately at African‑American men and other disadvantaged groups while perpetuating a new form of Jim Crow.

The book provides an eye-opening examination of how mass incarceration has concealed decades of racial inequality in the United States.

Elijah Anderson explores how the informal Code of the Street shapes daily life in Philadelphia’s impoverished African‑American neighborhoods, revealing the complex social rules that govern behavior, status, and survival.

"In the 1970s, Henry Hill pulled off heists and busted heads with the Mob. In the '80s, he became famous - as the antihero of the bestselling book Wiseguy and blockbuster movie Goodfellas. But there was one story he couldn't tell. Now his children, Gregg and Gina, tell it for him." "On the Run is the true account of what it's like to grow up in the federal witness protection program. Just as Gregg was celebrating his bar mitzvah and his sister, Gina, was buying her first bra, Henry Hill was informing on his former cronies. Henry, his wife, and children were swept into protective custody. And Gregg and Gina, who'd already been exposed to their father's wild side, were about to be ripped from their home and lose the only normalcy they'd ever known." "Taking only what they could fit in a bag, the Hill children began a nightmarish life on the run: constantly moving from town to town, often without warning, and always knowing that their Uncle Jimmy, along with their father's other former "friends," wanted the Hills dead. All the while, Henry, a violent career criminal with a taste for hard drugs and women, used his new identity to break the law and make new enemies - forcing the family to run again and again." "For Gina, the journey from Queens to Nebraska to Kentucky to Washington State was one of fierce denial - of trying to see the best in her abusive father, of learning her skills as an amateur actress, and finally uttering the unspeakable truth to her best friend. For Gregg, it was a chronicle of heartache, sacrifice, and violence: giving up a tennis career, standing up his first date because the family had to flee that night, and finally, after a series of near lethan confrontations with his father, running for his life."--BOOK JACKET.

Race to Incarcerate traces three decades of U.S. prison expansion, examining race, class, and policy, and argues for humane alternatives.