The result is an extraordinarily detailed portrait of a community-nicknamed “6 th Street” by Goffman and never identified by its actual location-in which the criminal justice system dominates people’s lives and systematically cuts them off from opportunity. Goffman conducted her fieldwork, first as an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania and later as a graduate student at Princeton University, by embedding herself with a group of men from the neighborhood-they are all given pseudonyms in the book-and carefully tracking their lives over the course of about six years. The book, On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City, is an ethnographic study of a black neighborhood in Philadelphia where, according to Goffman’s research, residents live in a mini–police state, constantly in fear of being arrested and sent to jail or prison, often for minor offenses. Late last month, a Northwestern University law professor published an article calling into question the veracity of a widely lauded book by Alice Goffman, one of sociology’s brightest young stars.
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