Alice Goffman's "On The Run " , an important National work . Must reading for anyone interested in the epidemic facing young Black Men in America.

Alice Goffman’s “On the Run” is must reading for anyone interested in making America a better place. This is not an indictment on the police; they are merely attending to the tasks we created, many times at their own peril. Rather the blame lies squarely on the shoulders of the average American who gives no thought to the legislation that creates a Criminal Justice system poised to cripple the young Black man.

In Goffman’s thesis we meet a number of young Black human beings who are caught in a web of incarceration, bleak opportunity and despair. We come to understand how, inculcated from birth, the Black man learns to hustle, avoid detection and defend himself as if there was no rule of law.

As a Catholic it appalls me that we are not addressing this plague on our fellow citizens.  We must demand that our leaders bring real solutions to this epidemic. We must stop viewing our society as bifurcated between the privileged and the poor …it must end; we must show mercy.

I implore all of you to read “On the Run”, not merely as voyeurs but as angels seeking truth and justice for these forgotten souls.

‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’ Matthew 25:40
Edward Strafaci

From the New York Times:

When newly minted Ph.D.s go on the job market, they usually have questions about the teaching load, research money and tenure prospects.

Alice Goffman, now an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, had another query, too: Would she be allowed to get arrested and go to prison?

“They said that with a felony record, I couldn’t teach at a public university,” she recalled recently. “For a second I thought, ‘Should I take this job?’ ”

Ms. Goffman chose the job over the jail sentence, but her question wasn’t as crazy as it sounds. Ever since her days as an undergraduate, she has pursued a deeply immersive style of fieldwork that has made her a rising star in sociology and her new book, “On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City,” out next month, one of the most eagerly awaited urban ethnographies in years.

The book, from the University of Chicago Press, is a closely observed study of the impact of the criminal justice system on everyday life in a low-income African-American neighborhood of Philadelphia, and it is attracting interest well beyond academia.

Publishers Weekly, in an advance review, praised it as “a remarkable chronicle” told “with honesty and compassion.” Several trade publishers recently vied for paperback rights (Picador prevailed), and there have even been some nibbles from film and television producers.

Though written in a sober, scholarly style, “On the Run” contains enough street-level detail to fill a season of “The Wire,” along with plenty of screen-ready moments involving the author herself, who describes, among other ordeals, being thrown to the floor and handcuffed during a police raid, enduring a harrowing precinct house interrogation and watching a man be shot to death after exiting her car.

But Ms. Goffman, a 32-year-old with a headlong speaking style that dares any note taker to keep up with her, is wary of putting the spotlight on herself.

“It just feels morally strange to talk about my own experiences when a whole community is dealing with violence and getting arrested,” she said in an interview in a Greenwich Village cafe this month, after giving the keynote address at a conference at New York University. After all, she added, “I could always just leave.”

Ms. Goffman is hardly the first middle-class white observer to venture into black urban America and emerge with a marketable story to tell. But the intensity of her research — and her ability to remain in the background while keeping her eyes and ears (and notebook) open — set her work apart, colleagues say.

“The level of immersion is really unusual,” said Mitchell Duneier, a sociologist at Princeton, who supervised Ms. Goffman’s doctoral dissertation, on which the book is based. “She got access to the life of the ghetto and came to understand aspects of it we don’t ever get to see.”

“On the Run” arrives at a moment when the explosion of America’s prison population since the 1970s has raised concern across the political spectrum, spurred in part by books like Michelle Alexander’s best seller, “The New Jim Crow” (2010), which has sold more than 500,000 copies.

Ms. Goffman’s book both builds on that work and pushes past it, closely tracking a group of young men caught up in what she characterizes as a new system of surveillance and control that reaches far beyond the walls of prison. Practices like stop and frisk may grab the headlines, but even more pernicious, she argues, is the little-noted spread of technology that allows the police to track people with outstanding warrants, often arresting them even for minor probation violations, missed court dates or unpaid fines.

The growth of this system over the last two decades has turned many men into “fugitives,” she writes, who avoid workplaces, hospitals,funerals and other places where the police routinely come to run the names of men who show up. Even family ties become part of the “net of entrapment,” as girlfriends and mothers are pressured into informing on legally entangled sons and partners.

“It’s an unraveling of relationships from the inside out,” Ms. Goffman said. “Home becomes a place of risk and danger.”

Ms. Goffman comes from a home where intensive fieldwork was something of a family business. Her father, the eminent sociologistErving Goffman (who died when she was a baby), posed as an employee of a mental hospital for a year to research his 1961 study, “Asylums.” Her mother, Gillian Sankoff, is a sociolinguist at the University of Pennsylvania who has done studies in Papua New Guinea and French Canada; her adoptive father, the sociolinguist William Labov, also at Penn, has done pioneering field research on African-American urban vernacular, among other subjects.

Ms. Goffman, who grew up in the Center City neighborhood of Philadelphia, said she took her first field notes as a teenager, recording observations about the Italian-American side of her family in South Philadelphia. By her sophomore year at Penn, she had moved full time to a mixed-income African-American neighborhood and was hanging out on a tough strip she calls 6th Street (all names and places in the book are disguised), fully immersing herself in local culture.

She abandoned her vegetarian diet, listened only to mainstream hip-hop and R&B, and adopted local “male attitudes, dress, habits, and even language,” as she puts it in a long appendix, describing her research methods. While drugs, and drug selling, pervaded the neighborhood, she did not use them, she writes, partly because “it hampered writing the field notes.”

By her own account, she lost most of her college friends, and struggled to complete her non-sociology requirements. Her thesis, advised by the noted ethnographer Elijah Anderson, won her a book contract from the University of Chicago (probably the first based on undergraduate research the publisher has ever signed, said Douglas Mitchell, its executive editor).

It may sound “absurd” now, Ms. Goffman said of her extreme immersion. “But I was trying to take the participant-observer approach as seriously as possible.”

It can be hard to square the very ordinary-seeming academic who recalls her teenage affection for “My So-Called Life” with the young woman of her startlingly confessional appendix, which ends with a moving account of a close friend’s death in a shootout. And it remains to be seen how Ms. Goffman’s ideas will play beyond left-leaning academic circles.

Ms. Goffman, who said she plans to share proceeds from her paperback deal with 18 people from 6th Street, said she was weighing how to use her new visibility to serve the growing criminal justice reform movement. But her scholarly sights — and intense habits of observation — are trained elsewhere these days.

She estimates that she has already taken some 3,500 field notes for her current project, which she will describe only as a “big idea book” based on close observation of friends, family and colleagues.

“Note taking is a way of living,” she said. “On a good day, I think I’m touching some kind of truth about everyday life. On a bad day, I just think it’s insane.”