In ‘A Walk on the Seamy Side,’ the Boston Globe reports on a remnant of the American Sociological Association annual meetings which occurred in Boston in early August. The article highlights a different kind of Boston history tour – visiting sites of homicides, arsons, and other illegal activities – creatively developed by sociologists. 

Two local criminal experts created this “Immoral Boston” tour for a recent sociology conference – and it may be no less insightful than walking along the red bricks of the Freedom Trail. James Alan Fox, a professor of criminal justice, law, policy, and society at Northeastern University, sees the tour as a way to understand the influence major crimes have had on the city. Tour cocreator Jack Levin, a Northeastern sociology and criminology professor, has a slightly different perspective: “Crimes can be very abstract,” he said. Real crime “isn’t something you see on prime-time TV, like in ‘Law & Order,’ ‘CSI.’ I think what a tour does, by focusing on the particular spots where crimes have occurred, is lend some reality.”

The Globe concludes:

The men acknowledge their tour caters to the public’s lurid interest in terrible crimes. “For most people, Hannibal Lecter is as real as Jeffrey Dahmer. It’s a fascination, an escape,” Levin said. But “if what you know about crime is based on books, on television, movies, sometimes, it’s difficult to distinguish . . . an actual trial from ‘Boston Legal,’ ” Fox said. “Therefore [we have] a very glamorized perception of what’s happened.

“By going to the sites, it reminds us that people actually died,” he said. “It is difficult to glamorize something when you remember how many people were killed.”

Read the full story.