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Street struggled with seemed immense
     to me—too numerous and complex to keep straight without copious notes. Between the
     ages of twenty-two and twenty-seven, Mike spent about three and a half years in jail
     or prison. Out of the 139 weeks that he was not incarcerated, he spent 87 weeks onprobation or parole for five overlapping sentences. He spent 35 weeks with a warrant
     out for his arrest, and had a total of ten warrants issued on him. He also had at
     least fifty-one court appearances over this five-year period, forty-seven of which
     I attended.
    Initially I assumed that Chuck, Mike, and their friends represented an outlying group
     of delinquents: the bad apples of the neighborhood. After all, some of them occasionally
     sold marijuana and crack cocaine to local customers, and sometimes they even got into
     violent gun battles. I grew to understand that many young men from 6th Street were
     at least intermittently earning money by selling drugs, and the criminal justice entanglements
     of Chuck and his friends were on a par with what many other unemployed young men in
     the neighborhood were experiencing. By the time Chuck entered his senior year of high
     school in 2002, young women outnumbered young men in his classes by more than 2:1.
     Going through his freshman yearbook years later, when he turned twenty-two, he identified
     roughly half the boys in his ninth-grade class as currently sitting in jails or prisons. 3
    ON BEING WANTED
    In 2007 Chuck and I went door to door and conducted a household survey of the 6th
     Street neighborhood. We interviewed 308 men between the ages of eighteen and thirty.
     Of these young men, 144 reported that they had a warrant issued for their arrest because
     of either delinquencies with court fines and fees or failure to appear for a court
     date within the previous three years. For that same period, 119 men reported that
     they had been issued warrants for technical violations of their probation or parole
     (for example, drinking or breaking curfew).
    According to contacts at the Philadelphia Warrant Unit, there were about eighty thousand
     open warrants in the city in the winter of 2010. A small portion of these warrants
     were for new criminal cases—so-called body warrants. Most were bench warrants for
     missing court or for unpaid court fees, or technical warrants issued for violations
     of probation or parole.
    Until the 1970s, the city’s efforts to round up people with outstanding warrants consisted
     of two men who sat at a desk in the evening andmade calls to the people on the warrant list, encouraging them to either come in and
     get a new court date or get on a payment plan for their unpaid court fees. During
     the day, these same men transported prisoners. In the 1970s, a special Warrant Unit
     was created in the Philadelphia courts to actively pursue people with open warrants.
     Its new captain prided himself on improving and updating the unit’s tracking system,
     and getting the case files onto a computer.
    By the 1990s, every detective division in the Philadelphia Police Department had its
     own Warrant Unit. Today, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Bureau of Alcohol,
     Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, and the US Marshals all run their own separate
     Warrant Units out of the Philadelphia force as well.
    As the number of police officers and special units focused on rounding up people with
     warrants increased, the technology to locate and identify people with warrants improved.
     Computers were installed in police cars, and records of citizens’ legal histories
     and pending legal actions became synchronized—first across the city’s police force
     and then among police departments across the country. It became possible to run a
     person’s name for any kind of warrant, from any jurisdiction in the country, almost
     instantly.
    The number of arrests an officer or a unit makes had been a key indication of performance
     since at least the 1960s. 4