Most dramatically one of Goffman’s key informants “Chuck” was murdered by a rival group in December 2007, during her fieldwork. Goffman lives with the brothers off and on for six years, becoming part of their lives at home, on the streets, in their contacts with the police, jail, and prison. George who lives upstairs and owns the house.

The three boys grow up in a household with Miss Linda, their crack cocaine addicted mother, and a grandfather Mr. And how did On the Run tweak the popular imagination? By telling the story of individual lives, particularly three anonymized brothers, Chuck, Reggie and Tim, and especially Mike’s friends Alex. There are chases through the neighborhoods, broken down doors, shootings, and drama, as two distrusting institutions-police and neighborhood-struggle over issues of violence, race, and legitimacy.

After all it is literally a cops and robbers story. More so than most “sociology” books, On the Run has tweaked the popular imagination via the news media. Perhaps then the beauty of any good ethnography is in trying to span this divide, while never quite achieving it. What becomes clear for her, as for many other great ethnographers, is that distance is not completely possible as she encounters what can be thought of as the “ethnographer’s dilemma.” If you are to empathize with your subjects, you come to appreciate them as human beings, irrespective of their personal foibles. In doing this, she wrestled with the emotional commitments of liking and empathizing with the people she lives and “studies,” while trying to sustain a “value free” distance of a social scientist.

To understand how such a high incarceration rate effects a community, Goffman lived in the “6 th Street” neighborhood for six years, first as an assignment for an undergraduate class at the University of Pennsylvania, later on her own, and finally as a graduate student at Princeton.

The story told here is of what that prison boom does to one neighborhood whose young men filled the jails and prisons. More are on probation and parole-in short everyone in the neighborhood is themselves enmeshed in the criminal justice system, or someone close to them is. The situation is a product of the United States’ skyrocketing incarceration rates-in the poor undereducated black neighborhood Goffman studies, something like 10% of the young men are incarcerated at any one time. Alice Goffman’s On the Run: Fugitive Life in America is about young African-American boys and men on the run from the police in Philadelphia.

Alice goffman's on the run