Tag Archives: alice goffman

May 2020 in Review

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You can’t say that 2020 has not been interesting so far. The Covid-19 saga continued throughout May. I certainly continued to think about it, including a fun quote from The Stand, but my mind began turning to other topics.

 

Most frightening and/or depressing story:

  • Potential for long-term drought in some important food-producing regions around the globe should be ringing alarm bells. It’s a good thing that our political leaders’ crisis management skills have been tested by shorter-term, more obvious crises and they have passed with flying colors…doh!

Most hopeful story:

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both:

  • There are unidentified flying objects out there. They may or may not be aliens, that has not been identified. But they are objects, they are flying, and they are unidentified.

more on Alice Goffman

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Recently I was talking about how much I enjoyed On The Run: Fugitive Life in an American City. I knew there was some controversy over the book, but I didn’t realize how much. I actually assumed she was a journalist, but it turns out she is a sociologist and some sociologists think they are not supposed to write books like that. (Later though, the article says that journalists have criticized her and sociologists have defended her, so I am a little confused there.) I don’t think I know any sociologists, or a lot about them. Once I knew an anthropologist, and I asked him how he was different from a sociologist, but he just laughed and never answered my question. The problem, some say, is that she got too close to her subjects, was too quick to repeat everything they told her, and reinforced stereotypes. On the last, I think that is completely false. If anything, she does a lot to humanize and find redeeming qualities in people who do some risky and violent things. As for the way she got personally involved with her subjects, that is what makes the story so engaging. I think ultimately it is a story told from a certain point of view, and you have to keep that point of view in mind almost as though you were reading a novel. Whether that is good academic sociology or not I wouldn’t know, but I enjoyed the book.

By the way, Alice Goffman did a TED talk which is more or less a summary of the book.

on the run

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This is by far the most interesting book I have read in a while. It’s interesting in a disturbing way – it’s hard to put down, and hard to stop thinking about after you put it down. I was already familiar with many of the facts, but what makes the book so engaging is how the author mixes the facts with narrative about real people, all from a first person perspective.

I got a much better sense from this of how young men can get entangled with the law in my own city. For the individuals in the book It started early – some got involved in the drug trade because their parents weren’t providing (fathers were absent in many cases, mothers were often hard working but sometimes affected by drug addiction or other problems) and/or because other jobs were hard to come by. Sometimes they were just with older kids who were involved in crimes, and they got charged as accessories. The first charge might be something like drug possession, driving without a license, receiving stolen property, or assault stemming from a playground fight. They were given a fine and put on probation. That made it even harder to get a job. If they fell behind on paying the fine, they could be arrested on some other minor charge, and this time they went to jail. If they had any kind of warrant, were on probation or parole, now they had an incentive to avoid the authorities at all costs. This could mean not getting a formal job, not going to hospitals, not applying for a drivers license or other government identification, not having housing or any assets in their own names. And of course, avoiding the police at all costs. Once they were avoiding the police at all costs, they could get taken advantage of by other more violent criminals, who knew they would not go to the police. Once they were taken advantage of, they could either do nothing, in which case it would happen again, or they could retaliate, in which case it could escalate and become more and more violent, ending in serious jail time for violent crimes or in death. And the handful of young men whose stories are told in the book are not unusual. Keeping track of all these warrants, fines, prisoners, probations and paroles becomes an enormous industry affecting not just a few violent criminals, but the vast majority of men in some neighborhoods. That leads to fathers who are absent and boys who are not provided for, and the cycle repeats.