Alice Goffman Essay

The introduction of this research paper discusses Alice Goffman’s observation of the increase in policing and supervision in poor Black neighborhoods. In this paper, Goffman explains what this increase has meant for wanted African American males and the inhabitants of poor communities. Since, according to Goffman, such studies done in poor minority neighborhoods were written before the expansion of the criminal justice system, she worked with a group of poor African American males for six years to get an “extended ethnographic look” at life in “the policed and surveilled ghetto” (Goffman). Goffman built her research not only on six years of fieldwork, but on prior works that pertain to the urban poor and broader concepts of power in the modern …show more content…
That would explain why wanted men (1) can easily become targets of robbery and (2) may resort to violence to protect themselves since they can’t use ordinary sources of the law (i.e. the police) to protect them (Goffman). If they are targeted, they retaliate to show they’re not “soft” (can easily be taken advantage of). Police can have access to a wanted person’s Social Security records, court records, electric and gas bills, unemployment records and hospital records (Goffman). Therefore the wanted men of Goffman’s study were also observed avoiding hospitals (whether for their child’s birth or if they needed medical attention for themselves), and taking other precautions such as only coming out at nights to run errands and avoiding familiar hangouts, workplaces (so they’re often unemployed), and family and friends (who can be used by the police, who threaten imprisonment, to get the wanted person’s location, or even “use the police and courts as a form of direct retaliation” and to control the wanted man’s behavior) (Goffman). The wanted subjects who threw precaution ‘out the window’ ended up in