Alice Goffman est une sociologue américaine, une ethnographe urbaine et une professeure adjointe visitante de sociologie au Pomona College.
Goffman est l'auteur de On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City , pour lequel elle a reçu des éloges ainsi que des critiques pour un examen approfondi de la sur-police, de la pauvreté et de l'incarcération vécue par les jeunes hommes noirs et leurs familles en Crême Philadelphia.
Thus, the great paradox of a highly punitive approach to crime control is that it winds up criminalizing so much of daily life as to foster widespread illegality as people work to circumvent it. Intensive policing and the crime it intends to control become mutually reinforcing. The extent to which crime elicits harsh policing, or policing itself contributes to a climate of violence and illegality, becomes impossible to sort out.
On a hot afternoon in July, Aisha and I stood on a crowded corner of a major commercial street and watched four officers chase down her older sister’s boyfriend and strangle him. He was unarmed and did not fight back. The newspapers reported his death as heart failure.