POSSIBLE PROBLEMS IN THE WORK

I am reaching out to you about Ms. Alice Goffman, who is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at The University of Wisconsin-Madison. Below, I provide you ample empirical evidence to support an investigation into substantial research misconduct on the part of Ms. Goffman in her book On the Run and in her American Sociological Review article "On the Run." Given the high regard in which Ms. Goffman and her work are held, you may be skeptical about this document. But I invite you at least to scroll down these many pages of careful substantiation before you form an opinion. To make this task easier for you, I've prefaced each point with a short statement in boldface. I ask you at least to read through the boldfaced parts below, since they will give you a feeling for what is contained herein. Taken together all the boldfaced parts come out to just a few pages of reading. Then, if you are still unsure, I invite you to read through the very first point (easy to understand without any fore knowledge) to reassure yourselves of the groundedness of my concerns. (Let me note that I have not arranged these points in order of severity. Later points sometimes are of lesser severity and sometimes of greater severity.) Private information intended for research ethics procedures has been redacted in the version you are receiving.

This critique is based on fact-checking Ms. Goffman's research against publicly available information, such as Philadelphia police homicide data and publicly available residential address records. This critique is also based on a close textual reading of her publications as well as a review of her speaking engagements posted online, highlighting inconsistencies and contradictions that cast serious doubt on the truthfulness of her accounts. Now, typically authors might have a few problems in their work due to errors of some sort and ethnographers might change a few facts to protect their subjects' identity. But the appearance of literally dozens of factual problems, falsification of quotations, textual inconsistencies, improbabilities, and impossibilities as well as self-aggrandizing exaggerations in Ms. Goffman's work are too plentiful to be dismissed. Moreover, there is no sensible explanation (for example, protecting personally identifiable information) for certain implausible accounts she tells. Below, across more than fifty pages filled with careful substantiation, you will read about nearly four dozen problems in a (partially) arbitrary order. If even just a portion of the below problems are what they seem to be, then this will suggest serious research misconduct, possibly including data fabrication, data falsification, data destruction, sloppiness, and failure to protect her subjects' anonymity.

To be clear, this is not a political critique, nor is it a critique about white privilege. Instead, it is a critique about possible dishonesty. In ethnographic research so much evidence is unavailable to the reader that even a few instances of dishonesty by the ethnographer raise questions as to the truthfulness of the rest of the work. This is very similar to how a few moments of dishonesty by journalists alter perceptions of their reports' veracity. There is evidence that Brian Williams told three implausible tales, Bill O'Reilly told two implausible tales, and Ms. Goffman told many more. In the end, it is the preponderance of the problems that casts a long shadow over the genuineness and quality of this work.

Problem 1: Ms. Goffman says that Alex (all names in her writings are pseudonyms), one of the main characters in her book and article, did not give her permission to take fieldnotes about him. She also says that she complied and did not take any fieldnotes about him. If this is the case, why does she have 31 lines of direct quotes from him in her book and 16 lines of direct quotes from him in her article? And why does she embellish these quotes with observation¬like descriptions of laughing, nodding, yawning, et cetera? Ms. Goffman herself states in her article that she would only use quotation marks if she had "[written] down what people said as they spoke (by typing it directly onto a laptop or by using a cell phone text message)" (American Sociological Review, Footnote 4, pg. 342). So what explains these direct quotes and descriptions? Did she take fieldnotes on Alex anyway? Or are those quotes and observation-like descriptions made up?

In Ms. Goffman's October 11, 2014 C-Span talk, she says that she did not take any fieldnotes about Alex in order to comply with his wishes:

It is really interesting that you talk about putting things in the book that people don't necessarily want you to put in....For me, I didn't want to put in anything that people didn't want in there....When I first talked to [Alex] about the book, he was extremely suspicious of me and didn't want to be in it. He was basically like, you don't know anything about this. You have no right to be writing this. And I said, okay, I will not put you in any of the fieldnotes [emphasis mine]. We can still hang out but you won't be in any of the notes. And that was our understanding. Years later when [the book] was much closer to being done, he called me and said, 'I just heard I am not in the book. What the fuck.' And I was like, don't you remember like seventeen years ago... five and a half years ago we had this whole conversation? And he was like, 'What do you mean, I've got so many things that could be in the book.' And he just started rattling them off. So I was like, my gosh, okay. I'll put you on the first page of the book (C-Span, minutes 44:40-46:00; I took out uhms and likes, and similar for readability).1

From the above quote we learn that Ms. Goffman was not taking fieldnotes about Alex, since he denied her permission to do so and she complied. However, she never mentions this fact in her book's body or in her article; it never appears in the book's endnotes or in its Methodological Note section. Moreover, in her article, she says that she only uses quotes when she "wrote down what people said as they spoke (by typing it directly onto a laptop or by using a cell phone text message)" {American Sociological Review, Footnote 4, pg. 342). Let me repeat: Ms. Goffman herself clarifies her rule about when to use quotes and when not to use them. All of the above makes it especially troubling that there are, by my count, 31 lines of direct quotations from Alex in her book and 16 lines in her article. The 16 lines of direct quotes in her article also appear in the book. Below, I provide you with the two large quotes that appear in both the article and the book and one quote that appears only in the book.

1 http://www.c-span.org/video/7321984-4/panel-discussion-race-inequality. It is important to listen to the portion I indicated from the audio rather than just to glance through the accompanying transcript, since the transcript is poorly done and distorts the actual words Ms. Goffman uses.

The first quote comes from one of the two most memorable stories in her book. And just like Ms. Goffman says she promised Alex in her C-Span quote above, she put him on the very first page of the book. This dialogue centers around Alex's decision not to seek medical treatment after being pistol-whipped, an event during which his teeth are knocked out and his jaw broken. According to Ms. Goffman, Alex suffers permanent disfigurement instead of going to the hospital. Also, in the book, the quote is preceded by numerous other quotes by Alex in a back-and-forth dialogue. She writes: "Mike usually won when the guys played craps...After a pair of nines, Alex started in on Mike. 'You a selfish, skinny motherfucker, man.' 'Niggas is always gonna hate,' Mike grinned. [Now Alex] 'You think you better than everybody, man. You ain't shit!' Chuck laughed softly at his two best friends. Then he yawned and told Alex to shut his fat ass up... 'Can I get a cheesesteak?' Alex interjected. 'Man, take your fat ass in the house,' Chuck laughed' " (pg. vii). Note how Ms. Goffman makes it look like she has actually observed and taken notes on the conversation through her use of quotation marks. Moreover, she uses various language devices to make these quotes sound like an observational account. For example, she says she observed Mike "grin" at Alex, Chuck "laugh" and "yawn," and Alex "interject." This story is in the Prologue to the book and is the first thing a person reads when they open her book. Here is the large block quote appearing in both the book's Prologue and in the article (pg. ix and American Sociological Review, pg. 348):

That night, Alex called his cousin who was studying to be a nurse's assistant to come stitch up his face. In the morning, he repeated his refusal to avail himself of medical care:

All the bullshit I done been through [to finish his parole sentence], it's like, I'm not just going to check into emergency and there come the cops asking me all types of questions and writing my information down and before you know it I'm back in there [in prison]. Even if they not there for me some of them probably going to recognize me then they going to come over, run my shit [run a check on his name]....I ain't supposed to be up there [his parole terms forbade him to be near 6th Street where he was injured]; I can't be out at no two o'clock [his curfew was ten]. Plus they might still got that little jawn [warrant] on me in Bucks County [for court fees he did not pay at the end of a trial two years earlier]. I don't want them running my name, and then I got to go to court or I get locked back up.

Again, let me point out that the above quote is set apart by Ms. Goffman deliberately as a block quote. If she wasn't taking fieldnotes about Alex, as she claims, and this quote is from roughly 2004, as a number of details indicate it is (to be discussed later in this document), then how was she able to produce this direct quote? She says in the above C-Span quote that it was around the time her book was nearing completion that she and Alex had this conversation about including him. This would be long after 2004, since her dissertation was defended in 2010 and her book was published in 2014.

A totally different series of quotes from an exchange between Alex and Donna appear both in her article and her book. These quotes are used by Ms. Goffman to demonstrate how women

use threats of arrest to limit the freedom of the men in their lives who are living with warrants or on parole. She writes (American Sociological Review, pg. 348):

In the early morning after a party, Mike and I drove Alex back to Donna's apartment. She was waiting on the step for him:

Donna: Where the fuck you been at?

Alex: Don't worry about it.

Donna: You must don't want to live here no more.

Alex: Come on, Don. Stop playing.

Donna: Matter of fact I'll give you the choice [between prison or a halfway house].

Alex: Come on, Don.

Donna: Uhn-uhn, you not staying here no more. I'm about to call your P.O. now, so you better make up your mind where you going to go.

Alex: I'm tired, man, come on, open the door.

Donna: Nigga, the next time I'm laying in the bed by myself that's a wrap [that's the end].

The book quote, while almost identical, does have some differences (pg. 100). But here again, both in the book and in her article, she indents this conversation, indicating it is a direct quote.

One last Alex quote that occurs only in the book deserves special focus. This quote appears towards the end of the book in the hospital scene, right after Chuck has died. The story of Chuck being shot in the head and his death at the hospital consumes the last ten pages in the book (pgs. 251-261). Also, this story is talked about by many reviewers and is the climatic end of her book. There is a moving moment shortly after Chuck's death where Ms. Goffman, Mike, and Alex are in the hospital room with Chuck's body still in the bed. Alex is talking about revenge, "and Alex said, 'Please—somebody gon'die regardless,' and Mike nodded his head in agreement, and Tanesha, too. Alex counted one, two, three, four with his fingers. The number of people who would die" (pg. 256). Again, her use of quotation marks and devices like Mike nodding his head all give the distinct impression that this is real ethnographic data, via quotes of conversations. And Malcolm Gladwell in his August 11, 2014 New Yorker article about her book features this exact same quote from Alex, noting that the last ten pages in her book are "devastating."2 Mr. Gladwell does not know, nor do his readers know, that Ms. Goffman's quotes (by her admission in her C-Span talk) seem to be made up. Only people who have listened to her C-Span talk could be aware of this admission on her part.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/oct/09/americas-front-lines/

Two of the most important stories in the book thus involve quotes from Alex that are apparently just made up. The book also has even more quotes from Alex, totaling 31 lines of direct quotation (see pgs. vii-ix, 100-101, pg. 233, pg. 256). If Ms. Goffman had said in her book and article that she was reconstructing these events from her memory many years later and that these quotes are for dramatic effect, that might have been okay, I guess. But she never says that. In fact, in the article she says she only uses quotes when it is directly from something a person says and when she was able to take notes about the conversation shortly thereafter. From her own statement in her article, she is stating that these two large block quotes above are in fact direct quotes from Alex. Yet, in her C-Span talk says she did not take any notes about Alex, respecting his wishes. In other words, it is not a case where she could claim she was taking the fieldnotes anyway over his objections, because in the C-Span exchange she says she did not take any such fieldnotes. Such misuse of quotations is a serious problem for something that purports to be scientific research. Falsification of dialogues with quotes is not okay. In fact, falsification of quotes fits the very definition of research falsification: changing or misreporting data.

Ms. Goffman's book has received praise for its novelistic style, making it an interesting read. However, it is one thing to have a novelistic style of writing by intelligent selection of quotes from fieldnotes and quite another thing to be making up quotes. In ethnography, conversations and observations are the data. This makes it especially troubling that these quotes are from some of the main and most lengthy stories in the book that are used to back up her analyses. As you will discover as you read through this document, her numerous conflicting accounts suggest she does not have the high level of memory a person would need in order to be able to remember many years later such conversations and whether people are yawning, nodding, laughing, grinning, and interjecting during those conversations. Perhaps these adverbs are indicative of something more than falsification of quotes: in a worst-case scenario, fabrication out of whole cloth.

Problem 2: Building on Problem 1, Ms. Goffman's claim about Alex changing his mind about being in "the book" "years later when [it] was much closer to being done" seems questionable given that there are already quotes from Alex in her American Sociological Review article (published June 2009, but most likely would have been written and sent into the Journal in 2008). Ms. Goffman "had to write a dissertation" (pg. 205) in 2008, received a dissertation writing fellowship for 2009, and defended her dissertation in 2010, so was "the book" really nearing completion as far back as 2008, when she submitted the article, with Alex quotations in it, to the Journal?

Consider the time frames of Ms. Goffman's article, book, and C-Span talk. Ms. Goffman explains, in the C-Span quote above, that as her book was nearing completion Alex became aware that he was not in the book. Ms. Goffman reminded him that, way back when, he said he did not want to be in the fieldnotes and she complied. Then to make Alex happy, Ms. Goffman says she put his story at the front of her book. Therefore, one would not expect to have seen stories of Alex in her earlier works, because she says that it was as her book was nearing completion that she included him in it. The issue here is that her June 2009 American Sociological Review article discussed above, which included numerous lines of Alex quotes, was

written before her book. Given the journalistic process, a 2008 time frame is likely for when she wrote that article and probably even for when she submitted it for publication. Also, she says it is when the book was nearing completion that Alex asked her to add him in. Therefore, he did not ask her early on in the book writing process. I know it is hard to fathom that a person would make up such stories about Alex, even including a conversation with him about being in the book or not, but I am afraid these stories don't seem likely to have happened. As you will see in Problems 22-26 below, there are several other serious problems in her other accounts about Alex, including three contradictory stories and one implausibility again raising the question if this Alex material is all invented out of whole cloth.

Problem 3: Ms. Goffman's four-page ethnographic account of attending Juvenile Court is puzzling at best and downright impossible at worst because she describes an open court room—but Juvenile Court in Philadelphia is closed.

In Philadelphia, Juvenile Court is a closed system with closed courtrooms. A juvenile court case is heard with only the family and those involved in the case in the room. Persons from other cases are not in the courtroom listening to other cases while they wait for their case to be called (whereas adults often hear cases about other adults, as adult court is an open system). I encourage you to call the Philadelphia Juvenile Court at 215-686-4000, and they will confirm the closed court process for juvenile cases.

Ms. Goffman mentions attending juvenile court as part of her ethnography of 6* h Street, which is a pseudonym for the few-block area she studied. While mostly she just provides her insights without reference to fieldnotes, there is one long ethnographic account about Juvenile Court from her fieldnotes. It spans four pages (pg. 108-111). A reader knows that she is in attendance at Juvenile Court because Tim is a juvenile (age 13) and because she says she goes to "Room K of the Juvenile Courthouse" (pg. 108). Room K is the waiting room. After about a page of describing the waiting room, it is on pg. 109 that the story takes an implausible turn. Ms. Goffman describes going from the waiting room into a smaller courtroom. The problem with her account that follows is that Ms. Goffman describes not a closed courtroom, as is the process in the Philadelphia Juvenile system, but rather an open courtroom: "We move to a small courtroom now, where we sit on long benches and wait for a judge to appear and begin hearing the cases. In the rows around us sit mothers and their sons, some with their younger children also....Two guards stand at the front, and public defenders and some case managers sit in the front row. A thin white woman, who I assume is a public defender, stands and turns towards us and calls a name; no one replies. She calls another name, and a boy and his mother or guardian approach her and speak in muffled voices....The judge emerges from a door behind the bench, and the guard asks us to stand and then be seated....Eventually, Tim's name is called, and he walks with his mother to the front desk. The judge asks if a certain person is here; I assume this is the teacher. The prosecutor says, 'No, Your Honor, I do not believe he is here, but I did reach him last night, and he told me he was planning to be here.' The public defender, the judge, and the prosecutor all look at their calendars and go back and forth for a while until they find a good date to continue the case" (pgs. 109-110). Ms. Goffman's description of attorneys and their clients being called to the bench in front of others and having their cases heard is clearly of an open courtroom process. Again, she says this four-page account is from

her fieldnotes taken during that visit. So this is not a case of an imperfect memory. Moreover, a person who has attended Juvenile Court in Philadelphia would have known that the system is a closed system. The disparity between her account of Juvenile Court and how Juvenile Court works in Philadelphia is suggestive of fabrication of ethnographic research.

Problem 4: Ms. Goffman seems to have a lot of trouble being consistent with even with the simplest of ethnographic details. Notably, she even flip-flops on how many blocks she is defining as her 6th Street primary field site. This is supposed to be a serious scientific study by an ethnographer who says she studied 6th Street for six years, so what explains why she can't even keep straight something as fundamental as the number of blocks making up her primary field site?

Throughout this document you will see numerous examples of Ms. Goffman's inconsistency surrounding larger factual issues, and interspersed with those larger factual problems will be even more examples of her presenting simple facts inconsistently. This section discusses one such simple thing that she presents inconsistently.

Ms. Goffman's field work centers on an area she calls 6th Street, and she claims to have conducted a house-to-house survey there. Moreover, she repeatedly reports precise counts of beatings she witnessed, police raiding houses, men running from police, and so forth, all taking place on 6th Street. And multiple times she describes 6th Street as a five-block area. However, multiple other times she says it is a four-block area. Notice her varied descriptions in the quotes below:

The five blocks known as 6th Street are 93 percent Black, according to a survey of residents that Chuck and I conducted in 2007 (American Sociological Review pg. 342).

Chuck and I did a neighborhood survey of one summer of residents in this four block radius of 6th Street (Irving K. Barber Learning Center, Minute 14:00-14:25).3

6th Street is a wide commercial avenue, and the five residential blocks that connect to it from the south form an eponymous little neighborhood (pg. 3).

"The first year and a half I spent in this four-block radius, I took notes every day about what was happening" (New School, minute 20:00-20:45).4

In her September 2, 2014 Irving K. Barber presentation (quoted above), Ms. Goffman says three times over the course of fifty minutes that her observational counts are from the four-block area she calls 6th Street. The one quote above and also the two quotes below from this presentation all reference four blocks: "I watched the police stop pedestrians or people in cars, search them, run their names to see if any warrants came up, ask them to come in for questioning, or make an arrest every single day with five exceptions in the first eighteen months in this four-block area" (Irving K. Barber, minute 21:20-21:45); and "I saw young men

3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sz2XVtCAbqg

4 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LcsoXnVxkDU

i

running from police 111 times, more than once every five days, just in these four blocks (Irving K. Barber, minute 26:20-26:40).5 This is not a case of someone misspeaking just once. In addition, Ms. Goffman repeats this four-block number at her New School talk. Also, since in both her book and article she describes it as a five-block area, this is not the case of a one-time typo. So did she study a five-block area or a four-block area? Such a lack of consistency about the number of blocks she is studying is not as trivial as it may sound to those outside social science (or science in general). This is especially the case since the vast majority of her numerical data are from her 2003-2004 observational counts and her 2007 survey. It is hard to imagine that someone who did counts and conducted a survey of a small area that they claim to have spent six years studying can't keep straight how many blocks they studied. This is akin to someone flip-flopping between claiming to have studied a new drug in 80 people and then later claiming instead to have studied the new drug in 100 people (4:5 ratio).

This is a smaller point, but careful definition of one's field sites and of what one means by neighborhood really does matter in this type of ethnography. One would think this would be elementary for any ethnographer. It is remarkable that Ms. Goffman ended her book with a Methodological Note that's no less than fifty pages long. She includes in that Methodological Note all kinds of reflections on herself, her changing state of mind and feelings at different points during and after her ethnographic fieldwork, and she even ends, as mentioned before, with a lengthy narrative (on Chuck's death) that didn't necessarily belong in such an appendix. But nowhere in those fifty pages does Ms. Goffman speak explicitly, clearly, and transparently about these more obviously methodological kinds of questions, which still are unanswered.

Problem 5: Ms. Goffman's observation that in December 2002 the 6th Street area had police surveillance cameras is erroneous. Philadelphia did not install police cameras until 2006. This is a strange error for a sociologist doing immersion ethnography for six years, studying police surveillance in an area she defines as spanning four or five blocks.

As part of her ethnographic evidence of an intense surveillance system of black poor youth in her field site, she describes the area when she first visits in December 2002: "By 2002,...police video cameras had been placed on major streets" (pg. 4). The same description appears in her article: "By 2002, curfews were established around 6th Street for those under age 18 and video cameras had been placed on major streets" (American Sociological Review, pg. 342). She also tells the same story that in 2002 there were police cameras in the 6th Street area: "In 2002...video cameras have been placed on major streets" (Irving K. Barber, Minutes 20:50-21:30).6 However, the Philadelphia Police Department received a grant for cameras and began installing cameras in 2006 as part of a pilot project: "The project, which began in 2006 as a pilot under Mayor John F. Street, has been plagued with setbacks from the beginning" (Philadelphia Inquirer, 6/21/2012).7 Moreover, Philadelphia did not even have red light cameras to catch

5 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sz2XVtCAbqg

6 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sz2XVtCAbqg

7 http://articles.philly.com/2012-06-21/news/32353087_l_cameras-police-officers-oversight

speeders until 2004, when the first one was installed on Roosevelt Blvd. (one of the three most dangerous roads for accidents in the USA): "The dangerous reputation of the road led to installation of the first red light cameras in Philadelphia in 2004" (Wikipedia: Roosevelt Blvd. Philadelphia).8 Therefore, this is not a case of Ms. Goffman mistaking red light cameras for police surveillance cameras, since neither existed in 2002.

I would have expected to read something like in 2002 there were no cameras, but by 2006 cameras were being installed on the streets. A person would expect that the installation of cameras in the 6th Street area would have been a topic of conversation. Also, this would seem an important development for an ethnographer making an argument about increased surveillance creating a culture of "suspects and fugitives."

Problem 6: Ms. Goffman presents a vivid and powerful account of Jay-Jay's murder at the hands of Tino. Her presentation of this account misleads a reader into thinking she has witnessed a murder. Reviewers have had this false impression, including Alex Kotlowitz, who in his June 26, 2014 the New York Times book review says that "she witnessed... two murders, one at the hands of a young man she was following, the other at the hands of a police officer."9 Ms. Goffman doesn't ever state straightforwardly that she never actually witnessed this murder of Jay-Jay at the hands of Tino. Only through careful cross-checking of an anecdote that appears 160 pages later, which does not mention Jay-Jay and Tino by name, can one realize that this is a secondhand account and not something she observed. Why mislead the reader in this way?

(This section works from the premise that the events surrounding Jay-Jay's murder are true, even though there is good reason to believe, as outlined in Problem 7 below, that this account may very well not be true.)

Background: The way Ms. Goffman organized her book is that each section is devoted to a particular topical area. For this reason, separate chapters of the book often make reference to the same incidences as other chapters but with a different focus and with different details of the same event provided. The problem that arises is that, when a reader compares the details of these chapters, very different pictures of the facts emerge. As you will see throughout this document, in many accounts she manipulates the reader through misleading presentations of the material, leading to multiple instances of reviewer and interviewer misinterpretation. The presentation of scientific material should not be so disorganized and misleading that multiple people have completely different understandings of a researcher's work, some of which are downright incorrect.

There are two different accounts of Jay-Jay's murder in different sections of the book. The first makes it sound like Ms. Goffman witnessed Jay-Jay's murder and then the after-murder

8 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roosevelt_Boulevard_(Philadelphia)

9 http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/29/books/review/alice-goffmans-on-the-run.html?_r=0

planning session (pg. 91-92). In the second account, she does not witness the murder but is there for the after-murder discussion. This has led to misunderstandings by reviewers, who believe she has witnessed Jay-Jay's murder. As you read how Ms. Goffman presents the first Jay-Jay murder account, ask yourself what your impression would be. She writes:

During a dice game one evening, Tino put a gun to Jay-Jay's head and demanded all his

th

money. Tino had moved to 6 Street only a few months before, so Chuck and Mike considered him only a candidate member of the group—a recent transplant on probationary status. Jay-Jay, who was originally from 4th Street but a frequent guest on 6th, didn't think that Tino was seriously trying to rob him, and told him to stop playing. Tino had been "wetted" (that is, taking wet [PCP]) all weekend and was now humiliated by Jay-Jay's refusal to take his robbery seriously; he demanded again that Jay-Jay give him everything in his pockets. Jay-Jay again refused. By this time, Chuck and Reggie were yelling at Tino to put down the gun. Steve, also wetted out that night, was laughing—he didn't think that Tino had what it took to rob Jay-Jay or to shoot him, and said so. Tino pulled the trigger and Jay-Jay fell to the pavement. Later, sitting in the basement with Chuck, Reggie, Steve, and me, Tino held his knees and rocked back and forth, repeating, 'My intentions wasn't to shoot him'..Jay-Jay's death triggered what is called a war...After a couple of weeks, Chuck and Steve had both been shot—Chuck in the neck and Steve in the thigh (pg. 91-93).

It is only 160 pages later, in the Methodological Note section, that the extremely attentive reader learns Ms. Goffman has not witnessed the murder but rather only the after-murder planning session. Here is the next quote about the incident. Please note that Ms. Goffman does not specify in this second account that Jay-Jay is the person murdered, adding to the difficulty in knowing that these two accounts are one in the same. Is she being deliberately confusing? She writes:

Reggie, now nearly eighteen, phoned to tell me that a man who was loosely associated with the 6th Street Boys had killed a man from 4th Street during a botched robbery at a dice game. He insisted that I come immediately to his uncle's basement, where the guys were assembling to work out what to do next. I sat on top of the washing machine for four hours and listened while five men berated the shooter for his thoughtless actions [and] discussed what the fallout would be from this death...Through this emergency, it seemed I'd somehow been asked to come back to 6th Street—not as someone

connected to Mike, but on my own steam....Over the following weeks, young men from 4th Street drove through the 6th Street neighborhood and shot up the block. Chuck took a partial bullet in the neck, and Steve took a bullet in his right thigh (pg. 250-251).

Because of how the first account is written, it leads the reader to believe Ms. Goffman has witnessed this murder. Since in the second account she does not mention Jay-Jay's name and it comes 160 pages later, it is easy to see how a reader could continue to believe she was present at Jay-Jay's murder. I, for most of the book, felt deep sympathy towards her, believing she had witnessed a murder. I even considered the ethical dilemma she faced of telling the police or not. And so on and so forth, only to learn 160 pages later this was not the case.

10

While it is still significant that she says she was there for the aftermath, her misleading style of manipulating elements for dramatic effect has led to reviewer misinterpretation. As mentioned above, Alex Kotlowitz writes: "She witnesses a number of beatings and, by my count, two murders, one at the hands of a young man she was following, the other at the hands of a police officer....I'll also concede that I've never witnessed something as profoundly disturbing as a murder, and if I did, I suppose under certain circumstances, especially if I feared for my or my family's safety, I might be torn about coming forward. But I wish Goffman addressed this dilemma head-on."10 He calls her work a "remarkable feat of reporting."11 Malcolm Gladwell also remarks that "she mentions instances in which people killed someone."12 She has received accolades and much goodwill, in part, because of her bravery in the face of witnessing this murder that she did not see. She has never corrected, to my knowledge, such misunderstandings.

Perhaps it is because the audience does not know she wasn't there for Jay-Jay's murder that certain questions have not been asked. For example, did she have Tino's permission to write about him, as she had been away from 6th Street for about two years at this point and Tino was new to the 6th Street area? Since he fled that night, did she really get his permission afterwards? This would have been a very interesting topic for her fifty-page-long Methodological Note section. But instead she focuses almost all the attention on herself during these fifty pages, including her feelings about her sexual attractiveness to guys at Princeton, getting pulled over for making a u-turn, getting a parking ticket, and so many other things (pg. 247-249).

Problem 7: Ms. Goffman's story of Jay-Jay's apprehension by police many weeks after (in a different account) Jay-Jay was supposedly shot dead is impossible unless Jay-Jay has somehow risen from the dead. Adding to the absurdity is that Chuck takes a partial bullet to the neck shortly after Jay-Jay's murder (in a revenge shooting). And yet somehow Chuck already has the revenge partial bullet in his neck when Jay-Jay is apprehended. Was one or the other or both of these accounts fabricated? Because both accounts obviously can't be true.

(This section draws on information contained in the preceding problem. Due to the textual complexity of this section, if you have any confusion after reading it, I would encourage you to review pages 92-92, 25-27, and 250-251.)

Jay-Jay is featured in two important accounts in Ms. Goffman's book. (The first of these includes the two narratives covered in Problem 6.) I briefly outline the two accounts, highlight the problem between the two accounts, and then provide the textual evidence.

As you shall see, the first account below is about Jay-Jay being shot to death at a dice game and

10 http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/29/books/review/alice-goffmans-on-the-run.html?_r=0

11 http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/29/books/review/alice-goffmans-on-the-run.html?_r=0

12

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/oct/09/americas-front-lines/

11

the aftermath, including Chuck being shot and sustaining a "partial bullet" to the neck (a revenge shooting for Jay-Jay's murder). Also important to note is that it is on the evening of Jay-Jay's death in 2006 that Ms. Goffman, who had stopped studying 6th Street for nearly two years, is invited by Reggie to come back and record what has happened.

As you shall see, the second account below is a story about Ms. Goffman, Chuck, and Reggie running from the police and is dated September 2006. As the story unfolds, Chuck is not running fast because of a partial bullet in his neck. Since it is Jay-Jay's death that gets Ms. Goffman invited back to study 6th Street in 2006, and Chuck is running slowly due to the partial bullet he took to the neck after Jay-Jay's murder, one would feel safe to assume that Jay-Jay would not appear in this story as he is already dead. I almost could not believe it when the story about them running from the police came to an end with Jay-Jay being taking away by the police! These scenarios are mutually impossible unless Jay-Jay has risen from the dead. In what follows, I provide textual evidence of the problem outlined here.

Account 1: Jay-Jay's death

Mike had been Ms. Goffman's primary connection to 6th Street. When he goes to jail in March 2004, she loses her connection to study 6th Street. She writes: "In March of 2004, Mike got sentenced to one to three years in state prison....But having not yet formed independent relationships with his friends and neighbors, I had no reason to hang out on 6th Street in Mike's absence" (pg. 164). Moreover, according to Ms. Goffman Mike serves his full sentence, approximately three years, in state prison before he is released. She explains, "After serving his full sentence in state prison, Mike returned to 6th Street in 2007" (pg. 251).

It is the death of Jay-Jay in 2006 that gets Ms. Goffman invited back to study 6th Street while Mike is in jail. Ms. Goffman writes: "Reggie, now nearly eighteen, phoned to tell me that a man who was loosely associated with the 6th Street Boys had killed a man from 4th Street during a botched robbery at a dice game. He insisted that I come immediately to his uncle's basement, where the guys were assembling to work out what to do next. I sat on top of the washing machine for four hours and listened while five men berated the shooter for his thoughtless actions [and] discussed what the fallout would be from this death...Through this emergency, it seemed I'd somehow been asked to come back to 6th Street—not as someone connected to Mike, but on my own steam....Over the following weeks, young men from 4th Street drove through the 6th Street neighborhood and shot up the block. Chuck took a partial bullet in the neck [emphasis mine]" (pg. 250-251). An earlier but similar story, which also will be familiar from Problem 6 above, appears on pgs. 92-93, but in this version Ms. Goffman says who the victim is, namely Jay-Jay. "During a dice game...Tino put a gun to Jay-Jay's head and demanded all his money. Tino had moved to 6th Street only a few months before, so Chuck and Mike considered him only a candidate member of the group...Jay-Jay, who was originally from 4* Street but a frequent guest on 6th, didn't think that Tino was seriously trying to rob him...Tino pulled the trigger and Jay-Jay fell to the pavement. Later, sitting in the basement with Chuck, Reggie, Steve, and me, Tino held his knees and rocked back and forth...Jay-Jay's death triggered what is called a war...After a couple of weeks, Chuck and Steve had both been shot—Chuck in the neck [emphasis mine]" (pg. 92-93).

12

After reading the above quotes, we have learned that Reggie is "nearly eighteen." Therefore, we can ascertain that it is 2006 at the time, since Ms. Goffman says that in 2003 Reggie is fifteen (pg. 107). We have also learned that this is the event that gets Ms. Goffman invited back on 6th Street to study the people there without Mike (who is still in prison at the time). We have learned that Chuck takes a partial bullet to the neck. And we have learned Jay-Jay is dead. It is only by comparing the above account to her other account below that the implausibility of these accounts taken together can be known.

Account 2: Jay-Jay's arrest after his death

Ms. Goffman presents a long and detailed account, from fieldnotes dated as September 2006, of a police chase with Ms. Goffman, Chuck, and Reggie all running from the police through neighbors' houses. During this account Reggie is teasing Chuck. She writes:

From fieldnotes taken in September 2006:... 'Look at yourself, nigga! You don't run for shit now with that little bit of shell in your shoulder,' Reggie responded, referring to the partial bullet [emphasis mine] that had lodged just below the back of Chuck's neck when he was shot the month before....Chuck got on the phone with his mother and then a neighbor to find out how many police were on his block and for whom they had come....Into the phone Chuck was saying, 'Damn. They got Jay-Jay? Damn' [emphasis mine] (pg. 26-27).

As you can see from the textual evidence in the two accounts above, these two accounts cannot coexist. It is Jay-Jay's death that gets Ms. Goffman invited back to spend time again with Chuck and Reggie and the guys on 6th Street. It is during the aftermath of Jay-Jay's death that Chuck takes a partial bullet to the neck. Therefore, when Jay-Jay is apprehended by police it is impossible for Chuck to have in his neck that partial bullet he sustained as revenge for Jay-Jay's death, unless Jay-Jay has risen from the dead. Now, ethnographers sometimes change dates to protect their subjects, but there is no good ethnographic reason that explains away Chuck having a partial bullet in his neck (that he sustained as revenge for Jay-Jay's murder) when Jay-Jay is apprehended by police. This type of problem is often associated with a person who is lying and gets their stories wrong.

Problem 8: Ms. Goffman says that Chuck was not allowed to reenroll in the Philadelphia school system because at age 19 he was too old. However, this is implausible because the Philadelphia school system does not have an age 19 barrier to reenroll. One wonders how Ms. Goffman would not have known this after so many years of supposedly careful, intensive, and immersive fieldwork, much of that time spent with young, high school age people. There are many students 19, 20, and 21 years of age in the Philadelphia high school system.

As many Philadelphians know, there are numerous young adults in the public high schools who are well into their early twenties. There is no age 19 barrier to re-admittance even for students expelled. I encourage you to call the Philadelphia school system and you can verify what I am writing as factual. Here is their telephone number: 215-400-4000. Ms. Goffman writes that "Chuck" is barred from re-enrolling in Philadelphia public schools because he has turned 19: "Chuck tried re-enroll as a senior, but the high school would not admit him; he had already

13

turned nineteen" (pg. 12). Ms. Goffman uses this example to highlight how educational options are closed to young men in Philadelphia. But again, that is not how the Philadelphia school system works; therefore her account and its implications for life chances are erroneous. It is hard for me to imagine that an ethnographer who claims to be spending so much time around high school boys and girls over the course of six years would not be aware that there is no age 19 limitation. She even tutored two high schools students, Aisha and Ray.

Unfortunately, Ms. Goffman's erroneous ethnographic account has led the public into thinking that part of the problem is that Philadelphia public schools have an unreasonable age limitation. For example, in her NPR July 11, 2014 interview, after Ms. Goffman discusses Chuck being expelled, turning 19, and aging out of the system at 19, the interviewer says, "but he can't go back to school because he is too old," and Ms. Goffman responds, "but he is 19, so he can't go back to school" (NPR, minutes 4-5).13 Then Ms. Goffman and the interviewer go on to discuss how this age 19 limitation combined with warrants leads to a downward spiral. In addition, James Forman Jr. in his article also considers how Chuck's life chances could have been better, if only "the high school had allowed him to return and graduate."14 So Ms. Goffman's misinformation has led others into believing that an age 19 barrier to re-admittance to the public schools is part of the problem, when it is not part of the problem, because it is simply not true.

Problem 9: In the paragraphs below, I provide examples of Ms. Goffman falsely or at best misleadingly stating in both spoken descriptions of her fieldwork and her written work itself that she lived in the 6th Street field site for six years. She did not. Multiple reviewers, not to

mention large numbers of readers of her work and audience members at her talks, think she did. That she did not live in the 6th Street area stands directly at odds with the impression that has been propagated, by Ms. Goffman herself, of a totally immersive ethnographic fieldwork experience on 6th Street. A reader should not have to wade through competing statements in an attempt to gauge where she was living. (Later you will see there is ample reason to believe that Ms. Goffman lived a whopping forty blocks away from 6Th Street— hardly the total immersion she propagates.)

In her article, Ms. Goffman tells us that "in the fall of 2002" she "moved into an apartment in the poor to working-class Black neighborhood in which [Aisha] lived" (American Sociological Review, pg. 341). She indicates that this location was "about 10 minutes away" from 6th Street. On pg. xii of the Preface of the book, she also states that she and Aisha would take a bus to see Ronny, one of the guys on 6th Street. She writes, "[Ronny] lived with his grandmother about ten minutes away by car. We started taking the bus to visit him there" (pg. xii). She also writes that 6th Street was about fifteen blocks away from Aisha's: "Between November 2002 and April of 2003,1 spent a large part of every day with Aisha and her friends and relatives, who lived about fifteen blocks away from 6th Street" (pg. 71). Elsewhere she explicitly contrasts the two neighborhoods in terms of poverty levels and crime rates, as we shall see in Problem 10. She

13http://www.cbc.ca/player/Radio/Day+6/ID/2473032569/

14 http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/10/the-society-of-fugitives/379328/

14

suggests that her own neighborhood was even poor and more crime-ridden than 6th Street. Why is it, then, that so many readers and reviewers seem to have fallen under the impression that Ms. Goffman actually lived on 6th Street? Certainly Ms. Goffman has earned the respect of sociologists based on her accounts of moving from her campus apartment, forgoing the undergraduate experience of living amongst students, and living instead amongst her subjects in or very near the five blocks (or four blocks) she calls 6th Street—immersion ethnography. How has that occurred?

The answer, here as in so many other places, is that Ms. Goffman seems to tell more than one story. Notice how, on the second page of her book, in her discussion of picking up Alex near 6th Street after his teeth are knocked out, she implies that she lived only a few blocks away from 6th Street: "We drove to my apartment a few blocks away" (pg. viii). More directly misleading is her comment, in an interview on C-Span, that she actually lived in the 6th Street neighborhood for six years: "I spent the next six years living in that neighborhood and getting to know [Mike's] friends and relatives" (C-span, minutes 9:45-10:30).15 In her May 31, 2014 New York Times Op-Ed piece, she also says she lived there: "In the time I lived there, we lost a number of young men to shootings."16 I could supply other examples as well where she uses the word "living" or "lived" (versus visiting, for example) in a way that makes it appear like she was living in or very near the five blocks (or four blocks) she calls 6th Street. Even her book cover seems to imply this: "Alice Goffman spent six years living in one such neighborhood in Philadelphia." (Did Ms. Goffman not approve the book cover?) The general impression is that her neighborhood and the 6th Street neighborhood were all but indistinguishable. In fact, when she writes in the New York Times Op-Ed piece that "I moved into a working-class-to-poor African-American neighborhood in Philadelphia, and got to know a group of friends in their teens and early 20s who hung out together in the alleyways and on back porches," the idea of her having lived somewhere else than on 6th Street completely vanishes.

This lack of clarity (at best) or misrepresentation (at worst) is especially important because many scholars, reviewers, and interviewers have gotten the wrong impression about Ms. Goffman's place of residence and the nature of the "immersion ethnography" she conducted there. This includes noted reviewers such as Christopher Jencks, Jennifer Schuessler, and Malcolm Gladwell. For example, Christopher Jencks in his New York Review of Books article (October 9, 2014) tells readers that Ms. Goffman lived in the 6th Street area. Jencks writes: "After graduating from Penn, Goffman lived in the 6th Street area for another four years, takingnotes on everything she saw and heard, while pursuing a doctorate at Princeton."17 It is a real problem when the perception is that Ms. Goffman is living around 6th Street and taking notes on everything she is seeing and hearing, when in fact she did not live there. In addition, Jennifer Schuessler, in a New York Times article titled "The Field Work of Total Immersion"

15

http://www.c-span.org/video/?321984-4/panel-discussion-race-inequality.

16 http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/author/alice-goffman/

17 http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/oct/09/americas-front-lines/

15

(April 29, 2014), explains that Ms. Goffman "has pursued a deeply immersive style of fieldwork that has made her a rising star in sociology."18 The New Yorker article by Malcolm Gladwell (August 11, 2014) also says that Ms. Goffman "had taken an apartment close by and lived in the neighborhood for the next six years."19 And at the NPR website there is a write-up about Ms. Goffman that states: "Alice Goffman decided to study the crime problem in a Philadelphia neighborhood by completely immersing herself in the life. Over the next six years, she lived in the neighborhood she calls 6th Street."20 These reviewers bear at least a small part of the responsibility for spreading this misleading information and for not noticing the disconnect between her narrations of "living" on 6th Street and the details in the book that say she lived in a different neighborhood. However, the misleading manner in which Ms. Goffman presents the material in her book and her misleading verbal narrations claiming to have lived on the five blocks (or four blocks) called 6th Street are mostly to blame.

This therefore appears not to be the immersion sociology on 6th Street that many perceive it to be. In fact, if it is true that 6th Street is around the border between the yjSJfjjSffl and

| sections of Philly (later you will see there is reason to believe it is), then Ms. Goffman lived forty blocks or some three miles away from 6th Street. Living forty blocks away is not the immersion level that even fifteen blocks implies. Ms. Goffman's style, where details are scattered throughout the book, combined with misleading narrations and statements, have led to confusion among readers and reviewers, when there should have been no confusion at all.

Problem 10: Judging by publicly available residential address records, Ms. Goffman seems to have misled the audience as to the characteristics of the neighborhood in which she actually lived (the same neighborhood in Philly where Aisha and Ms. Deena lived), making it seem blacker, poorer, and more crime-ridden than it actually was. Also, Ms. Goffman's portrayal of needing a "black person" to help her rent an apartment in Aisha's and Ms. Deena's neighborhood seems made up for effect. Ms. Goffman's residence it seems was in a racially diverse area with many students; it is frequently described as a pleasant, safe, and desirable place to live. It is odd that she says it was a worse area than 6th Street, a five or four block area in which she says she attended nine or nineteen funerals for young men killed by gunfire over a seven-year period. In the five-block area surrounding her apparent address, there was not even one murder by gunfire over a seven-year period.

(Note: All of the following analysis for Problems 10-11 is based on the reasonable assumption that public reports combined with a background check of Ms. Goffman's address history between 2002 and 2015 provide an accurate reflection of where she lived. [The background check is from a background checking company commonly used by employers to verify a person's identity and address history.] If in your investigation she is able to prove she lived somewhere

18 http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/30/books/alice-goffman-researches-poor-black-men-in-on-the-

run.html

19 http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/08/ll/crooked-ladder

20http://www.cbc.ca/player/Radio/Day+6/ID/2473032569/

16

else, please discard the information in Problems 10-11.1 would like to add here that this unusual background check, using publicly available information, became necessary because the acclaim for this book derives mostly from its purporting to be deeply immersive ethnography.)

It is worth repeating that Ms Goffman has earned the respect of sociologists and reviewers based on her accounts of moving from her campus apartment, forgoing the undergraduate experience of living amongst students, and iiving instead amongst her subjects—immersion ethnography. Readers are provided a compelling story about Ms. Goffman's first time entering Ms. Deena's and Aisha's neighborhood (which is not 6th Street). Ms. Goffman explains that while walking around, "a young man asked me if I was a cop or a caseworker, there apparently being no other reason that a person like me would be in the area" (pg. 215). Moreover, in the endnotes on pg. 275, she says that at first she thought no white people lived in this neighborhood and that "the very few whites working and living in the neighborhood would often nod to me when we passed each other on the street, in the special way that minorities do when they chance upon another of their kind" (note 1, pg. 275). The search for an apartment becomes part of her ethnography as she details the problem she has with realtors who "were unwilling to rent to [her] in the Black section of the city" (pg. 217). She attributes this to the realtors thinking she is too good as a white person to live in this black neighborhood: "they often indicated I was too good for the apartments" (pg. 275). Eventually, but only with the help of Aisha's older sister (who is black) contacting realtors and setting up appointments on Ms. Goffman's behalf, Ms. Goffman is able to find an apartment in this black neighborhood (pg. 217). According to Ms. Goffman, she cleverly utilizes Aisha's older "black" sister to get realtors to rent to her so she can gain access to this apparently very black neighborhood.

Ms. Goffman's ethnographic description of her neighborhood becomes in doubt when you find out where public records indicate she lived. According to a well-established background checking company used by employers to establish a person's residence and time at that residence, Ms. Goffman moved into an apartment at 241 S. 46th Street in the Walnut Hill neighborhood around October 2002. (You can easily find on the Internet several such background companies and, utilizing one or another of them, verify this information for yourself.) The background checking company I used also lists her stepfather Professor William Labov at that address, so we can be fairly confident this is the right Alice Goffman. In addition, it lists her current address in Madison, Wisconsin. Moreover, the date the report shows she moved into 241 S. 46th St. lines up closely with the time frame during which she says in her book she moved into Aisha's and Ms. Deena's neighborhood, namely, partway into her Sophomore year, making it 2002 (pg. 217).

Ms. Goffman's Walnut Hill apartment was very close to six universities in the area; it was only five blocks away from the nearest university. Also, Wikipedia describes the Walnut Hill neighborhood as "a racially mixed neighborhood with a large seasonal student population" (Wikipedia search: Walnut, Hill Philadelphia). In addition, there are statistics and reviews of her area on StreetAdvisor.com, a widely known website for getting information about various areas throughout the US, including people's reviews of those areas. According to StreetAdvisor.com reviews, there are so many students living in Walnut Hill that universities have buses that go there to pick them up. "Spsimons" notes in her StreetAdvisor.com review that "Many of the

17

university buses service the area to prevent students from having to walk the blocks from school to home."21 Street Advisor's "Sweaverl213" writes, "The area enjoys a vibrant and diverse collection of residents including Italian Americans, African Americans, Middle Easterners and Asians...There are also a lot of students in the area due to Walnut Hill's close proximity with six of the city's colleges and universities. There are plenty of housing opportunities in Walnut Hill which include two and three-story row homes as well as a few apartment and condo complexes. It is a quiet area and does not have a lot of crime, which makes it an extra desirable location for young people who are looking for a safe and affordable area to live in. Walnut Hill's large houses and tree lined Streets make it pleasant."22

Moreover, Ms. Goffman's apartment was located right where the Walnut Hill neighborhood ends and the Spruce Hill neighborhood begins, making it reflective of the even more affluent Spruce Hill area. It was exactly half a block in from Spruce Hill. Spruce Hill, by the way, is one of the most desirable areas for students to live in. "Spsimons" on StreetAdvisor.com elaborates: "Nestled just west of the University of Pennsylvania, Spruce Hill is as its name sounds: plenty of hills and numerous spruce trees. It is a bedroom community for students, faculty, staff, and medical personnel. Pennsylvania Presbyterian, Children's Hospital, The Wistar Institute, Penn's Hospital, Dental and Medical School are nearby. Walking or biking gives you access as well as trolley lines and bus routes. In a word, transportation is great."23 "Jammerz" from StreetAdvisor.com also provides some information about Spruce Hill: "Many of the large homes in Spruce Hill have been converted into apartments or rented out to groups of individuals, mostly college students. You can also find young professionals and small families living in this area as well. But it makes sense that it's an attractive area to students, it's close to campus and close to bars and restaurants. Not to mention off street parking is available and public transportation is easily accessible. Students do not have to travel far from campus or home to meet their needs."24

So, if this address is correct, what is one to think about Ms Goffman's comment that no white people lived in her, Aisha's, and Ms. Deena's neighborhood (and that white people were nodding to other rare white people), when it is a racially diverse area with a large number of students? Also, if she lived in an area with a large student population, her story about her difficulty in renting an apartment and the necessity of having Aisha's "black sister" help her find an apartment seems peculiar. Did the numerous students who live in Walnut Hill also have to have "black persons" (if they were not black themselves) intervene to help them rent an apartment? I don't know the state of the real estate market's Internet presence in 2002 when she was looking for an apartment, but currently it is very easy to find a nice rental or a home to purchase there. Here are some options on her very same block. The first one for sale, right

21 http://www.Streetadvisor.com/walnut-hill-philadelphia-philadelphia-county-pennsylvania

22 http://www.Streetadvisor.com/walnut-hill-philadelphia-philadelphia-county-pennsylvania

23

24

http://www.Streetadvisor.com/spruce-hill-philadelphia-philadelphia-county-pennsylvania http://www.Streetadvisor.com/spruce-hill-philadelphia-philadelphia-county-pennsylvania

18

across the street, is a truly lovely home listed for $419,000; click on the URL to take a tour.25 Also provided with a URL are two nice apartments just doors away from Ms. Goffman's old apartment; they took me one minute to find and seem easy to rent.26 Many undergraduate students, graduate students, and professors would be happy to call these places home.

One final example of misleading statements is from Ms. Goffman's lecture where she emphasizes how poor and crime-ridden the area she was living in is. In her New School talk (mentioned earlier), she says that 6th Street was a "nicer neighborhood than the one we [Ms. Goffman and Aisha] lived in...The neighborhood we lived in was much poorer, had a much higher crime rate" (New School; minutes 12-13).27 Ms. Goffman's description could be interpreted as a skewed / exaggerated attempt to make where she was living seem blacker, poorer, and more crime-ridden—and her own research more immersive—than it was (if, in fact, she lived at 241 S. 46th St.). I am sure, given her descriptions of her living conditions, that many readers would be quite surprised by where it seems she actually lived, a desirable area full of students. Moreover, as you will read below, in Walnut Hill there is no five or four block area in which even nine persons were killed by gunfire, let alone nineteen, over a seven-year time frame. In fact, in all of Walnut Hill, a much larger area than five blocks, there were not nine people killed by gunfire. So how was it a more crime-filled area than 6l Street, given her accounts of the number (either 9 or 19) of 6th Street funerals for young men killed by gunfire she says she attended? The figure below shows the murders by gunfire taking place between 2002 and 2008 in the five blocks surrounding the 241 S. 46th St. address where it appears she lived. Such murders would have been indicated by red dots had there been any. Notice there aren't any. (More on this in Problems 17 and 40; the data source is discussed in Problem 40.)

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25 http://www.zillow.com/homedetails/246-S-46th-St-Philadelphia-PA-19139/10452258_zpid/

26 http://www.zillow.com/homedetails/237-S-46th-St-APT-2-Philadelphia-PA-19139/2137333271_zpid/

and http://www.apartments.com/207-s-46th-st-philadelphia-pa/jv07175/

27

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LcsoXnVxkDU

19

Problem 11: Again, based on publicly available residential address records, it turns out that Ms. Goffman misleads readers by not telling them that, after living in the apartment described above for a few years, she moved out of Aisha's and Ms. Deena's neighborhood into Spruce Hill, an even nicer and more upscale neighborhood than the one she was in before.

According to a background checking report, Ms. Goffman moved from Walnut Hill into an apartment in Spruce Hill. She never says in her book that she moved out of Aisha's section of Philly. Instead she says that she continued to live in Aisha's neighborhood until 2008. She writes, "through four years of graduate school I continued to live in Aisha's neighborhood, commuting to school and spending many of the remaining hours hanging out around 6 Street with whichever 6th Street Boys were home" (pp. xiv). Since she started graduate school in 2004, this quote suggests she lived in Aisha's neighborhood (Walnut Hill) until 2008, but the background report suggests otherwise. Indeed it appears the neighborhood she moved into is an even nicer and more upscale neighborhood than the one she was in before, as we saw above in Problem 10.

Problem 12: Ms. Goffman appears to speak misleadingly of having been "roommates" "through college" with several of the young men featured in her work, when at most this living situation could have lasted, according to careful reconstruction of her own timeline, substantially less than a year. Moreover, she provides confusing and contradictory information about precisely which individuals were or were not her roommates. If this was an important aspect of her deeply immersive ethnography fieldwork, then why, in what is expected to be a serious and careful work of social science, are we not given a transparent explanation of "with whom" and "for how long"? Contrary to the impression many have had that this roommate situation was another example of her totally immersive fieldwork, the details suggest it was a short-lived arrangement.

Ms. Goffman's narrations and descriptions about being roommates with certain guys from the five blocks (or four blocks) known as 6th Street appear, like so much else in the book, misleading, exaggerated, and contradictory. Firstly, in some accounts she says she was roommates with Chuck and Mike. For example, when Chuck is dying she reflects on when she, Chuck, and Mike "had first become roommates" (pg. 252). In other accounts she says that she, Chuck, and Mike also were roommates with Steve (pg. 251). However, in another part of the book Steve appears to be more of a frequent guest: "Steve alternated sleeping at his grandma's house on 6th Street, his girlfriend's house a few blocks over, and our living room floor" (pg. 238). In her book she says that in March 2004 Mike went to jail and the other guys stopped staying there: "When Mike got taken into custody, I lost all three roommates, since Chuck and Steve had been staying at the apartment at Mike's invitation...But I was, at the time, only Mike's person—there was no reason for me to hang out on 6th Street with him sitting in state prison" (pg. 246). Perhaps the previous quote is the strongest evidence that Chuck and Steve were not her roommates in the traditional sense, since once Mike was taken into custody Chuck and Steve were no longer staying at her apartment. Young folks and college students often stay over at each other's apartments. This is especially true for persons who are drinking, partying, and doing drugs, as was the case in Ms. Goffman's account. She writes: "That

20

afternoon, Chuck and [a] friend came to my apartment, took some wet (PCP), and lay on the couch and floor with covers over their heads. They didn't eat, drink, or get up for almost twenty-four hours" (pg. 46). Her choice of the word roommate seems a misleading one, since Chuck and especially Steve seem more to have been guests.

Troubling as well are Ms. Goffman's narrations that make it appear like she was roommates with these guys though many years of college. She states, "I was roommates with Mike and Chuck, who were the main characters in the book, through college" (New School, 24:00-25:00).28 (Again, notice that Steve is left out here.) I think we can all agree that living with someone for 3-7 months is different than living with someone through college. According to the details in Ms. Goffman's various accounts, she can only have been "roommates" with these guys for a maximum of seven months, from the fall of her junior year (2003) to March in the spring of that same junior year (2004). (Bear in mind also that she started graduate school in Princeton after her junior year in college at Penn [pg. 245].) This time frame can be established by comparing information in two different works. In her New York Times Op-Ed piece (May 31, 2014) she says that she, Mike, and Chuck became roommates in her junior year: "My junior year, Mike, Chuck and I became roommates."29 (Notice, by the way, yet again how Steve is left out.) Also, in the above quote on pg. 246 they all stopped being roommates when Mike was taken to prison in the spring of her junior year, March 2004. These two accounts in conjunction present a maximum seven-month time frame that they would be roommates: from the Fall of 2003 to March 2004. Interestingly, Ms. Goffman says that the entire time she knew Mike he only had his own apartment for three months. The rest of the time he lived with family members (such as his mother and uncle), with girlfriends, or in halfway houses. This description of a three-month time frame that he had an apartment—and it should be noted that Ms. Goffman says, "After awhile I said that if [Mike] was going to be crashing so much, he should contribute to the bills and groceries. Gradually we became roommates"—left me wondering if they were roommates for only those three months (pg. 238). Further evidence supporting a three-month time frame is that there are no anecdotes of Mike having an apartment to call his own other than the one he shared with Ms. Goffman. This material is so vague and disorganized that one is unsure what to think.

Lastly, it is also worth noting that the 6th Street guys were staying with her, in Ms. Goffman's home, in her (presumed) Walnut Hill apartment a good distance away (perhaps some 40 blocks) from 6th Street. Rather than immersing herself in her field site by moving to the five blocks (or four blocks) known as 6th Street, she seems to have instead studied these guys on her own turf (which seems to have been a student area). In her fifty-page-long Methodological Note section, she talks about how she didn't want to have her presence influence the 6th Street guys' behavior. She talks about this for about a page and a half (pg. 235-237). But she never mentions or reflects on the impact that taking them out of the field site could have had on her research. By having the 6th Street guys stay with her, she altered their normal routines, including reducing

28http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LcsoXnVxkDU

29 http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/author/alice-goffman/?_r=0

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their time and her own time on 6th Street. This can be understood as something different than a total immersion on 6th Street. It is analogous to studying bacteria in sugar instead of studying those same bacteria in water.

Problem 13: Ronny shoots himself in the leg. In one riveting movie-like account the bullet is removed while he lies in pain on his grandmother's kitchen table with a rag in his mouth and Ms. Goffman turning up the music to cover his screams. Yet in another account the self-inflicted bullet wound is treated at the hospital. This second account also is dramatic: the person who was with Ronny when he shot himself in the leg and who brings Ronny to the hospital winds up arrested there by the police. Did Ronny accidently shoot himself in the leg on two completely separate occasions? If not, did Ms. Goffman make up one or both of these two accounts?

There are two very different accounts in Ms. Goffman's book about what happens after Ronny shoots himself in the leg. In one account Ronny goes to the hospital. In a second account, much later in the book, he has the bullet removed while on the kitchen table. In the first account he is fifteen years old. In the second account he is sixteen years old.

In the first account the young man who brings Ronny to the hospital is arrested by police: "Ronny shot himself in the leg when he was 15. Six police officers occupied the ER lobby when he arrived; two of them quickly handcuffed the young man who had brought him [Ronny] in" (pg. 37). Ms. Goffman uses this story to illustrate how his friends were afraid to go into the hospital for fear of being locked up.

In yet another account, a nurse's aide comes to Ronny's grandmother's house to take the bullet out of his leg. Ronny is afraid to go to the hospital because he is on parole and refuses to go. "Ronny, sixteen, had been boarding a bus when the gun tucked into his waistband went off, sending a bullet into his thigh... Ronny refused to go to the hospital, convinced that the trip would land him back in juvenile on a violation. He spent the next five days bleeding on his grandmother's couch...Then his grandmother located a...nurse's aid who agreed to remove the bullet. She performed this procedure on the kitchen table. Ronny's grandmother shoved a dish towel in his mouth and asked me to turn up the music to cover the screams....His grandmother paid her $150, and the next day brought her some of her famous spicy fried chicken wings" (pg. 153). This story appears in Ms. Goffman's discussion of the underground market for medical services.

If Ronny had already accidentally shot himself in the leg on a previous occasion, then why does Ms. Goffman not say this is the second time he accidently shot himself in the leg? Or, if this is the same incident, why not mention the puzzling discrepancy between the two accounts? Would it not be extraordinary for the same person to accidently shoot himself in the same part of his body, his leg, in two consecutive years (i.e. when he is 15 and then again when he is 16)? Such a coincidence would be very hard to believe. As an aside, one is also left with a question about the bus driver on the bus where Ronny accidently shot himself. Wouldn't he and other passengers have heard a gun go off as Ronny was boarding the bus and called the police?

Problem 14: In one account Mike has a car when he and Ms. Goffman first meet. In another

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account he has no car when they first meet.

The occasion on which Ms. Goffman first met Mike is when they are set up on a date. In the preface, Ms. Goffman says that when she first met him he explained to her that "he is in a temporary financial rut, living at his uncle's house and with no car to drive" (pg. xii). However, in her Methodological Note she states that, during her blind date with Mike, they "piled into Mike's ten-year-old Bonneville—more like a boat than a car" (pg. 219). Therefore, in one account Mike had a car (with a vivid description of it being like a boat) when they first met on a blind date, and in another account when they first met he explained why he does not have a car.

Problem 15: Is Mike 21 or 22 when Ms. Goffman first meets him? For that matter, is Ronny 14,15, or 16 when she first meets him?

In her book Ms. Goffman says Mike is twenty-two when they first meet. "When Ronny introduced us in January of 2003, Mike was a thin young man of twenty-two" (pg. 219). In her book she also says Ronny is fourteen when they first meet (pg. xii). She meets Ronny about a month before Ronny introduces her to Mike. Therefore on pgs. 49-50 a reader is surprised to see an ethnographic account by Ms. Goffman in which Mike is twenty-one and Ronny is sixteen. In describing what happened after an attempted motorcycle theft, she writes: "According to the signed affidavit that Mike's lawyer read to us later, Ronny and his friend, both sixteen [emphasis mine], were separately interrogated and agreed to name Mike as the one who had put them up to it....Mike, who was twenty-one [emphasis mine] at the time, was charged with attempted breaking and entering, vandalism, and trespassing" (pgs. 49- 50). These ages are impossible given her account of their ages when she first meets them—Mike 22, Ronny 15; but the quote says Mike 21, Ronny 16. Adding to all this confusion is that in Ms. Goffman's article, she says Ronny is fifteen when she meets him, but then later says Ronny is fourteen when she meets him (American Sociological Review, pgs. 341 and 342, respectively). Moreover, in her article Mike is twenty-one when they first meet and not twenty-two like in the book: "Ronny introduced me to Mike, who was 21" (pg. 341). I know you are thinking sure these are small details, but taken together and especially with the other stuff I am presenting, they lead the reader to ask: why is there this lack of concern for details?

I could have written literally pages and pages more about other small discrepancies of this sort. Perhaps readers of the public version of this document will wish to share additional examples they come across in their own study of Ms. Goffman's work.

Problem 16: In one account, Mike's mother's house has laundry facilities in the basement. In another account, Mike leaves his mother's house to go across the street to do the laundry at a laundromat.

In Ms. Goffman's account Mike is living at his uncle's house when they first meet. Shortly thereafter Mike is arrested, goes to jail, and then about a month later he is released from jail on bail and moves in with his mother who lives "across town" in North Philly. On pg. 58 of her book, Ms. Goffman describes Mike's mother's house as having a washing machine in the basement: "Miss Regina [Mike's mom] had just gotten home from work, and had started a load

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of laundry in the basement" (pg. 58). However, on pg. 30, in providing an account of his being arrested at his mother's house, Ms. Goffman says he returns from the laundromat across the street to be arrested. She writes: "We had been playing video games, and he had gone across the street to change his clothes at the Laundromat. Two unmarked cars pulled up..." (pg. 30).

Problem 17: Ms. Goffman in one account attends 9 funerals of 6th Street young men killed by gunfire. In another account she attends 19 funerals of 6th Street young men killed by gunfire. How many times are we to be treated to two variations on the same or recognizably similar story? Like Noah's ark, Ms. Goffman's work seems to have two versions of story after story after story.

Towards the end of Ms. Goffman's book, she says that in the seven years (yes seven years, not six like she claims elsewhere) she studied 6th Street, she "attended nineteen funerals for young neighborhood men who'd been killed by gunfire, as well as three funerals for older people" (pg. 234). This information is repeated by Christopher Jencks in his New York Review of Books article "On America's Front Lines." He writes: "She mentions instances in which people killed someone, and that she attended nineteen funerals for young men killed by gunfire."3 I think it is important to note that no correction to this account appears in future issues of The New York Review of Books, from what I can tell. If this nineteen number is wrong, Ms. Goffman could have, but didn't, send in the correction. Readers are left with the impression that nineteen young men she knew from 6th Street were killed by gunfire, which is no small number. Also, nineteen funerals strongly suggests a tremendously high level of crime on 6th Street. Other paragraphs in the book seem to line up with this very high nineteen funeral number by referencing the every-few-month frequency of funeral attendance: "It could be that Chuck's peacekeeping efforts in this and other conflicts made his death more of a blow for his family and friends and for the neighborhood as a whole than the deaths of other young men whose funerals we attended every few months [emphasis mine]" (pg. 182).

However, in a different account Ms. Goffman writes that she attended nine funerals, mentioning "nine funerals I attended for young men who had been killed in the 6l Street neighborhood" (pg. 35). In addition, she mentions that Ronny's cousin was killed, but that she was not able to attend that funeral, raising the number of persons killed by one more person to either ten or twenty. Whether she attended nine or nineteen funerals is important for understanding the level of crime taking place in her 6th Street primary field site. (Note that when she says "nineteen" funerals on pg. 234, the number "nineteen" is written out rather than written as "19," making explanation-by-typo much less likely.)

Problem 18: Ms. Goffman tells a vivid story about Chuck's death in 2007, so why is he still alive in 2009 and driving Tim to Reggie's trial? Has he too risen from the dead?

Ms. Goffman says that Chuck was killed in the summer of 2007. His death is the focus of the last ten pages of her book. Yet, in her fieldnotes from "2009," Chuck is alive and driving Tim to the courthouse for Reggie's trial. She writes:

30

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/oct/09/americas-front-lines/

24

From field notes taken in 2009: There was a big showing in room 405 today for Reggie's Must Be Tried. I drove his mother, Miss Linda, and their neighbor Anthony, who has two bench warrants and took a real risk showing his support today. Reggie's older brother, Chuck, drove their youngest brother, Tim, who skipped class today (pg. 116).

Problem 19: Ms. Goffman's account of detectives putting their guns on the table facing her, while she looks through photos on the very same table, is something that occurs on TV but would be improbable in real life. Also occurring on TV is people being kept in the dark while in solitary confinement, but that is not how solitary confinement works in the real world.

Ms. Goffman's account of her time being interviewed by police takes an implausible turn when she claims that the police officers "remove their guns and put them on the table facing [her]. One cop leafs through a folder and puts pictures in front of [her] of Mike, then Chuck, then Reggie" (pg. 70). Adding to the improbability is that on that very same table, where the guns are pointed towards her, she is looking through police photos. This description is something someone sees on a TV show. This is not to say it can't happen, but it is hard to believe that it did happen. In fact, many interview and interrogation rooms have a box outside that police deposit their weapons in. This is to avoid a person attacking an officer and taking the gun from an officer's holster. It would very reckless for an officer to put his or her gun on a table where a suspect or interviewee can grab it and shoot the officers or themselves. It is hard to imagine not one but two officers putting their guns on the table pointed at her. This improbable scenario in combination with all the other improbable scenarios makes them all the more improbable when taken together.

Ms. Goffman's story about Mike being in "solitary confinement" also has a TV-like feel to it. Ms. Goffman writes that Mike spent "three days of solitude in the dark" (pg. 224). The reason why this story is television-like is that prisoners in solitary confinement are not kept in the dark. There are lights and sometimes windows. And each prisoner gets one hour of time outside in the yard. The same cells used for solitary confinement are also used for protective custody, that is, if a prisoner is in danger from other prisoners they are put in the same solitary confinement cells. If a prisoner had been kept in the dark for three days, this would have been cause for an investigation into inhumane treatment of prisoners. Also, Mike and his friends are frequent prisoners and, if this had actually happened, Mike most likely would have been complaining to Ms. Goffman about how the prison was mistreating him. And Ms. Goffman would have noted yet another instance of police or corrections mistreatment. But Ms. Goffman shows no awareness that being kept in the dark for three days would be something remarkable.

Problem 20: Ms. Goffman says Mike was not released from prison until 2007, so why in 2006 does it sound like he was on parole?

On pg. 149, Ms. Goffman says that in 2006 "a rumor started to circulate that a woman who had recently been transferred to the PennDot nearest to 6th Street was accepting one thousand dollars for making driver's licenses for people who didn't actually qualify for them. Mike reasoned that since the tickets on his license amounted to more than three thousand dollars and his parole sentence prevented him from getting a license anyway, it made financial sense

25

to pay this woman" (pg. 149). However, Ms. Goffman says that Mike was not released from jail until around the spring or summer of 2007. "After serving his full sentence in state prison, Mike returned to 6th Street in 2007" (pg. 251). This may be a case of sloppy writing or of something else, but I thought it still worth mentioning, given the other problems in the book, including the closely related Problem 21.

Problem 21: Suggestive of a larger pattern of misrepresentation of facts is a story about a woman who Ms. Goffman claims was acquainted with Mike, worked at PennDot, and, when later "discovered and arrested,...claimed she'd made over three hundred thousand dollars selling real identities to people who don't otherwise qualify for them" (pg. 150). What happens when one follows the paper trail and looks up the newspaper accounts? One discovers that the person in connection with the $300,000 was a man, and he did not work at PennDot. There was a woman (Anita Levier) who played a minor role in the ID ring, but she received only $1,200, not $300,000. Moreover, it appears Ms. Levier did not even work at the PennDot location "nearest to 6th Street," as Ms. Goffman states, but rather in a completely different part of Philadelphia at least ten miles away.

In this section, I compare Ms. Goffman's account of the PennDot "woman" involved in making IDs for people who did not qualify for them and news accounts of the ID ring involving PennDot personnel. News articles elaborated that there were twenty people involved in this complex ID-making network. Three of them were PennDot employees; and, at first glance, seeming to corroborate Ms. Goffman's story, one of the PennDot employees involved in the scheme was a woman, named Anita Levier. Since only one of the PennDot workers was a woman, I have based this section on the apparent identity of the PennDot woman (Anita Levier) Ms. Goffman was trying to interview and Mike was trying to get an ID from.

Ms. Goffman implies that the PennDot woman she wanted to interview had made $300,000 from the scheme. But that is not what the news reported. Ms. Goffman writes: "This woman never agreed to talk with me, but two years later, when she was discovered and arrested, she claimed she'd made over three hundred thousand dollars selling real identities to people who don't otherwise qualify" (pg. 150). But according to news reports, no one claimed to make $300,000. Rather, Saman H. Salem was found with $300,000 in cash in his possession. He did not work at PennDot.31 It was Saman's name that was all over the news in conjunction with the $300,000. If Ms. Goffman recognized Anita Levier's name buried in the details, why does she get it wrong as to who the person was in connection with the $300,000?

Ms. Goffman suggests she was at least indirectly in contact with this woman at PennDot who was selling IDs, since she had Mike ask this woman if she could interview her (pg. 150). (This woman refused to be interviewed, according to Ms. Goffman.) However, this description of Mike having direct contact with the woman (presumably Anita Levier) is at odds with news reports and the federal indictment. This Ms. Levier was not caught directly selling IDs to people.

31 http://articles.philly.com/2010-05-06/news/24958974_l_license-scheme-license-examiners-penndot-employee

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Rather, a person seeking an ID would contact Carlos Tejeda Mejia, who would accompany that person to PennDot where Ms. Levier would make the ID. Carlos paid Ms. Levier about $30 per ID for his clients. Anita is reported to have made fifty IDs and to have received $1,200 for all of them combined (not each). "Defendant LEVIER produced more than 50 PennDot identification cards for customers...Defendant ANITA LEVIER received approximately $1,200 dollars from co¬conspirator Carlos Tejeda Mejia for producing PennDot identification cards for his customers."32 Also, Ms. Goffman says that it was the PennDOT woman (presumably Anita Levier) who "was accepting one thousand dollars for making driver's licenses" (pg. 149). But this is not supported by the federal findings. In the federal charges Ms. Levier did not drum up business, rather, Carlos charged his "customers" a thousand-plus and paid Ms. Levier about $30 per ID.

Also, Ms. Goffman says that "through [Mike's] negotiations with [the PennDot woman] [she] learned that a number of other men in the neighborhood had obtained [an ID], including Chuck's and Reggie's uncle" (pg. 150). It is interesting to read that a number of men in the neighborhood had obtained an ID through this woman, because this ID ring largely catered to foreigners wanting to appear as legitimate people.33

Moreover, Ms. Goffman says in her account that this woman worked at the PennDot location

nearest to 6th Street. "A rumor started to circulate that a woman who had recently been

transferred to the PennDot nearest to 6th Street was accepting one thousand dollars for making

driver's licenses for people who didn't actually qualify for them" (pg. 149). If we assume that 6th

Street is | | on the border between the | | and p"1i-8____jj

sections of Pennsylvania (more on this location later), or even fifteen blocks from where Ms. Goffman was presumably living in Walnut Hill (or later in Spruce Hill), then based on current locations there are four PennDot centers that are closer: Arch St., West Oak Lane, Whitman Plaza, and Island Avenue. The closest PennDot during Ms. Goffman's 2006 time frame seems to have been the Arch Street location about four miles away. Why does Ms. Goffman say the PennDot woman worked at the PennDot nearest to 6th Street when Anita Levier worked at the Lawndale PennDot location, which was around ten miles away?

If Ms. Goffman recognized Anita Levier's name buried in the details, why does she get it wrong as to who the person was in connection with the $300,000? And why does she change Saman's or Carlos's gender since both had been already arrested and convicted? Since Anita had been arrested and had accepted a plea deal, there was no reason to change her information, either. One is left wondering what explains all of this. One explanation could be that Ms. Goffman co-opted this story from the news, making up this account, but was sloppy in getting the details straight, thereby creating an imperfect match to the headlines. By co-opting this story, if Ms. Goffman did, she might have been trying to impress her faculty mentors at the time by pretending to have stumbled in her ethnography into yet another news-making story, another instance in a pattern of self-aggrandizement extending throughout the work. (She was at

32 http://www.justice.gov/archive/usao/pae/News/2009/feb/levierinfo.pdf

33 http://www.justice.gov/archive/usao/pae/News/2009/feb/levierinfo.pdf

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Princeton, and her Professor's easily could have been seeing this story on the New Jersey news since this ring also operated there.) At the very least, it will be difficult to continue praising her for her journalistic accuracy. Time and time again (for example, erroneous accounts about Police surveillance cameras in 2002 and erroneous accounts about an age 19 barrier to reentry into high school), she does not follow up and check on things as would be easy and common for a journalist to do.

Problems 22-26: In a careful, serious ethnographic work one would not expect to find so many contradictions, not to mention an implausibility, as emerge in Ms. Goffman's stories about Alex's arrest at the hospital and his teeth being knocked out. Problems 22-26 document these difficulties, two of which involve blatant contradictions between Ms. Goffman's American Sociological Review account and her book account; another of which involves a clear contradiction within the book; and yet another of which involves a factual impossibility (if we believe some other information also in the book). There is one additional reason to doubt Ms. Goffman's narratives. In a review of her book, a Yale Law School Professor reports: "I was astonished by her account of the police trolling maternity wards for parole violators. I had never heard of such a thing. When I spoke with civil rights attorneys and public defenders in New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C., and with a police official in New Haven, Connecticut, I couldn't find a single person who knew of a case like Alex and Donna's."34

Let's start out by examining what is the same about both her book and American Sociological Review article and then let us examine what is different. In both her American Sociological Review and book accounts Ms. Goffman says she arrives at the hospital shortly after the birth of Alex and Donna's first child. In both accounts Ms. Goffman and Donna watch as the police arrest Alex and take him to jail just after the birth of his child at the hospital (pg. 34). In both accounts Donna is crying and pleading with police not to take him to jail. In both accounts Ms. Goffman asks the officers how they knew Alex had a warrant out for his arrest. In both accounts, officers tell Ms. Goffman they ran his name and the names of other hospital visitors and a warrant came up for Alex along with two other men on the maternity floor who the police are also taking into custody. In both accounts the police tell Ms. Goffman that they frequently run the names of visitors and patients looking for warrants. In both accounts Alex's arrest leads Chuck and other men to be afraid to go to the hospital both to seek medical treatment and for significant events, such as the birth of their children. In fact, Ms. Goffman says that Chuck does not go to the hospital for the birth of his child because he is afraid of getting taken into custody, which causes acrimony between him and his girlfriend. Alex's hospital arrest at the birth of his child also plays into Alex's decision not to seek medical treatment after being pistol-whipped, during which his teeth are knocked out and his jaw broken. According to Ms. Goffman, Alex suffers permanent disfigurement instead of going to the hospital. She writes, "Alex's attack occurred over ten years ago. He still finds it difficult to breathe through his nose and speaks with a muffled lisp...But he didn't go back to prison" (pg. ix).

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/10/the-society-of-fugitives/379328/

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While there are many similarities between these two accounts, there are four troubling incongruities. While I was initially inclined to think that the problems between these accounts stem from the fact that Ms. Goffman is making up these accounts years later (as we saw in Problem 1), given all the other problems I can't help but wonder if these things occurred at all. First, if these accounts are real, then why does she tell two different stories about why the police arrest Alex at the hospital (Problem 22)? Second, if these accounts are real, why are there significant differences in accounts of the time Alex spent out of jail before his teeth were knocked out and his jaw was broken (Problem 23)? Third, if these accounts are true, how is it that Mike is present for Alex's teeth and jaw being broken, when in yet another story Mike is in jail at this time (Problem 24)? Fourth, why in one account are Alex's children by two different mothers and in another account both his children are by the same mother (Problem 25)?

Problem 22: Alex is arrested on the delivery room floor for a different reason in Ms. Goffman's American Sociological Review article than in her book. He is arrested because of having completely different warrants for his arrest between the two accounts.

In her American Sociological Review article Ms. Goffman says the police take Alex to jail while he is at the hospital because he had violated his parole by drinking. She writes, "He had violated his parole a few months before by drinking alcohol and had a warrant out for his arrest" (American Sociological Review, pg. 345). However, in the book version she says Alex had a warrant out for his arrest because he had been caught driving with a revoked license. She writes, "I asked Alex's partner about the warrant, and she reminded me that the offense dated from Christmas, when police had stopped Alex as he pulled up to a gas station. Since his driver's license had been revoked, driving constituted a violation of his parole" (pg. 34). (This also adds to the Noah's ark list where we are treated to two different accounts of the same story.)

Problem 23: During the two years subsequent to his arrest on the delivery room floor, Alex's life follows a completely different path in Ms. Goffman's American Sociological Review article than it does in her book.

In the book account, Ms. Goffman says Alex has been out of jail for almost two years before he is attacked and his teeth are knocked out. This two-years-out-of-jail time frame is established as she explains that if Alex went to the emergency room for his teeth and jaw after he had been attacked and the police arrested him at the hospital for violating his parole, "he'd be back in prison, his two years of compliance on the outside wiped away" (pg. viii). However, in the article she says he has been in jail for one year and out of jail for almost one year when his teeth are knocked out. The one year Alex is in jail is because he was arrested at the birth of his child. She writes: "Alex spent a year back upstate on the parole violation" (American Sociological Review, pg. 345). She continues: "Just after his son's first birthday he was re-released on parole, with another year left to complete it...Three weeks before Alex was due to complete his parole sentence...[he was] pistol-whipped three times" (American Sociological Review, pg. 345). Therefore, in the book account he is out of jail for just under two years ("his two years of compliance on the outside") and in the article it is for just under one year. In a serious ethnographic work there should not be this factual discrepancy about one of the main subjects of the book. One of the reasons why it appears Ms. Goffman is making up these stories

29

is that many stories are similar, but with different and sometimes conflicting details. (This also adds to the Noah's ark list where we are treated to two different accounts of the same story.)

Problem 24: In one account on pg. 34, Alex's two children are by two different women. In two other separate accounts 18 and 65 pages later, they are both by Donna.

Early on in the book Ms. Goffman presents a section that discusses each of the main subjects in her book. The description of Alex mentions that he has two children, each by a different mother. She writes: "By twenty-three Alex was a portly man with a pained and tired look about him, as if the weight of caring for his two toddlers and their mothers were