J.D. Tuccille on Life in an Inner-City Police State

For six years, starting as a University of
Pennsylvania sophomore, the sociologist Alice Goffman lived in a
black Philadelphia neighborhood that she calls 6th Street. (The
place name is a pseudonym, as are the names of the people Goffman
describes.) There she immersed herself in the family lives and
legal woes of people whose experiences were far removed from her
own. In On the Run, her book about the experience, writes
J.D. Tuccille, Goffman concludes that the neighborhood is molded by
its young men’s relationship with the criminal justice system and
that such places constitute an archipelago of racially tense police
states within a larger liberal democracy.

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