Steven Lubet does an old-fashioned journalistic review of sociology’s newest heart-throb, Alice Goffman and her book, ON THE RUN: Fugitive Life in an American City, revealing a confirmation bias that never even thought to vet the specifics.

On the Run is the story of the six years Goffman spent conducting an ethnographic study in a poor black community in West Philadelphia. Beginning in her sophomore year at the University of Pennsylvania and continuing through her graduate work at Princeton, she observed a group of young men in a neighborhood she pseudonymously called 6th Street. Goffman eventually moved into an apartment in the neighborhood, sometimes taking in two of them as roommates, while she chronicled their lives, challenges and, most notably, their almost endless interactions with the law on matters ranging from trivial to homicidal. […]

The praise overwhelmed the nays, and soon there was talk of a possible film or television adaptation. The New York Times selected On the Run as one of fifty notable works of non-fiction for 2014; it was the only university press book on the list. Picador won a bidding war for the paperback rights, and issued a widely promoted trade edition in April 2015.

One of the previously unremarked upon problems is Goffman’s credulity toward her sources, which leads her to repeat dubious stories as though they are unquestionably true. Consider the case of the brothers Chuck and Tim (all names in On the Run are pseudonyms), which Goffman also tells in her public appearances. In Goffman’s account, eighteen year old Chuck and eleven year old Tim were out for a drive, when they were pulled over by the police. It turned out that the car had been stolen, and Chuck was arrested, notwithstanding his protest that he had only borrowed it from his girlfriend’s uncle. Young Tim was also arrested, according to Goffman, and later placed on three years of juvenile probation on the charge of “accessory” to receiving stolen property. (p. 12).

This story is not incidental to the book, as Goffman uses Tim’s ordeal to demonstrate how difficult it is for her subjects to avoid acquiring significant criminal records at an early age. Although I do not doubt her general point about the snares of the judicial system, these particular events almost certainly could not have happened as she retells them in her book and lectures.

I spoke with a former Philadelphia public defender and a current Philadelphia prosecutor, both of whom have personal knowledge of juvenile court proceedings during the period of Goffman’s study. Neither one could imagine that an eleven year old would be arrested and charged merely for riding in a stolen car. The only reason he would be taken into custody, said the prosecutor, “would be to get him home safely.” Even adult passengers, he told me, are not charged for riding in stolen cars, because that is not a crime in Pennsylvania. There is nothing to prosecute, he said, because it isn’t against the law.

The former public defender was still more skeptical of the alleged juvenile court charge and probation for accessory to receiving stolen property. That would never happen to an eleven year old simply for riding in the car, he explained. There would have to have been proof of something more – “like maybe if the kid had popped the ignition with a screwdriver.” And in any event, a three year “probation sentence” would have been impossible, because Pennsylvania does not have fixed terms of probation for juveniles. Moreover, there are several outcomes less severe than probation that are virtually always given to first-time juvenile offenders for non-violent crimes. If the length of a short “consent decree” had been extended to a three years, it would have been for continuing behavior far more serious than merely sitting in a stolen car. Finally, there is no such offense as accessory to receiving stolen property in the Pennsylvania Crime Code. “Accessory” is a term you might hear on television, said the prosecutor, “but not from a juvenile court judge.”

I do not know what actually happened to Chuck and Tim that day, but neither does Goffman. Chuck’s story about his girlfriend’s uncle would be immediately familiar to anyone who has ever represented a car thief, but we can leave that aside for now. I am not naïve about neighborhoods like 6th Street. I spent two years in a legal services office on the West Side of Chicago, and another decade as a defense lawyer in the Cook County juvenile and criminal courts. The idea that an eleven year old received such a heavy sentence for such innocent behavior is so implausible as to raise red flags, as is Goffman’s uncritical reliance of the story.

Lubet even cites the story in Goffman’s book that she participated in driving around her homeboys while they were actively trying to find someone to murder; an action that constitutes a felony in just about every jurisdiction in the country.

Lubet asks

I do not know if Goffman’s editors and dissertation committee held her to a journalist’s standard of fact checking.

Perhaps because the story was too good, too in line with how her peers in academia view those people along with their contempt of the America they can blame for the social conditions as laid forth in the book. Even Lubet, who has done the job her editors should have, can’t help but fall in with the politically correct

I did not set out to censure Goffman, and it gives me no pleasure to make these observations about such an accomplished young scholar. There is much of value in On the Run, especially as it reveals the terrible consequences of brutal- and over-policing in minority neighborhoods.

Alice Goffman wouldn’t be the first sociologist to embellish her stories and romanticize the “exotic” people she is studying. She is to sociology what Timothy Treadwell was to zoology; Alice just didn’t end up being eaten by her subjects.

Or she could just be making the whole thing up.

alice goffman sociology