After overwhelmingly positive initial critical reception, Alice Goffman’s ethnography in On The Run attracted several withering critiques, particularly when it came to her more vivid descriptions of “outlandish” scenes, like Tim getting arrested as an accessory to a vehicle theft or Alex getting arrested in the maternity ward and not being able to stay with his newborn baby. Based on legal analyses from “experts” like Steven Lubet, a law professor at Northwestern, or simply their personal experiences, some argue that the situations Goffman claimed to have witnessed just couldn’t possibly be true. Yet that is the point of Goffman’s work: to shed light on the lived conditions of residents of poor black communities, which are far different from those of the “experts” who try to pick apart Goffman’s claims. That the situations that Goffman writes about seem impossible to some of us should cause us to question whether our own limited experiences with the criminal justice system are universal, as many seem to assume, rather than questioning the veracity of Goffman’s account.

It is true that any sociological report as large-scale and significant as On The Run deserves to be subjected to a high level of scrutiny. But because of the nature of the ethnography that Goffman engaged in for this work, that scrutiny is sometimes impossible. It was necessary for Goffman to anonymize her subjects to protect them from (further) victimization at the hands of the criminal justice system. This means, as Leon Neyfakh explains in the Slate article, that it is impossible to verify the identities of the people Goffman describes and the accuracy of the events she recounts. Because of this, Goffman’s critics turned to the question of whether the events that occur in On The Run are possible. But they do so through the lens of their own experiences with the criminal justice system. When Lubet argues that Tim couldn’t have gotten arrested for riding in a stolen car because there is no law in Pennsylvania against doing so, he ignores one of the main points of the book—that police use, and abuse, the law to criminalize black youth in Philadelphia. When he argues that Alex couldn’t have gotten arrested in the hospital because police wouldn’t look at hospital sign-in sheets, he ignores the possibility that the one source he spoke to in the Philadelphia Police Department could just as easily be lying as the police sources Goffman spoke to. While there may very well be minor factual inaccuracies in Goffman’s portrayal of life in inner-city Philadelphia, attacking these ignores the larger truths exposed in the book—that low-income black communities are treated very differently by the criminal justice system than their higher-income or white counterparts.