“I don't have time for drama”: Managing risk and uncertainty through network avoidance*

This study employs in-depth interviews (n = 45) with men 25–34 years in age who live in a Philadelphia neighborhood heavily impacted by mass incarceration. It asks the following: 1) How do they perceive risk? 2) How do they organize their daily routines in response to it? 3) Are there racial differences in perceptions and adaptations to risk? Nearly all of the men of color in the study reported staying in their houses and avoiding public spaces, viewing them as unpredictable and posing an unacceptable level of risk. They worried about “drama” or the potential for interactions with others to lead to attention by the police. Their practice of “network avoidance” often meant a complete lack of engagement in their community. Network avoidance is a racialized adaptation to the expansion of the criminal legal apparatus and the unpredictable nature of men's interactions with its agents and enforcers. It reproduces the effects of incarceration by essentially turning their homes into prisons. Network avoidance effectively erases young men of color from the public sphere in the same way that incarceration removes them from their communities, with considerable costs for the men themselves and for their neighborhoods.