I'm sorry, but that is ridiculous. Don't get me wrong, she was very brave for wilfully going into that sort of an environment, and a very intelligent person. Bu

I'm sorry, but that is ridiculous. Don't get me wrong, she was very brave for wilfully going into that sort of an environment, and a very intelligent person. But remember that there are thousands who live in a similar manner in just that city alone - people who have been living in these environments for their entire lives, and who come to much of the same conclusions that she has, only without academic language or a parent's name. After a run-in with law enforcement that left me with a bitter taste (I was arrested for a crime I wasn't guilty of), and seeing first hand many of the horrors of the justice system I had only heard or read about, I asked a friend of mine who had spent a decent amount of time in jail what he thought the justice system believed it doing for him by sentencing him. He responded that jail time was never about changing the people inside, it was about how everyone else felt outside. This is arguably the entire premise of Goffman's work: the police crack down on frankly minor charges in predominantly black areas has nothing to do with actual safety or reform for those individuals. "But after braving violence and intimidation to get this story, Goffman now faces a different challenge. How can she keep the focus on black poverty, and not her own biography?" Indeed. No, Alice Goffman is neither the "one of the bravest women of our generation" nor a "revolutionary," she's an academic who is well-off enough to get in the paper and sell books. Who knows, maybe her book could be the "Silent Spring" of the prison-industrial complex, but don't deify her like that - it belittles the people who actually do get coerced, imprisoned, and killed for living their lives.