Read this passage from an article by journalist Sasha Abramsky on America’s prison system.

Horror stories have led to calls for longer prison sentences, for the abolition of parole, and for the increasingly punitive treatment of prisoners. The politics of opinion-poll populism has encouraged elected and corrections officials to build isolation units, put more prisons on “lockdown” status (in which prisoners are kept in their cells about twenty-three hours a day), abolish grants that allowed prisoners to study toward diplomas and degrees, and generally make life inside as miserable as possible. Marc Mauer, the assistant director of the Sentencing Project, an advocacy group based in Washington, D.C., says, “Fifty years ago rehabilitation was a primary goal of the system.” Nowadays it’s not. “The situation we’re in now is completely unprecedented,” Mauer says. “The number going through the system dwarfs that in any other period in U.S. history and virtually in any other country as well.” In 1986, according to figures published in the Survey of State Prison Inmates (1991), 175,662 people were serving sentences of more than ten years; five years later 306,006 were serving such sentences. People haven’t become more antisocial; their infractions and bad habits are just being punished more ruthlessly. Crime, however, is a complex issue, and responses to it that might instinctively seem sensible, or simply satisfying, may prove deeply counterproductive.

2 Questions for Pt 3, Exercise A:

1) Abramsky uses both direct and indirect quotations. Identify one example of each from Abramsky’s text. (If you are uncertain of the distinction between direct and indirect quotations, see here.) By “identify” here, I mean, copy an example of each. (Remember: even indirect quotations require citations.)

2) Identify Abramsky’s claim and his warrant.  By “identify” here, I mean, copy, and label both the claim and warrant.

Exercise Pt 3, B

Read the following passage below by the (liberal) writer and policy analyst Helen Epstein:

What accounts for the high rate of incarceration in the US, particularly of black males? Opinions vary, but for drug crimes in particular, part of the problem has to do with excessive surveillance of young black men by the police and other authorities. White youths may carry and use drugs just as often as blacks, but they seldom get caught, and if they do, they may be more likely to get off with a warning. In one recent study, 60 to 75 percent of black teenagers in Baltimore and Chicago said they were routinely harassed by the police. “Everywhere we go, we going to get stopped,” said one Chicago youth. Once he was approached by detectives as he and a friend were leaving the church they regularly attended:They was like, “Do y’all got guns?” or something. “We heard shooting on the next block, y’all match the description. Where y’all just come from?” We like, “We just come out the church, y’all done seen it.” You know just, they stopping us for no reason.While police surveillance and harassment may explain the racial discrepancy in drug-related crime, it probably explains little of the same discrepancy in violent crime. When it comes to homicide, which is the most accurately measured crime of all, the data are clear: blacks are seven times more likely to be offenders and six times more likely to be victims than whites. This cannot be explained by discrimination in arrests and sentencing alone.

Above, Epstein explains why police  surveillance and harassment can not explain racial disparities in violent crime. In this exercise, you will add a new, additional paragraph to Epstein’s article to make an argument that Epstein might have made, but did not.

Let’s look at a passage by Heather Mac Donald, a (conservative) journalist, on mandatory sentencing laws; you will be taking information from this passage to write the new paragraph for Epstein’s article.

Unfair drug policies are an equally popular explanation for black incarceration rates…Playing a starring role in this [argument] are federal crack penalties, the source of the greatest amount of misinformation in the race and incarceration debate. Crack is a smokeable and highly addictive cocaine concentrate, created by cooking powder cocaine until it hardens into pellets called “rocks.” Crack produces a faster—and more potent—high than powder cocaine, and it’s easier to use, since smoking avoids the unpleasantness of needles and is more efficient than snorting. Under the 1986 federal Anti-Drug Abuse Act, getting caught with five grams of crack carries a mandatory minimum five-year sentence in federal court; to trigger the same five-year minimum, powder-cocaine traffickers would have to get caught with 500 grams. On average, federal crack sentences are three to six times longer than powder sentences for equivalent amounts. The media… target the federal crack penalties because crack defendants are likely to be black. In 2006, 81 percent of federal crack defendants were black, while only 27 percent of federal powder-cocaine defendants were. Since federal crack rules are more severe than those for powder, and crack offenders are disproportionately black, those rules must explain why so many blacks are in prison, the conventional wisdom holds.  [NOTE: The phrase in red is the author’s summary of the viewpoint she is criticizing. The phrase “the conventional wisdom holds” tells you that the preceding material is NOT what she thinks to be true, but rather what she claims her opponents claim.  In short, she does NOT think the sentencing guidelines can explain “why so many blacks are in prison.”] But consider the actual number of crack sellers sentenced in federal court each year. In 2006, 5,619 were tried federally, 4,495 of them black. From 1996 to 2000, the federal courts sentenced more powder traffickers (23,743) than crack traffickers (23,121). It’s going to take a lot more than 5,000 or so crack defendants a year to account for the 562,000 black prisoners in state and federal facilities at the end of 2006—or the 858,000 black prisoners in custody overall, if one includes the population of county and city jails. Nor do crack/powder disparities at the state level explain black incarceration rates: only 13 states distinguish between crack and powder sentences, and they employ much smaller sentence differentials.

Now, we are ready to take the concept from MacDonald’s passage above and fold it into Epstein’s article.

Below, you will find the Epstein passage above with the start of a new paragraph inserted.

In the text below, (TR) indicates the transitional phrase that explains the logical connection between the new paragraph and the preceding material. (CL) indicates the CLAIM of the new paragraph. YOU will craft the EVIDENCE and the WARRANT (look for the “insert evidence here” and “insert warrant here”). For the evidence, you will want to identify evidence relevant to the new claim (look for the (CL)) in  the material from Heather MacDonald above and then deploy that evidence in the paragraph, using a combination of a direct and an indirect quotations using. REQUIREMENTS: Your direct quotations should take the form of method 3 or 4 from your readings (see the video on that page).  10 points off if you do not use method 3 or 4; 2 points off if your quotation is not properly punctuated.

What accounts for the high rate of incarceration in the US, particularly of black males? Opinions vary, but for drug crimes in particular, part of the problem has to do with excessive surveillance of young black men by the police and other authorities. White youths may carry and use drugs just as often as blacks, but they seldom get caught, and if they do, they may be more likely to get off with a warning. In one recent study, 60 to 75 percent of black teenagers in Baltimore and Chicago said they were routinely harassed by the police. “Everywhere we go, we going to get stopped,” said one Chicago youth. Once he was approached by detectives as he and a friend were leaving the church they regularly attended: They was like, “Do y’all got guns?” or something. “We heard shooting on the next block, y’all match the description. Where y’all just come from?” We like, “We just come out the church, y’all done seen it.” You know just, they stopping us for no reason. While police surveillance and harassment may explain the racial discrepancy in drug-related crime, (TR) one commonly heard explanation can not explain the very different incarceration rates for blacks and whites. (CL) The consequences of mandatory sentencing law for crack cocaine are too small to explain why so many black men are in prison. [INSERT YOUR EVIDENCE HERE] [INSERT YOUR WARRANT HERE] Nor can police surveillance and harassment explain the discrepancy in violent crime. When it comes to homicide, which is the most accurately measured crime of all, the data are clear: blacks are seven times more likely to be offenders and six times more likely to be victims than whites. This cannot be explained by discrimination in arrests and sentencing alone.

Now, you’ll need to submit your homework through Blackboard: How to submit homework through blackboard done by my five-year old ; be sure to follow the file naming conventions specified at the start of the assignment in red (no reason to lose points unnecessarily) END OF ASSIGNMENT