WHEN SOCIOLOGISTS GO BAD, as spotted by Andrew Klavan:

I just finished reading Alice Goffman‘s in-the-field study of Philadelphia’s black slums, On The Run: Fugitive Life in an American City. I recommend it highly. It’s a wonderful piece of reporting. It’s also nuts. It’s worth reading for both reasons.

Goffman — a slight, attractive white girl and the daughter of famous sociologist Erving Goffman — lived for six years in a place she calls Sixth Street in Philly. There she befriended various black drug dealers and gangsters and their girlfriends. Completely losing her objectivity along the way, she actually reached a point where she chauffeured one of these thugs around town while he, his gun on his lap, searched for a man he wanted to kill. She’s lucky he didn’t find him. I don’t think that would’ve been sociology exactly. More like felony murder.

Somehow, I don’t think Christopher Reeve and Morgan Freeman intended Street Smart to be a how-to guide to journalism or sociology. And as Andrew notes:

Also, for myself, while I think it’s nonsensical to blame the police for the criminality of poor black people, it is not nonsensical to note that the dysfunctions of modern poverty are generationally self-replicating. A kid with no father and a crack whore for a mother is going to have a difficult time learning moral self control — and that’s going to be true of the fatherless child he fathers too. I do not believe such behaviors are related to race in any way. They’ve appeared too often in too many people throughout history. Read Germinal by Emile Zola. Read Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens. Read some of the writing about the Irish in England during the Victorian period. The poor have children out of wedlock and fatherless children commit more crimes.

There’s a reason why Life at the Bottom, Theodore Dalrymple’s report as a psychiatrist working inside the British prison system, is subtitled, “The Worldview That Makes the Underclass.”