There were, inevitably, some infantile happenings during the Vietnam dissidents’ Washington march last October, but few were more pronounced than the performance of most of the news media. Journalism’s shortcomings enhance the value of this account by a thirty-one-year-old participant in the late unpleasantness on the Pentagon Mall. Mr. Jackson is a sociologist and teaches English and folklore at the State University of New York at Buffalo.
In theory, drug addicts and narcotics detectives are bitter antagonists, but they move in the same covert milieus, work the same hours, speak the same language, and form a peculiar partnership in the way both are outcasts from the American mainstream. Mr. Jackson, a Junior Fellow at Harvard, spent several months observing their symbiotic relationship at firsthand. His “White-Collar Pill Parly" appeared in the August ATLANTIC.
A good eye, a sharp ear, and quiet personal research characterize Bruce Jackson's examination of American manners and morals. This report on a spreading social habit is a long step ahead of journalism's routine portrayal of what has come to be called the drug scene
Most of the people who commit crimes which could send them to prison do not go, says Mr. Jackson, a Brooklynborn Junior Fellow at Harvard, who is studying imerican folklore and penology. For two years he has been visiting prisons to interview inmates and law enforcement officials.