As I mentioned in class, Alice Goffman’s privilege was something I felt was a shortcoming for her in this book. Even though see acknowledges her privilege in her methodological notes, I would have liked for her  to talk about how she grapples with her privilege a bit more. I think her methodological notes were a very good and necessary addition to the book. I did appreciate that she took the time to explain how she got to 6th Street and how she formed relationships in the book. But I wanted her to talk more about what it meant to live there as a upper class White woman. What preconceptions did she have before going into the neighborhood? How shocking was it going from living at a place like UPenn to living on 6th street?

This book also made me think about how/if the situations described by Goffman would change not only if her race was different but also her gender. If she were a White male, would Mike treat her more like one of the boys or not want to deal with her because she would look like a cop. How would she be treated as a Black man? A Black woman? The list could go on. It’s interesting to considered how her identity would change how people would react to her and act around her in certain situations.

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.

In Chapter 4 of On the Run, Alice Goffman discusses how members of the 6th Street community turn legal troubles into resources. Here, she argues that the people of this community used the carceral state  of their community to their advantage. While I understand her argument, I don’t completely agree with the format or function of this chapter.

I think, through this chapter, Goffman sought to outline the agency of individuals in this community despite their surroundings. Similar to Marcus Hunter’s Black Citymakers, residents of 6th Street used their own tactics and methods to improve their individual lives and their community as a whole, despite of the constant police and legal entanglements of the area. To me, though, the way Goffman wrote this chapter read more like a list of reasons why the state of the community wasn’t as bad as she outlines in the rest of the book. Over and again, Goffman would frequently cite one or two interviews as her basis for an entire conclusion. Throughout the book, though specifically in this chapter, Goffman was quick to come to conclusive statements about this community based on a single interview of experience. Because of this, I thought that the setup of this chapter seemed to lend itself towards more of an account of varied situations, rather than an overall picture of the community.

During our discussion of On the Run, many of us expressed concerns about the ethics and efficacy of Alice Goffman’s approach to fieldwork. As some of us noted, she may well have committed several serious crimes in the process of conducting fieldwork; she may have acted unethically in engaging as a roommate and date rather than simply as an observer. Ethics aside, Goffman might have altered the course of events simply through her presence, and likely offers an account that is rather biased towards the close friends she has made on 6th Street.

Goffman’s embedding in the social world she studies made it impossible for her to be an objective observer. However, I think that rather than undermining the ethnography, Goffman’s close ties to the community transformed it. The ways in which she is implicated and impacted in her fieldwork make it meaningful as a personal account (regarding her own life adjacent to the Black urban ghetto) and also as a broader sociological one. Goffman offers us a window into the mentality and survival instincts she acquired on 6th Street – mentioning, for example, that her time there has led her to enter Penn facilities with an eye towards TVs and computers that she could steal if in need of fast cash. The mentality of scarcity and self-preservation that Goffman develops around theft, police, and other matters is a testament to the ways in which life on the run, or even life proximate to people on the run, can transform an individual with an entirely different background.

In addition, Goffman’s ties to 6th Street may safeguard against bias at least as much as it generates it. Her deep emotional investment in Chuck, Mike, and others may have actually led to greater objectivity than another account offers: one in which the meaning of “snitching,” “riding,” and other phenomena previously alien to a white, middle-class college student are colored by profound personal understanding. If the alternative is the sort of distance – colored by racism – that led Goffman’s friend to quickly leave the party upon seeking Mike, Chuck, and Steve enter, then Goffman’s more intimately sympathetic approach is likely preferable.

Reflecting on Tuesday’s discussion, I started thinking about the  intersection between substance abuse, mental health, and imprisonment. Looking for further writing on the topic, I found the transcript of an interview that Michelle Alexander gave to PBS’ Frontline for a two-part series  called “Locked Up In America.” In my view, one of the most potent parts of the dialogue comes when she says that mentally ill people in ghetto communities

“have little choice but to self-medicate, and when they do, when they decide to turn to marijuana or turn to cocaine or turn to some type of substance we’ve designed, we’ve decided is prohibited, is off-limits, then rather than responding to these people with drug treatment and say[ing], “How can we help you cope with your crisis and help you through this period of time and help you deal with your drug addiction?,” instead we say: “Oh, the answer for you is a cage.”

Her suggestion that substances are “designed” to be “prohibited” hints at deliberately crafted policies and their harsh impact on poor, mentally ill blacks who enjoy less access to the prescription medications and therapy that their white counterparts enjoy. Alexander thus suggests that public officials can modify drug policy to ensure that law enforcement does not punish mental illness, while also expanding treatment options that understands addiction as a medical problem instead of a criminal behavior. I left reading the transcript of her interview questioning how state- and federal-level interventions can intersect to take mentally-ill drug offenders out of the prison pipeline and into rehabilitative programs.

For more information on the PBS series, check out the articles and films here.

I thought the Slate article on the nature of ethnography was very interesting. On the question of whether or not obfuscating identities and events in ethnographies is a problematic practice or a relatively harmless, integral aspect of these studies, I am inclined to believe the latter. The Slate article talks quite a bit about how institutional review boards require complete anonymity as a condition of ethical, publishable research. I would suggest that anonymity is probably also a required condition on the other end. For studies like Goffman’s, I imagine many subjects request anonymity before allowing ethnographers to study and record their lives. Because so many of their daily actions are illegal – ranging from driving with an expired/revoked license to dealing drugs to unlawfully sharing electricity with neighbors – it is hard to believe any of these subjects would want to be identified in a nationally published study. Who would choose to be entirely truthful with an ethnographer without a promise of anonymity and, thus, immunity from embarrassment and legal consequences? In these cases, anonymity is sometimes the only way for a researcher to get any valuable information.

Because of this, it seems that readers must simply trust authors to tell the truth. It is good practice, as well, for readers to take more wild claims (such as some made by Goffman) with a grain of salt. Because the entire field of ethnography is grounded in the promise of anonymity to subjects as well as institutional review boards, there is just no way to thoroughly verify a work. I think this is just a part of the nature of the discipline. Ethnography may not be a precise science – or even a precise social science – because it is rarely entirely truthful and can never be truly proven, but that is not necessarily its goal. Ethnography is not a regurgitation of facts and statistics. Rather, it is a detailed look into a specific community and its distinctive inhabitants. While it may sometimes read like a fantastical piece of fiction, this is only because it depicts real life: messy and not able to be fully understood by numbers alone. Rather, ethnography shows how recorded statistics affect individuals’ everyday lives. I think that, because this is the function of ethnography, muddying dates, names, and characters a bit is not very harmful. It does prevent the reader from ever knowing the precise truth of what happened, but readers trust that ethnographers make their writing choices in a way that is faithful to the overall spirit and culture of the community they study. While this can possibly lead to deliberately misleading ethnographies, these are the exception rather than the rule.

While I am glad we did have some time to discuss the methodology of On the Run, I also find myself wishing we had had more of a debate on the merits of Alice Goffman’s ethnography. As someone who is considering becoming an ethnographer, my bias leads me to defend Goffman against claims of reductionism and inaccuracy. Some in class criticized her use of only one or two examples to make broad claims, but I see this as a valuable contribution to sociological knowledge. By pointing out micro-level trends and by studying the nuances of real lived processes, ethnography can bring new phenomena to light within academia, raising questions that can guide future research and presenting evidence that goes against conventional knowledge (Goffman mentions this last point in the Slate article). While perhaps it may seem like stretching to apply a few instances to an entire population – and while I do agree with this claim on some level – I counter the claim that ethnography is reductive and less valuable than other forms of sociological research.

The part of Goffman’s ethnography that really struck me, however, and which went largely unaddressed in the Slate article, was Goffman’s position in the social world she studied. We discussed in class the ways that her (often very visible) privileges may have affected her study, which I think warrants deeper and more generalized inquiry into the role of the ethnographer and how identities and privileges interact with qualitative sociological studies. Something about Goffman’s role on 6th Street that I found particularly interesting was somewhat detached from her social identities, however. What struck me was how embedded she was in the social world she studied. She was not a detached observer, but rather a close friend and an emotionally invested and involved member of the 6th Street community. She admits in her methodology section that she did not socialize with almost any people outside of 6th Street, and her deep attachment to Chuck and his family and friends is illustrated in the controversial section in which she describes the period after his murder. How did this deep attachment color her work? I think it has some merits – it gave her insight into the lives of Mike and Chuck that she may not otherwise have gained – but also raises some questions about the quality of her research. I also think that all ethnographers, to some degree, form relationships with and become involved in the community in which they work, but Goffman’s social isolation within 6th Street seemed extreme to me. Did her desire to fit in and be accepted (illustrated by her agreement to go on a date so as to change people’s views of her presence in the 6th Street community)  in what became her only social world color her actions or the behavior of others? Did it color how she portrayed certain individuals or events? Do changes in her behavior from its state before the study began – i.e. her claimed fear of white men that resembled policemen or her controversial hunt for Chuck’s murder – have any significance on their own? In other words, do those changes highlight anything or deepen her claims about the police state she describes? These are all questions that I have been thinking about and trying to develop and hope we can discuss (perhaps in other contexts) later in the semester, as I would love to hear others’ views.

The thing that stuck with me the most from this past discussion was how the Pew Foundation published 1 in 100 in order to bring attention to mass incarceration in the United States. As we discussed, the title come from the fact that 1 in 100 people in the United States are in prison or jail. What is stunning is that they could have picked even more potent numbers. They didn’t include people who are under penal supervision outside of confinement (parole or probation), and they could have chosen certain groups of people to make the number even lower.

My question is whether choosing a different static with which to title the book would have been more or less effective. I imagine that they chose 1 in 100 because it encompasses the entirety of the population regardless or race, sex, or other differentiators. Including the entire population could serve to get everyone behind the cause it is evidently affecting everyone in the US, and people are definitely more likely to react if they can see that it is affecting people like themselves. However, they could have picked a more dramatic number such as the 1 in 9 black males in their 20s and early thirties that are currently in jail or prison. I’m not sure this number would have gotten the same widespread media attention that book received under its actual title. It could have not come across as groundbreaking since young, black men are often viewed as criminals, so the media would not have made nearly as big a deal about it. Contrarily, it could have also been even more publicized because it puts the insane disproportion of racialized incarceration into a single statistic. We’ll never know, but it is something interesting to ponder.

In class several of you raised important queries and critiques of Goffman’s methodology in particular and ethnography as a methodological tool in particular.

Quinn raised an important point, which the following article addresses: is it that Goffman’s methodology is especially suspect or is the nature of her field site, as well as the IRB protocols of ethnographic research with human subjects, partly responsible for what seems like inaccuracies and flaws?

Here are some excerpts from the article on Slate,  you can read the full article here:

The Ethics of Ethnography

“Alice Goffman’s heralded book about inner-city life has come under fire for inconsistencies and inaccuracies. Is the author to blame—or does the fault lie with her field?”

“Ethnography can look like an uncomfortable hybrid of impressionistic data gathering, soft-focus journalism, and even a dash of creative writing.”

“The frustration is not merely a matter of academics resenting oversight out of principle. Many researchers think the uncompromising demand for total privacy has a detrimental effect on the quality of scholarship that comes out of the social sciences—in part because anonymization makes it impossible to fact-check the work.

“It makes it really hard to verify—you don’t even know if the people exist,” said Christopher Winship, a sociologist at Harvard University. He added, “The discipline thinks it’s fine and that’s probably totally wrong.”

University of Chicago sociologist Richard Taub doesn’t think it’s fine and explained why: “Your honor—your word—is the only thing you have to make your stuff believable, because your job is to not let anyone track these people down,” he told me. “It’s a terrible problem”