{"id":309,"date":"2008-10-17T11:19:24","date_gmt":"2008-10-17T17:19:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/crawler\/?p=309"},"modified":"2008-10-17T11:20:06","modified_gmt":"2008-10-17T17:20:06","slug":"quite-the-tour","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/2008\/10\/17\/quite-the-tour\/","title":{"rendered":"quite the tour…"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Bromfield<\/a>In ‘A Walk on the Seamy Side,’ the Boston Globe<\/a> 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The Globe concludes:<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

“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.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Read the full story<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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.\u00a0 Two local […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":17,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[39074],"tags":[39116,39112,125],"class_list":["post-309","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sightings","tag-crime","tag-culture","tag-urban"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/17"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=309"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":311,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309\/revisions\/311"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=309"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=309"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=309"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}