Must-Read: Chris Blattman: The Wire Got It Backwards

…but for lower class black Americans, this country basically looks like a failed state. Some books and articles I recommend: Vesla Weaver’s book, Arrested Citizenship, or her shorter Boston Review article on the criminal justice system. Alice Goffman’s amazing ethnography of a Philadelphia neighborhood, On The Run. Jill Leovy’s Ghettoside, on murder and policing in Watts LA. Mark Kleiman’s When Brute Force Fails, on the behavioral perversities of criminal justice. The Harper High School episodes of This American life. With one exception, these have all been written by white people. And I would bet all fall in the category of reading The New Yorker and find Starbucks lowbrow. While I am myself in that category (well, I’m actually sick of The New Yorker) I would appreciate pointers to the best of the best books and essays by another race and class.