Critical Thinker

New Jim Crow Lesson 6 Updated for 12-3-15

 

 

Introducing Your Research Paper (from Writing Argumentative Essays)  

Task 1: The four parts of an introduction
A simple introduction to an argumentative assignment has four parts. Read the following description of the parts. Then circle the sentences in the introduction above which cover each part and write the number for each part in the margin next to it, e.g. for the first part draw a circle around the sentence(s) that introduce(s) the topic and write "1" in the margin next to it.  

1.	Introduces the topic
2.	States why the topic is important
3.	States that there is a difference of opinion about this topic
4.	Describes how the assignment will be structured and clearly states the writer's main premise

Dos and Don’ts of Writing an Introduction

Don’t

Use a trite quotation like “We have nothing to fear but fear itself.” 

Don’t use any cliché like “All talk and no action” or any other over-familiar phrase that has no freshness. 

Begin your introduction by writing, “In this essay it is my objective to . . .”

Don’t use a common dictionary definition of a term you want to define. 

Don’t begin with “In today’s society” or “In society today” or “In today’s modern world” or “The modern world in which we live in” because all are lame. 

Don’t be trite or boring. 

Do’s 

Do establish relevance. Why is your topic compelling, a topic your reader needs to reckon with? 

Do begin with a compelling cultural reference. 

Do begin with an extended definition that helps your reader understanding a term that is central to your essay. 

Do begin with a refutation of a commonly held opinion: “Most United States prison sentences don’t make us safer; they increase crime and feed business interests, not human interests.” 

Do begin with a series of rhetorical questions: “Have you ever wondered by so many Americans are apathetic to the very issues that determine the core of their morality and quality of life?” 

Do begin with a “delicious quote” or paraphrase that captures your reader’s attention: “Economist Paul Krugman said it would be cheaper for insurance companies to fire their underwriters who are paid to deny medical claims and simply not deny medical claims.” 

 Thesis checklist from Purdue Owl 

Your thesis is more than a general statement about your main idea. It needs to establish a clear position you will support with balanced proofs (logos, pathos, ethos). Use the checklist below to help you create a thesis. 

This section is adapted from Writing with a Thesis: A Rhetoric Reader by David Skwire and Sarah Skwire: 

Make sure you avoid the following when creating your thesis:

• A thesis is not a title: Homes and schools (title) vs. Parents ought to participate more in the education of their children (good thesis).
• A thesis is not an announcement of the subject: My subject is the incompetence of the Supreme Court vs. The Supreme Court made a mistake when it ruled in favor of George W. Bush in the 2000 election.
• A thesis is not a statement of absolute fact: Jane Austen is the author of Pride and Prejudice.
• A thesis is not the whole essay: A thesis is your main idea/claim/refutation/problem-solution expressed in a single sentence or a combination of sentences.
• Please note that according to the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers, Seventh Edition, "A thesis statement is a single sentence that formulates both your topic and your point of view" (Gibaldi 42). However, if your paper is more complex and requires a thesis statement, your thesis may require a combination of sentences. 

Quick Checklist for Your Thesis Statement:

_____ The thesis/claim follows the guidelines outlined above

_____ The thesis/claim matches the requirements and goals of the assignment

_____ The thesis/claim is clear and easily recognizable

_____ The thesis/claim seems supportable by good reasoning/data, emotional appeal

Thesis Template Examples

The New Jim Crow is a failed/successful analogy to the original Jim Crow because __________________, ________________, _____________________, and __________________.

While Alexander makes a compelling critique of the mass incarceration system, her analogy between Jim Crow and incarceration as "The New Jim Crow" collapses when we consider ______________, ______________, ___________, and ______________.

While through Alexander's own admission the analogy between Jim Crow and mass incarceration as "The New Jim Crow" is not a perfect one, we can make the case that those who would dismiss her analogy entirely are in grave error when we consider these major flaws in their thinking, which include ___________, ___________, _____________, and _______________.

Michelle Alexander has written a brilliant critique of mass incarceration in which she points out its moral bankruptcy in ways that are beyond dispute. However, her book is a failure because she squandered the opportunity to point out the real causes of this moral bankruptcy, which include __________, ___________, __________, and ____________.

The assertion that Alexander's book falls short because it fails to address the deeper problems caused by free market capitalism collapses when we consider ___________, __________, ___________, and ________________.

While Alexander's book is hardly perfect and contains some serious flaws, her overall argument is compelling when we consider ____________, ____________, __________, and _______________.

 

Your Final Essay

Support, refute, or complicate Michelle Alexander's thesis that the current justice and prison system are perpetuating the old Jim Crow into a new Jim Crow. Use Toulmin or Refutation model.

Because this is your Final, it is a bit longer than your previous typed papers. While they are four pages (1,000 words), this essay is five pages (closer to 1,200 words).

Be sure to have a Works Cited page with no fewer than three sources and be sure one of the sources is from the El Camino College database. 

Essay Requirements: 

One. Students will express critical viewpoints and develop original thesis-driven arguments in response to social, political, and philosophical issues and/or to works of literature and literary theory.  This argumentative essay will be well organized, demonstrate an ability to support a claim using analysis and elements of argumentation, and integrate primary and secondary sources.  

 Two. The paper should use at least three sources and not over-rely on one main source for most of the information.  Rather, it should use multiple sources and synthesize the information found in them.  Three.  This paper will be approximately 5-6 pages in length, not including the Works Cited page, which is also required.  The Works Cited page does NOT count toward length requirement. 

Four. Within your argument, address issues of bias, credibility, and relevance.  

Five. Analyze and employ logical structural methods such as inductive and deductive reasoning, cause and effect, logos, ethos, and pathos, and demonstrate understanding of formal and informal fallacies in language and thought.  

Six. You must use MLA format for the document, in-text citations, and Works Cited page.

Seven. You must integrate quotations and paraphrases using signal phrases and analysis or commentary.

Eight. You must sustain your argument, use transitions effectively, and use correct grammar, spelling, and punctuation. 

Student Learning Outcomes:

Upon completion of this course, students will: 

One. Compose an argumentative essay that shows an ability to support a claim using analysis, elements of argumentation, and integration of primary and secondary sources. 

Two. Identify and assess bias, credibility, and relevance in their own arguments and in the arguments of others, including primary and secondary outside sources. 

Three. Organize an essay in proper MLA format and will also be technically correct in paragraph composition, sentence structure, grammar, spelling, and usage.

 

Perhaps the Best Criticism of the Book Comes from Someone Who Admires Much In It

From New York Times book review, we read:

In an article to be published next month in The New York University Law Review, James Forman Jr., a clinical professor at Yale Law School and a former public defender, calls mass incarceration a social disaster but challenges what he calls Professor Alexander’s “myopic” focus on the war on drugs. 

Painting the war on drugs as mainly a backlash against the gains of the civil rights movement, Professor Forman writes, ignores the violent crime wave of the 1970s and minimizes the support among many African-Americans for get-tough measures. Furthermore, he argues, drug offenders make up less than 25 percent of the nation’s total prison population, while violent offenders — who receive little mention in “The New Jim Crow” — make up a much larger share. 

“Even if every single one of these drug offenders were released tomorrow,” he writes, “the United States would still have the world’s largest prison system.” 

To Professor Alexander, however, that argument neglects the full scope of the problem. Our criminal “caste system,” as she calls it, affects not just the 2.3 million people behind bars, but also the 4.8 million others on probation or parole (predominately for nonviolent offenses), to say nothing of the millions more whose criminal records stigmatize them for life.

“This system depends on the prison label, not just prison time,” she said. 

In a telephone interview, Professor Forman, a son of the civil rights leader James Forman, praised the book’s “spectacular” success in raising awareness of the issue. And some activists say their political differences with Professor Alexander’s account matter less than the overall picture she paints of a brutal and unjust system.

Here is James Forman's book review of The New Jim Crow in the Boston Review.  

Here is the final part of Forman's critique:

This account of the origins of mass incarceration reinforces the Jim Crow analogy by tracing a direct line from a profound social ill (mass imprisonment) to a well-known enemy (racist voters and politicians who pander to them). But the account is incomplete. Something else was going on in the United States in the 1960s and early 1970s: violent crime shot up dramatically just before the beginning of the prison boom. Homicide rates doubled between 1965 and 1975, and robbery rates tripled.

The increase in crime helped to fuel demands for more punitive policies. In The Politics of Imprisonment, Vanessa Barker describes how black activists in Harlem fought for what would become the notorious Rockefeller drug laws. Harlem residents were outraged by rising crime rates in their neighborhoods and sought increased police presence and stiffer penalties. The NAACP Citizens’ Mobilization Against Crime demanded longer minimum prison terms for “muggers, pushers, 1st degree murderers.” New York’s leading black newspaper, the Amsterdam News, advocated mandatory life sentences for the “non-addict drug pusher of hard drugs” because such drug dealing “is an act of cold, calculated, pre-meditated, indiscriminate murder of our community.” What these concerned citizens got were some of the strictest drug penalties in the nation. Under the original Rockefeller laws, possessing four ounces of heroin or cocaine was punishable by a minimum of fifteen years in prison.

Today the Rockefeller laws have become emblematic of the futility and destructiveness of the drug war. We now know that America’s punitive turn has been less successful than its defenders claim: Alexander cites studies indicating that mass imprisonment is responsible for only 3–25 percent of the crime reduction that has occurred since the early 1990s. For his part Perkinson reminds us that longer prison sentences were not the only possible response to the increase in violent crime. The country could have chosen the path recommended by President Johnson’s 1967 Commission on Crime in the United States: crime prevention through “hope and economic opportunity.” And both authors are right to insist that mass imprisonment, whatever its popular appeal, has been a mistake. But the fact remains that mass imprisonment has a complex political and social history that, unlike Jim Crow’s, cannot be neatly reduced to “proponents of racial hierarchy . . . seeking to install a new racial caste system.”

In her account of the prison boom, Alexander employs a rhetorical strategy common to critics of mass imprisonment: she speaks almost exclusively about the war on drugs. This avoids drawing our attention to the less sympathetic violent offender. (To be fair, mass imprisonment’s defenders speak almost exclusively about violent crimes, the more heinous the better.) But it is ironic that Alexander should concentrate on the most sympathetic defendants, for she criticizes civil rights organizations like the early NAACP for avoiding criminal cases unless the lawyers were convinced of the defendants’ innocence. In her view, “Challenging mass incarceration requires something civil rights advocates have long been reluctant to do: advocacy on behalf of criminals.” Just so. And not only the drug kind.

The war on drugs is an unmitigated disaster, and The New Jim Crow makes that case better than anything else I’ve read. But ending the drug war is only a partial response to the problem of mass incarceration. Our prison system has become so enormous not only because of the drug war, but also because we send non-drug offenders to prison more often and for much longer periods of time than virtually any nation on earth.

Most of America’s 2.3 million inmates are held in state prisons. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, 49 percent of state prisoners are serving time for violent offenses, 21 percent for drug offenses, 20 percent for property offenses, and 10 percent for public-order offenses. In federal prison half of the prisoners are serving time for drug offenses, but federal prisons hold many fewer people overall—200,000 in 2008, while state facilities held 1.4 million. In jails, which hold about 750,000 people nationwide, the split among the four major categories (violent, drug, property, and public order) is roughly even. Thus, more prisoners are locked up for violent offenses than for any other type, and just under 25 percent (550,000) of our nation’s prisoners are drug offenders. If every person in prison and jail for a drug offense were released tomorrow, the United States would still have the world’s largest penal system.

Turning our attention from drug offenders to others (including violent offenders) requires that we confront issues that do not arise when we talk about the old Jim Crow. Blacks in the era of segregation did nothing to incur the treatment they suffered. But the same cannot be said for all blacks affected by today’s system of mass incarceration. Alexander’s account blurs this distinction. Consider the case of Jarvious Cotton, whose story opens The New Jim Crow:

Cotton’s great-great grandfather could not vote as a slave. His great-grandfather was beaten to death by the Ku Klux Klan for attempting to vote. His grandfather was prevented from voting by Klan intimidation. His father was barred from voting by poll taxes and literacy tests. Today, Jarvious Cotton cannot vote because he, like many black men in the United States, has been labeled a felon and is currently on parole.

Cotton is like his ancestors in that he cannot vote. But, unlike his ancestors, he was convicted of murder. Alexander’s passive construction—Cotton “has been labeled a felon”—suggests that he had no choice in the matter. The compelling arguments against felon disenfranchisement would lose none of their force if Alexander were to acknowledge Cotton’s crime, but she never does.

Those who call attention to the harm caused by our current criminal-justice policies must also be ruthlessly honest about the harm caused by crime. This, too, is a matter of racial justice: victims of crime—especially violent crime—are disproportionately poor, young, and black or brown. It is also a strategic imperative. Tough-on-crime advocates are not going to stop talking about violent offenders and the need to protect communities from them. If reformers shy away from the topic, their chances of building a broad movement for change will suffer.

• • •

The final distinction between Jim Crow and mass imprisonment concerns the race of the victims. Whites were not direct victims of Jim Crow, but today, many whites—most of them poor—are behind bars. One-third of U.S. prisoners are white, and incarceration rates have risen steadily even in states where most inmates are white. Perkinson tells us that one in 39 white men has been incarcerated. This is astonishing, even if African American men are imprisoned at much higher rates. Charges for some of the offenses that we punish most severely, such as possession of child pornography, are mostly brought against middle-aged white men.

Alexander claims that mass imprisonment’s true targets are blacks, and that incarcerated whites are collateral damage. But that’s a lot of collateral damage. And in strategic terms, it is clear that this approach to mass incarceration has costs. Although defining mass imprisonment as a black thing may be effective in garnering support from fellow racial-justice advocates, it is likely to discourage whites (including white prisoners, ex-prisoners, and their families) from joining efforts to fight mass imprisonment. Thus the Jim Crow analogy threatens to undermine a goal that Alexander and Perkinson share: forging a multiracial grassroots movement against mass imprisonment.

Advocates for a smaller, less harsh prison system must approach the problem in a way that crosses racial lines. The Sentencing Project recently did this in a report noting that although whites remain relatively underrepresented as drug offenders, the percentage of drug offenders who are white has risen since 1999, while the percentage of drug offenders who are black has declined. (The Hispanic percentage has remained constant.) And the ACLU has taken a multiracial approach by targeting intolerable prison conditions not only in Mississippi, but also in Idaho, where 76 percent of the prisoners are white.

Finally, advocates must also marry their moral claims with appeals to society’s collective interest. On this last point, there is some reason for hope. Fiscal considerations may induce increasing numbers of policymakers, politicians, and voters to support measures to reduce our bloated prison system. Downscaling Prisons, a recent report published by The Sentencing Project, documents how four states have recently reigned in their prison systems to some degree. From 1999 to 2009 New York’s prison population declined by 20 percent, while New Jersey’s declined by 19 percent. Michigan’s dropped 12 percent from 2006 to 2009, and Kansas’s fell 5 percent from 2003 to 2009. Just as important, crime rates in these states continued to fall even as prisons got smaller. Criminologist Franklin Zimring documents this phenomenon in a forthcoming book about New York City, which has seen dramatic crime reductions even as it has reduced the number of offenders sent to state prisons.

Given the magnitude of the crisis Perkinson and Alexander describe, reducing the prison populations in four states is slight progress. But if we are to mobilize effectively against the punitive overreach these authors document, we must celebrate and learn from even small victories.

 

 

 

Here's a link to a Slate interview about a new theory for the growth of mass incarceration.  

 

 

 

 

Class Exercise:

Write your thesis for your final paper. You can use one of the above templates, but of course you must come up with your own mapping components.

 

New Jim Crow Lesson 5 Updated for 12-1-15

  

"When White Girls Deal Drugs, They Walk"

(I've adapted these ideas from Chapter 3 of How to Write Anything by John J. Ruszkiewicz.)  

Know what kind of argument you are writing: 

Argument to advance a thesis: 

You argue for a thesis as you champion an idea or a cause. 

For example, you might argue for eating steamed vegetables three times a day and provide the many benefits of employing such a practice.  

Another example would be a writer who argues that the Paleo diet is the most effective way to maintain lean muscle mass.  

Another example would be for a writer to argue for water rationing and triple water bills for homeowners who go over their water threshold.  

Another example would be to argue for prison reform to address concerns raised in The New Jim Crow. 

Refutation argument: 

You refute an already existing argument or practice, showing point by point why the argument is weak, precarious, or even fallacious (fallacy-laden). 

For example, you might refute Civil War reenactments on the grounds that they are white male fantasies based on the infantile hunger for nostalgia, the toxic Kool-Aid of White Supremacy, and the denial of moral accountability for the evils of slavery. 

In your refutation, you paint Civil War reenactments as a grotesque pageantry akin to a racist Disneyworld where are all the actors are white and black history has been erased because "it would be too disturbing" to the bogus, idealized world inhabited by the emotionally-arrested aspirants of "the good old Confederate days" and their other shameless displays of morally-bankrupt tomfoolery.   

Once you decide on your argument or claim, you must consider finding compelling reasons to support your claim.  

Support Your Claim 

Without support consisting of data, statistics, reasoning, logic, and refutations to counterarguments, your opinion exists in an abyss or a vacuum. You must develop a considered or educated opinion, which is the result of fearlessly studying the pros and cons of your subject in which you try to minimize your prejudices, biases, and other emotional baggage that might blind you from the truth.  

Understand Opposing Claims and Points of View 

You don't have an educated or considered opinion until you have been tested by your opponents' strongest arguments. If you can refute those arguments, then you can continue with your claim.  

You will also gain credibility with your readers for showing your understanding of your opponents' views.  

You will gain even more credibility when you can refute your opponents with assured insouciance rather than infantile hostility. Also choose polite insouciance over hostility as the former is a sign of intellectual superiority; the latter is a sign of juvenile fear and inexperience.  

Give Appropriate Sartorial (Clothing Style) Splendor (Writing Style) to Your Arguments 

Your argument is the "body" of the essay. Your writing style is the fashion or sartorial choice you make in order to "dress up" your argument and give it power, moxie, and elan (passion). 

Here is the same claim dressed up differently in the following two thesis statements: 

Plain 

Civil War reenactments are racist gibberish that need to go once and for all. 

More Dressed Up 

Our moral offense to civil war reenactments rests on our understanding that the participants are engaging in nostalgia for the days when the toxic religion of white supremacy ruled the day, that the participants gleefully and childishly erase black history to the detriment of truth, and that on a larger scale, they engage in the mythical revisionism of the Confederacy narratives, hiding its barbaric practices by esteeming racist thugs as if they were innocent and venerable Disney heroes. Their sham is so morally egregious and spiritually bankrupt that to examine its folly in all its shameless variations compels us to abolish the sordid practice without equivocation.   

Plain 

We need to stop blaming the poor for their poverty. 

More Dressed Up 

The idea that the rich are wealthy because of their superior moral character and that the poor live in poverty because of their inferior moral character is a glaring absurdity rooted in willful ignorance, the blind worship of money, and an irrational fear of poverty as if it were some kind of contagious disease.  

Qualify Your Thesis to Make It More Persuasive and Reasonable 

Qualifiers such as the following will make your thesis more bullet-proof from your opponents: 

some 

most

a few 

often 

under certain conditions 

when necessary 

occasionally 

Example: 

Under most conditions, narcotics should be legalized in order to decrease crime, increase rehabilitation, and decrease unnecessary incarceration.  

Examine Your Core Assumptions 

Assumptions are the principles and values upon which we base our beliefs and actions.  

Claim 

Under most conditions, narcotics should be legalized in order to decrease crime, increase rehabilitation, and decrease unnecessary incarceration.  

Assumption 

Treating drug use as a medical problem that requires rehabilitation is morally superior to relying on incarceration. Some may disagree with this assumption, so the writer will have to defend her assumption at some point in her essay.  

Here's a link (with grammar errors) for writing counterarguments and refutations in your essay. 

Notice the link, which is from a community college, is riddled with grammar errors. We all make mistakes from time to time, especially on the Internet, but a pattern of errors is disturbing indeed. 

Study Questions, 221-261 

One. Why would there be huge resistance to reforming the New Jim Crow and Mass Incarceration? 

We read on page 230 that if we got back to the incarceration rates of the 1970s, before the War on Drugs, we’d have release 4 out of 5 prisoners. This would reduce prison jobs and would be met with all-out war from the 700,000 prison guards, administrators, service workers and other prison personnel.

In a report by the U.S. Department of Justice’s Bureau of Statistics in 2006, the U.S. spent $185 billion for police protection, detention, judicial, and legal activities in 2003. This is a tripling of expenses since 1982.

The justice system employed almost 2.4 million people in 2003. If 4 out of 5 prisoners were released, far more than a million prison employees would lose their jobs.

Private sector also has an investment in prison growth and the mass incarceration of helpless and vulnerable people of color. For example, former vice president Dick Cheney has invested millions in private prisons. His bank account depends on the incarceration of more and more black men (230). 

On page 231, the author gives a sample of “prison profiteers” who look for new ways to increase the prison business, with the targets always being the same: poor black men, the people this country has abandoned.

Consider this: On page 237 we read that 75% of all incarceration has no impact on crime, that if between 7 and 8 prisoners out of 10 were released, there’d be no change in crime; however, this 75% generates $200 billion annually. It’s a money-making device.

The moral bankruptcy of the New Jim Crow is that this multi-billion-dollar economy has been built on the backs of poor black men whom America doesn’t give a damn about. There’s an “it ain’t me” mentality that is morally loathsome and detestable. 

Two. What fuels the New Jim Crow in addition to greed? Is it racial hatred?

On page 242, the author argues racial hatred is not the culprit but something far worse: indifference. “My narrow, insular world is not effected so why should I give a damn?” A moral country would be like the group, All of Us or None (255). This group tirelessly advocates the “least among us,” which is the central message of the greatest religions and philosophies. Yet America has turned toward the other direction. 

Review of Alexander's Major Claims and Arguments

One. The NJC was based on race-neutral language to exert racist control and to make a rich prison empire on the backs of poor black men.

Two. Prisons don't reduce crime. They increase it.

Three. NJC was created by elite whites to appease poor whites.

Four. NJC is a reaction to the Civil Rights Movement merging with the Poor People's Movement (threatening to take more pie from the white elite who needed to break the alliance).

Five. Treatment, prevention, education, and decriminalization of drugs reduces drug use; mass incarceration increases it.

Six. War on Drugs threw away the Fourth Amendment for people of color.

Seven. Poor people don't get legal representation.

Eight. U.S. legal system accomodates white crimes (alcohol, powder cocaine, marijuana) but prosectutes to the full extent black crimes.

Overview of "The Caging of America" by Adam Gopnik

Adam Gopnik from “The Caging of America”

1. We give longer sentences for the same crime than all other countries in the world.
2. Over 400 teen-agers in Texas have life sentences.
3. 6 million Americans are under “correctional supervision.” There are 2.4 Americans in prison.
4. In 1980, there were 220 Americans in prison for every 100,000 people. In 2010 that number has jumped to 731. No developed country in the world comes close to this.
5. Here’s some evidence or data for our immoral prison system being part of The New Jim Crow: In two decades prison spending is up 600%. Here’s the warrant, the logic that connects the data to the claim that the modern prison system is part of The New Jim Crow: The money incentive, not smart and moral public policy, is the driving force.
6. Gopnik: The US prison system is the “moral scandal of American life.” It’s a scandal most Americans are indifferent to because they’re sedated by the blue pill in The Matrix. Reading Gopnik’s essay and Alexander’s book is the equivalent of taking the red pill.
7. Today’s prison policy is influenced by 19^th Century America when prison was seen as a slave plantation.
8. There is a landmark book that analyzes the corruption of our prison system. It’s Collapse of American Criminal Justice by William J. Stuntz. It reinforces many of the points made in The New Jim Crow.
9. We see an evil marriage of public policy and private interests: Corrections Corporation of America, a private prison company, enjoys financial growth that is dependent on America’s growing arrest rate (which is 90% people of color). The company’s stockholders want more arrests (not caring about the racial disparities and draconian nature of those arrests for all people) because they want to see their stock grow and grow. To make sure their stockholders are happy, CCA “spends millions lobbying legislators” to serve the purpose of the stockholders. Human rights can be damned as far as they’re concerned. They want their money.
10. The above example evidences that America is less of a democracy and more of an oligarchy. The word oligarchy is Greek which means the state is ruled by a only a few. In fact the Greek root oligos means “few.” We can conclude—and this would be in my conclusion of my paper when I restated my thesis—that to perpetuate The New Jim Crow is not only about the perpetuation of racism, slavery, and Jim Crow; it’s about a country being degraded into a corrupt oligarchy. I emphasize this because a conclusion should show the wider ramifications of your claim’s message.

Review of Principles of an Argumentative Essay

The Rhetorical Triangle Connects All the Persuasive Methods

Logos, reason and logic, focuses on the text or the substance of the argument.

Ethos, the credibility or expertise from the writer, focuses on the writer.

Pathos, the emotional appeal, focuses on the emotional reaction of the audience. 

The Elements of Argument

Thesis Statement (single sentence that states your position or claim)

Evidence (usually about 75% of your body paragraphs)

Refutation of opposing arguments or objections to your claim (usually about 25% of your body paragraphs)

Concluding statement (dramatic restatement of your thesis, which often also shows the broader implications of your important message).

Thesis

Thesis is one sentence that states your position about an issue.

Thesis example: Increasing the minimum wage to eighteen dollars an hour, contrary to “expert” economists, will boost the economy.

The above assertion is an effective thesis because it is debatable; it has at least two sides.

Thesis: We should increase the minimum wage to boost the economy.

Antithesis: Increasing the minimum wage will slow down the economy.

Evidence

Evidence is the material you use to make your thesis persuasive: facts, observations, expert opinion, examples, statistics, reasons, logic, and refutation. 

Refutation Section (also called Counterargument and Rebuttal)

Your argument is only as strong as your understanding of your opponents and your ability to refute your opponents’ objections.

If while examining your opponents’ objections, you find their side is more compelling, you have to CHANGE YOUR SIDE AND YOUR THESIS because you must have integrity when you write. There is no shame in this. Changing your position through research and studying both sides is natural.

Conclusion

Your concluding statement reinforces your thesis and emphasizes the emotional appeal of your argument. 

Avoid the Thesis Summary Trap

Too often when a writer wants to express his agreement with an author, his thesis merely summarizes the author’s main points.

Take the example of a writer who agrees with Michelle Alexander’s book, The New Jim Crow:

Sample Summary Thesis

Michelle Alexander does an excellent job of showing the parallels between the original Jim Crow and the New Jim Crow. First, she compares the economic exploitation in two periods of history. Second, she shows the violence and harassment, one explicit and the other implicit, inflicted upon people of color in the two types of Jim Crows. Third, she shows the similarities of the racist media campaigns designed to denigrate people of color in both periods of history. Finally, she shows the immoral economies resulting from both types of oppression.

In the above the thesis, the writer will merely summarize Michelle Alexander’s main point, put a bow on his paper, present it to McMahon, and say, “All right, Teacher, I’m all finished.” But in fact, this student hasn’t elevated his critical thinking skills to meet the class’s expectations.

What’s the solution?

The writer would be better served to defend Michelle Alexander against her opposition.

Alternative Thesis That Avoids Summary by Refuting Opponents

While Michelle Alexander’s thesis has some flaws that diminish the complexity of the narrative she offers us, her overall argument holds up in the face of her opponents’ critiques, specifically, that she fails to convince me that mass incarceration compares to the evils of Jim Crow, racism is not as virulent today is it was in the Jim Crow era, her narrative paints people of color as victims rather than as active agents of their own destiny, and her solution to reduce prison sentencing is a reckless form of leniency that would result in a crime spike.

 

 

 

 

New Jim Crow Lesson 4 Updated for 11-24-15

 

Essay Four (Final): The New Jim Crow

Support, refute, or complicate Michelle Alexander's thesis that the current justice and prison system are perpetuating the old Jim Crow into a new Jim Crow. Use Toulmin or Refutation model.

Because this is your Final, it is a bit longer than your previous typed papers. While they are four pages (1,000 words), this essay is five pages (closer to 1,200 words).

Be sure to have a Works Cited page with no fewer than three sources and be sure one of the sources is from the El Camino College database. 

Essay Requirements: 

One. Students will express critical viewpoints and develop original thesis-driven arguments in response to social, political, and philosophical issues and/or to works of literature and literary theory.  This argumentative essay will be well organized, demonstrate an ability to support a claim using analysis and elements of argumentation, and integrate primary and secondary sources.  

 Two. The paper should use at least three sources and not over-rely on one main source for most of the information.  Rather, it should use multiple sources and synthesize the information found in them.  Three.  This paper will be approximately 5-6 pages in length, not including the Works Cited page, which is also required.  The Works Cited page does NOT count toward length requirement. 

Four. Within your argument, address issues of bias, credibility, and relevance.  

Five. Analyze and employ logical structural methods such as inductive and deductive reasoning, cause and effect, logos, ethos, and pathos, and demonstrate understanding of formal and informal fallacies in language and thought.  

Six. You must use MLA format for the document, in-text citations, and Works Cited page.

Seven. You must integrate quotations and paraphrases using signal phrases and analysis or commentary.

Eight. You must sustain your argument, use transitions effectively, and use correct grammar, spelling, and punctuation.  

Sample Concession Thesis Statements That Address the Analogy Between Jim Crow 1.0 and Jim Crow 2.0:

One. Support of Michelle Alexander:

While the New Jim Crow comparison to the Old is not a perfect analogy, there are compelling similarities evidenced by ______________, _______________, _______________, and _______________________. 

Two. Refutation of Michelle Alexander:

While I concede there are some disturbing parallels between Jim Crow 1.0 and what Michelle Alexander calls the New Jim Crow, the comparison ultimately collapses when we examine _____________, ______________, _______________, and _______________________. 

Three. Example of Thesis That Refutes Michelle Alexander

While Alexander makes compelling points about the loss of human rights and the link between degradation of justice in the face of the profit motives behind the disturbing expansion of the incarceration system in the Age of the Drug War, her narrative is an incomplete, highly selective propaganda piece that fails to address the link between drug crime and theft (Proposition 47 and the spike in Los Angeles crime), the demands of many African Americans for more robust police intervention to protect their communities, and the exaggerated analogy between Jim Crow and the alleged “New Jim Crow.”

Four. Example of Thesis That Supports Michelle Alexander

While Alexander’s analogy between Jim Crow 1.0 and the War on Drugs as a form of Jim Crow 2.0 has many flaws, there are enough compelling parallels to make her thesis persuasive, especially when we focus on the profit motive behind incarceration, the racial disparities in prison sentencing, and the loss of constitutional rights as a result of the futile Drug War.

Five. Thesis That Refutes Michelle Alexander

While Alexander makes some compelling points about the need for more drug treatment and making incarceration less profit-driven, her overall narrative is largely a fiction that does a great disservice to American society by demonizing all politicians and cops as money-hungry racists, by ignoring the crimes resulting from drug use, by ignoring how black communities suffer when the police back off from those communities, and by ignoring the role of economic class, not race, as a predictor of crimes that must result in imprisonment if we are to protect law-abiding citizens.

Six. Thesis That Supports Michelle Alexander

While Alexander's argument would be better served to take a more nuanced approach in her portrayal of the police, her overall New Jim Crow narrative is persuasive in light of racial arrest patterns, race-based loss of civil liberties, and the military-like expansion of police powers.

Review: What McMahon Would Do If He Were Writing This Essay 

For paragraph 1, I'd write an introduction that does four things: 

Defines Jim Crow 

Summarizes Alexander's major points and how they add up to support her main argument

 Introduce the question: How convincing is her argument? 

Answer the question with a thesis that includes 4 mapping components that will corrospond to the supporting evidence paragraphs

 Paragraphs 2-5 would be the supporting evidence paragraphs 

Paragraphs 6-7 would be counterarguments in which I'd anticipate my opponents' disagreement with Alexander and show why those opponents are wrong and/or misguided. 

Paragraph 8, my conclusion, would sum up my supporting evidence and restate my thesis in a dramatic fashion. 

Each paragraph would be approx. 150 words for 1,200-word total. 

How to Set Up a Counterargument in Your Rebuttal Section (The Templates)

Some of my critics will dismiss my claim that . . . but they are in error when we look closely at . . . 

Some readers will 0bject to my argument that . . . However, their disagreement is misguided when we consider that . . .

Some opponents will be hostile to my claim that . . . However, their hostility is unfounded when we examine . . .

Some Alexander critics argue that . . . However, their remarks collapse under the weight of various fallacies, which include

Common Rebuttal Points to Michelle Alexander

1. "She is encouraging the victim role instead of personal responsibility."
2. "Racism is over. Obama is President!"
3. "Do the crime; pay the price."
4. "NJC is an exaggerated and offensive analogy to slavery."
5. James Forman has a very complex critique. This is the best critique I've seen. 

 Study Questions, 140-177

One. What is the cruel stigma that whites have had against blacks since the beginning of slavery as described by Frederick Douglass?

On page 140, at the beginning of Chapter 4, The Cruel Hand, we see that whites have had these attitudes toward blacks:

 Whites don’t know blacks. 

Whites are ignorant of their character. And this ignorance leads whites to fear blacks and behave in irrational ways that put blacks in danger as we see in the tragic case reported in Slate. 

Whites estimate blacks to be without character and purpose. 

Whites hold blacks in scorn and contempt. 

Today, the author asserts, a black criminal released from prison suffers the same stigma. 

Lynch mobs are gone but police harassment is alive and well with The War on Drugs.

The author writes, “In ‘colorblind’ America, criminals are the new whipping boys.” 

Out of prison, a felon can’t get housing and without housing a felon can lose his or her children (146).

Two. How could the following quotation, taken from Glenn Loury, be posed as a quiz question: “Are we willing to cast ourselves as a society that creates crimogenic conditions for some of its members, and then acts-out rituals of punishment against them as if engaged in some awful form of human sacrifice?”

Alexander’s entire book is an indictment against this ritual. This "ritual" of "human sacrifice" reminds me of the evil evident in the famous Ursula Le Guin short story, "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas." A brief thematic analysis of this short story would make a great introduction to your essay. 

Three. What is the paradox of urban young black men labeled as criminals as described on page 172?

They turn to each other for identity and support just like the oppressed during the first Jim Crow."We're not crazy."  

Four. How do pages 172 and 175 summarize Alexander’s entire New Jim Crow narrative?

She explains how racial control was achieved through mass incarceration. 

Five. Does Alexander concede that victims of the New Jim Crow have responsibility and how does this help her argument?

See page 176 in which she states that to deny their free will would be to deny an essential part of their humanity. I emphasize this because Alexander’s opponents will argue she is crying victim for those she defends. This could be part of your counterargument section. 

Study Questions, 178-221

One. Why are black children often without a father?

See page 180. A black child today is less likely to be raised by both parents than in times of slavery because most black fathers are in jail. 

Two. What is disturbing about mass incarceration?

We read on page 180 that there are more black adults in prison today than there were black people enslaved in 1850, fifteen years before the Civil War, when slavery was flourishing. Further, with the felon label, young black men today are just as likely to suffer discrimination in employment, housing, public benefits, and jury service as black men in the Jim Crow era (181).

Three. On pages 183 and 184, we read that racism has evolved from an explicit form to an implicit one. Explain.

The implicit one is more durable than its previous incarnations.

The implicit version works as thus:

War on Drugs is the vehicle for rounding up extraordinary numbers of young black men.

The first stage is called the roundup.

The police are motivated by drug forfeiture laws and federal grant programs (185).

Police can stop anyone if they get “consent.”

The second phase is conviction, the period of formal control. Once arrested, defendants are denied legal representation and pressured to plead guilty, which results of being stripped of many citizen rights.

Once convicted, drug offenders spend more time under the criminal justice system’s formal control, in prison or on parole, more than anyplace in the world. This control may last a lifetime.

The final stage is called invisible punishment, which describes sanctions imposed on individuals once they step outside the prison gates (186). They become members of the undercaste, an enormous population that is mostly black and brown.

Four. What makes the New Jim Crow such a dangerous form of oppression?

We read on pages 188 and 189 that whole communities are imprisoned and that in Illinois, 90% of all drug-related incarcerations are black people and 55% of the total black male population. These are members of the new racial undercaste. 

Five. What are the parallels between Jim Crow, the original version, and Mass Incarceration (Jim Crow 2.0)?

Both versions are born of white elites exploiting poor white resentments and to deflect anger on a more vulnerable people, people of color, rather than the people doing the exploiting, the white elites (191).

Conservative politicians in the 1970s and 1980s sought political power by claiming to “be tough on crime,” code for being tough against blacks and making white people “feel safe.” We call such politicians “racial opportunists.” 

Both versions engage in legalized discrimination. In the first Jim Crow, blacks suffered job and housing discrimination; now branded felons suffer the same fate. 

Both versions result in political disenfranchisement with the stripping away of voter rights and jury duty. Now it’s done in race-neutral language so the discrimination is more insidious and hard to fight. 

Both versions instill racial segregation, the first one explicitly, the second one insidiously by isolating entire communities of black men in prison.  

Both versions instill the idea of race, an artificial idea, into American consciousness. Before slavery, skin color and race were not on people’s radar (197). 

Both versions emphasized racial symbolism. In the New Jim Crow, “black men choose to be criminals. It’s their nature.” As a result, this country has created a racial stigma even though whites and blacks use drugs in equal rates (197). 

Six. What are the limits of making the analogy between the first Jim Crow and Jim Crow 2.0? 

Jim Crow was explicitly about race; Jim Crow 2.0 is not; the latter is about coded language such as “criminals” (which equal blacks). 

The Drug War is not against blacks but it targets blacks with race-neutral language. And it could be further argued that the Drug War targets the poor regardless of race.  

KKK has been replaced by the state prison system. 

Seven. What purpose is served by comparing drunk driving deaths to drug-related deaths on page 206?

 The War on Drugs was an elite-based program, generated by conservative, rich politicians who wanted to use race to bring Democrat voters into their Republican party.

Mothers Against Drunk Drivers (MADD) was grass roots, starting at the bottom. 

Drunk drivers are responsible for 22,000 death annually. 

All alcohol-related deaths number 100,000 a year. 

In contrast, drug-related deaths are 21,000 annually, about 20% of the deaths produced by alcohol.

So alcohol kills 500% more people than drugs. But there is no War on Alcohol. 

Drunk drivers are predominantly white male. White males comprise 78% of all drunk driving arrests. They are charged with misdemeanors, receive fines, license suspension, and community service.

Also, this behavior, which kills far more people than drugs, is addressed with treatment and counseling. 

In contrast, people charged with drug offenses are people of color and they are charged with felonies and sentenced to prison as part of a mass incarceration program (207).

Eight. How has the law changed with marijuana use changed over the years? 

We read on page 207 that in the early 1900s marijuana was perceived as a drug used by blacks and Mexican Americans, leading to strict penalties under the Boggs Act. 

In the 1960s when marijuana was associated with white middle class use and college kids, reforms set in, resulting in the Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act, which differentiated marijuana from other narcotics and reduced penalties.

Nine. On page 217, the author explains how we are a sick society, choosing the sick path when presented with a “Fork in the Road.” Explain.

We could give the poor and vulnerable opportunities in education and employment, but instead we punish them while giving them no options. 

We choose what kind of nation we are. 

Now the populace is indifferent as the 1% elite take more and more of the wealth while the middle class erodes. Young people of all colors aren’t buying cars because they have college debt, no good jobs, and no place to go. They’re hanging out at Starbucks with their smartphones. 

People of color in the inner cities have it even worse and yet they’re targeted in the War on Drugs. For example, on page 229 we read that black men without an education suffer 24% unemployment, a condition that would not be tolerated if levels were that high in the white community.

During the economic boom of the 1990s, young black men suffered an increase in unemployment, 42% overall and 65% for high school dropouts (229).   

Study Questions, 221-261 

One. Why would there be huge resistance to reforming the New Jim Crow and Mass Incarceration? 

We read on page 230 that if we got back to the incarceration rates of the 1970s, before the War on Drugs, we’d have release 4 out of 5 prisoners. This would reduce prison jobs and would be met with all-out war from the 700,000 prison guards, administrators, service workers and other prison personnel.

In a report by the U.S. Department of Justice’s Bureau of Statistics in 2006, the U.S. spent $185 billion for police protection, detention, judicial, and legal activities in 2003. This is a tripling of expenses since 1982.

The justice system employed almost 2.4 million people in 2003. If 4 out of 5 prisoners were released, far more than a million prison employees would lose their jobs.

Private sector also has an investment in prison growth and the mass incarceration of helpless and vulnerable people of color. For example, former vice president Dick Cheney has invested millions in private prisons. His bank account depends on the incarceration of more and more black men (230). 

On page 231, the author gives a sample of “prison profiteers” who look for new ways to increase the prison business, with the targets always being the same: poor black men, the people this country has abandoned.

Consider this: On page 237 we read that 75% of all incarceration has no impact on crime, that if between 7 and 8 prisoners out of 10 were released, there’d be no change in crime; however, this 75% generates $200 billion annually. It’s a money-making device.

The moral bankruptcy of the New Jim Crow is that this multi-billion-dollar economy has been built on the backs of poor black men whom America doesn’t give a damn about. There’s an “it ain’t me” mentality that is morally loathsome and detestable. 

Two. What fuels the New Jim Crow in addition to greed? Is it racial hatred?

On page 242, the author argues racial hatred is not the culprit but something far worse: indifference. “My narrow, insular world is not effected so why should I give a damn?” A moral country would be like the group, All of Us or None (255). This group tirelessly advocates the “least among us,” which is the central message of the greatest religions and philosophies. Yet America has turned toward the other direction. 

Review of Alexander's Major Claims and Arguments

One. The NJC was based on race-neutral language to exert racist control and to make a rich prison empire on the backs of poor black men.

Two. Prisons don't reduce crime. They increase it.

Three. NJC was created by elite whites to appease poor whites.

Four. NJC is a reaction to the Civil Rights Movement merging with the Poor People's Movement (threatening to take more pie from the white elite who needed to break the alliance).

Five. Treatment, prevention, education, and decriminalization of drugs reduces drug use; mass incarceration increases it.

Six. War on Drugs threw away the Fourth Amendment for people of color.

Seven. Poor people don't get legal representation.

Eight. U.S. legal system accomodates white crimes (alcohol, powder cocaine, marijuana) but prosectutes to the full extent black crimes.

  

 

New Jim Crow Lesson Three Updated for 11-19-15

 

Essay Four (Final): The New Jim Crow

Support, refute, or complicate Michelle Alexander's thesis that the current justice and prison system are perpetuating the old Jim Crow into a new Jim Crow. Use Toulmin or Refutation model.

Because this is your Final, it is a bit longer than your previous typed papers. While they are four pages (1,000 words), this essay is five pages (closer to 1,200 words).

Be sure to have a Works Cited page with no fewer than three sources and be sure one of the sources is from the El Camino College database. 

Essay Requirements: 

One. Students will express critical viewpoints and develop original thesis-driven arguments in response to social, political, and philosophical issues and/or to works of literature and literary theory.  This argumentative essay will be well organized, demonstrate an ability to support a claim using analysis and elements of argumentation, and integrate primary and secondary sources.  

 Two. The paper should use at least three sources and not over-rely on one main source for most of the information.  Rather, it should use multiple sources and synthesize the information found in them.  Three.  This paper will be approximately 5-6 pages in length, not including the Works Cited page, which is also required.  The Works Cited page does NOT count toward length requirement. 

Four. Within your argument, address issues of bias, credibility, and relevance.  

Five. Analyze and employ logical structural methods such as inductive and deductive reasoning, cause and effect, logos, ethos, and pathos, and demonstrate understanding of formal and informal fallacies in language and thought.  

Six. You must use MLA format for the document, in-text citations, and Works Cited page.

Seven. You must integrate quotations and paraphrases using signal phrases and analysis or commentary.

Eight. You must sustain your argument, use transitions effectively, and use correct grammar, spelling, and punctuation. 

 

Sample Concession Thesis Statements That Address the Analogy Between Jim Crow 1.0 and Jim Crow 2.0:

One. Support of Michelle Alexander:

While the New Jim Crow comparison to the Old is not a perfect analogy, there are compelling similarities evidenced by ______________, _______________, _______________, and _______________________. 

Two. Refutation of Michelle Alexander:

While I concede there are some disturbing parallels between Jim Crow 1.0 and what Michelle Alexander calls the New Jim Crow, the comparison ultimately collapses when we examine _____________, ______________, _______________, and _______________________. 

Three. Example of Thesis That Refutes Michelle Alexander

While Alexander makes compelling points about the loss of human rights and the link between degradation of justice in the face of the profit motives behind the disturbing expansion of the incarceration system in the Age of the Drug War, her narrative is an incomplete, highly selective propaganda piece that fails to address the link between drug crime and theft (Proposition 47 and the spike in Los Angeles crime), the demands of many African Americans for more robust police intervention to protect their communities, and the exaggerated analogy between Jim Crow and the alleged “New Jim Crow.”

Four. Example of Thesis That Supports Michelle Alexander

While Alexander’s analogy between Jim Crow 1.0 and the War on Drugs as a form of Jim Crow 2.0 has many flaws, there are enough compelling parallels to make her thesis persuasive, especially when we focus on the profit motive behind incarceration, the racial disparities in prison sentencing, and the loss of constitutional rights as a result of the futile Drug War.

Five. Thesis That Refutes Michelle Alexander

While Alexander makes some compelling points about the need for more drug treatment and making incarceration less profit-driven, her overall narrative is largely a fiction that does a great disservice to American society by demonizing all politicians and cops as money-hungry racists, by ignoring the crimes resulting from drug use, by ignoring how black communities suffer when the police back off from those communities, and by ignoring the role of economic class, not race, as a predictor of crimes that must result in imprisonment if we are to protect law-abiding citizens.

Six. Thesis That Supports Michelle Alexander

While Alexander's argument would be better served to take a more nuanced approach in her portrayal of the police, her overall New Jim Crow narrative is persuasive in light of racial arrest patterns, race-based loss of civil liberties, and the military-like expansion of police powers.

 

Use Present Verb Tense for Argument Research Paper and Textual Analysis 

Study Questions for Chapter 3, 97-139

One. Describe the injustice imposed upon Erma Faye Stewart on page 97. Did she ever get justice? How are millions of the poor vulnerable to this injustice?

We find that African Americans were put into prison just 3 years after the Drug War in the 1980s at a rate of 400% or a quadrupling (98). By 2000 the rate of African American imprisonment was up 26 times or 2,600 percent. 

Are black people "2,600 percent more criminal inside," as opponents of Alexander claim. Ridiculous.

It seems reasonable to call this Jim Crow 2.0. 

We read on page 98, that although the majority of illegal drug users and dealers nationwide are white, three-fourths of all people imprisoned for drug offenses are black or Latino.

 On page 118 we read that African Americans are six times as likely as whites to be sentenced to prison for identical crimes. Sounds like Jim Crow to me. 

 African American youth account for 16 percent of all youth, 28 percent of all juvenile arrests, 35% of the youth waived to adult criminal court, and 58% of youth admitted to state adult prison.

Hypersegregation of the black poor in ghetto communities has made the roundup, police arresting people with no just cause, easy. Rappers call this situation “The Occupation.”

 We read on page 128 that Adolph Lyons was stopped for a burned-out taillight and beaten into a loss of consciousness, urinated and defecated on himself, and suffered permanent damage to his larynx. This was the LAPD. Lyons sued but lost. Deadly chokeholds are still a legal practice even though sixteen people have been killed by it.

In New Jersey, we read on page 133, racial minority drivers are 15% but 42% of all stops and 73% of all arrests happen to minorities (New Jersey Turnpike).

 Seventy-seven% of all consent searches happen to minorities.

In Maryland, African Americans are 17% of drivers yet 70% are stopped and searched.

In both studies, we see that whites were more likely to be carrying drugs. That’s twice as likely as black people and five times as likely as Latinos.

This racial isolation doesn’t affect white communities and the suburbs and the result is indifference toward those who are unfairly imprisoned, what’s called an “I don’t give a damn” mentality (124).

Two. How does white drug use differ from black drug use?

We read on page 99, that white students use cocaine at seven times the rate of black students, and use heroin at seven times the rate of black students. Equal percentages use marijuana.

White drug dealers do their dealing, not on street corners like the poor, but in more discreet settings (100).

Crack cocaine, the major drug in black offenses, creates sentences that bring punishment with one hundred times more severity than offenses involving powder cocaine (the white drug) as we see on page 112. Crack law is unfair since plain cocaine results in far fewer sentences, a ratio of 100:1. Fair sentencing act may change this. 

In Jim Crow 2.0, racial language is not used; there is a code that includes the type of drugs that will result in strong convictions. These strong convictions will be exacted on poor people of color, not white people with economic resources.

Three. What is the circular illogic of racial profiling?

On page 134, we read that cops say, “Our prisons are full of blacks; blacks must be doing all the crime; therefore, we must stop and search blacks.”

In Denver, a 1992 investigation showed that 8 out of 10 people of color in the entire city were on a list of suspected criminals.

Clearly, the studies show that racial minorities are the main targets of stop-and-frisk. This humiliating ritual of dominance and submission recalls Jim Crow (136). And these searches are the gateway to a lifelong spent in the prison system.

From Lesson Two

Lexicon

One. Prison Cash Cow

Two. Reasonable Cause and Fourth Amendment

Three. Forfeiture Law (over billion dollars between 1988-1992)

Four. "Consent search"

Five. Traffic stop trick

Six. "massive bribe" to the police to encourage drug arrests (74)

Seven. Sentencing disparity (drug lords go free; small timers go to prison)

Eight. Legal Counsel Myth: Eighty percent of defendants don't get legal representation. Usually, there is no trial; there's a plea bargain.

Nine. "Closed circuit of perpetual marginality" (95)

Ten. Racial disparity: 80-90 percent of all drug offenders sent to prison are African American. 

One. What is the single leading cause of rising incarceration?

Drug offenses, which account for two thirds of the rise and more than half of the rise in state prisoners between 1985 and 2000 (60). There are more people in prisons and jails today for just drug offenses than were incarcerated for all reasons in 1980.

We read on page 60 that most prisoners are first offenders arrested for possession, not selling. In 2005, four out of five were arrested for possession only, not selling.

Another glaring fact: In the 1990s, marijuana was the leading cause for arrest. Marijuana is less dangerous than alcohol. By 2007 one in every 31 adults were behind bars, on probation, or on parole.

Two.  What rules, if any, dictate the War on Drugs?

First, the Fourth Amendment, the law against search and seizures, has been eradicated since a cop can say he had “reasonable cause” to do a drug search. This results in police harassment and intimidation in poor communities as the police can do warrantless searches (63).

Second, law enforcement can now use invasive means to do drug surveillance and forced drug tests and use of informants and allow the forfeiture of cash, property, and other belongings (62). So we see a huge economic motive to make these arrests. 

Third, consent searches are now police policy and studies show that most people, intimidated by the police, will consent (66). As a result, human rights are being violated under the huge umbrella of "reasonable cause."

Fourth, the police can now rely on a pretext traffic stop (failing to make a turn signal or going 1 MPH over speed limit, to cite 2 examples) and use that stop as an excuse to do a drug search (67). Many people are forced to spread eagle on the ground during these searches. Ninety-nine percent of these people being investigated are innocent but left humiliated. The majority of these people are of color. 

Three. The author asks on page 72, why would the police choose to arrest such an astonishing percentage of the American public for minor drug crimes (between 1980 and 2005 drug arrests more than tripled)?

Especially since drug use was in decline when the War on Drugs began in the early 1980s.

Here we get to the crux of the matter: The system’s design was control with tangible and intangible benefits. And these benefits were a “massive bribe” offered to state and local law enforcement. Millions of dollars are given to local law enforcement. The military gives weapons, including bazookas, helicopters, night-vision goggles (74). 

Four. Why is a SWAT raid inappropriate for the War on Drugs? Trauma, disproportion, and financial incentives. Each drug arrest brought $153 in funding, so the more arrests, the more money. See page 78.

Five. What other dramatic change took place under the Reagan Administration during the War on Drugs? On page 78, we see that the police now had the right to seize and keep everything for themselves, including cash and other assets. State and local police could keep up to 80 percent of assets’ value. This in turn increased police budgets. So not only was the prison industry expanding into a multi-billion-dollar business, police departments were getting richer with the incentive to make more arrests. Between 1988 and 1992 alone, this forfeiture law amassed over a billion dollars in assets. 

And the targets of these arrests were poor because they lack the means to hire an attorney and defend themselves. And since the poor represent easy cash, the police are encouraged to engage in illegal shakedowns, searches, and threats in search of forfeitable cash (80).

The big drug kingpins, the ones presumably targeted by the Drug War, go free because they can afford attorneys. It’s the little man who gets put in jail, so the War on Drugs fails on that level as well (79). For example, an investigation showed that when a person arrested can pay 50,000 dollars from drug profits seized would earn 6.3 year sentence reduction and agreements of $10,000 reduced trafficking charges by three-fourths (80).

Six. Why is it that after a poor person is arrested his chances of being free from the legal system are forever thin? On page 84 we see that thousands of defendants are escorted through the courts with no legal counsel at all. Eighty percent of the defendants cannot hire a lawyer. In Lake Charles, Louisiana, we read that the defender office had only two investigators for the 2,500 new felony cases and 4,000 misdemeanor cases each year (85). We further read that defendants often plead guilty, even when innocent, without understanding their legal rights or what is occurring (86).

In most cases there is not trial because there is a plea bargain which results in a reduced sentence but carries with it a lifetime of stripped human rights: he can’t get government benefits or get a job. He’ll be under constant surveillance. The condition is called by Loic Wacquant a “closed circuit of perpetual marginality” (95).

We currently have 2.3 million in the prisons and another 5.1 million on probation or parole (94).

According to Human Rights Watch, 80-90% of all drug offenders sent to prison are African American (98).

Violent crimes are at historically low levels yet mass incarceration is on the rise (101). 

Of the 7.3 million under correctional control, only 1.6 million are in prison (101). 

The prison system encourages criminality so that 68% of those released from prisons are back in 3 years (94). And only a small minority for violent crimes. 

The poor were targeted by the media at the onset of the Drug War as pathological and created an “us vs. them” mentality (105).

“Drug criminals” became a code word for black and this makes sense when we consider that about 90% of those arrested are poor black males (105).

Alexander's Major Claims and Arguments (you should address in your essay's mapping components)

One. The NJC is based on race-neutral language to exert racist control and to make a rich prison empire on the backs of poor black men.

Two. Prisons don't reduce crime. They increase it.

Three. NJC was created by elite whites to appease poor whites.

Four. NJC is a reaction to the Civil Rights Movement merging with the Poor People's Movement (threatening to take more pie from the white elite who needed to break the alliance).

Five. Treatment, prevention, education, and decriminalization of drugs reduces drug use; mass incarceration increases it.

Six. War on Drugs threw away the Fourth Amendment for people of color.

Seven. Poor people don't get legal representation.

Eight. U.S. legal system accommodates white crimes (alcohol, drunk driving (80% of drunk drivers are white men) powder cocaine, marijuana) but prosecutes to the full extent black crimes.

Counterarguments

Here is a legitimate critique from Yale.

Counterargument and rebuttal (in reader comments) of the claim that mass incarceration is the New Jim Crow.

 

 

 

 

 

 

New Jim Crow Lesson Two, Chapter 2 The Lockdown Updated for 11-17-15

 

 

Essay Four (Final): The New Jim Crow

Support, refute, or complicate Michelle Alexander's thesis that the current justice and prison system are perpetuating the old Jim Crow into a new Jim Crow. Use Toulmin or Refutation model.

Because this is your Final, it is a bit longer than your previous typed papers. While they are four pages (1,000 words), this essay is five pages (closer to 1,200 words).

Be sure to have a Works Cited page with no fewer than three sources and be sure one of the sources is from the El Camino College database. 

Essay Requirements: 

One. Students will express critical viewpoints and develop original thesis-driven arguments in response to social, political, and philosophical issues and/or to works of literature and literary theory.  This argumentative essay will be well organized, demonstrate an ability to support a claim using analysis and elements of argumentation, and integrate primary and secondary sources.  

 Two. The paper should use at least three sources and not over-rely on one main source for most of the information.  Rather, it should use multiple sources and synthesize the information found in them.  Three.  This paper will be approximately 5-6 pages in length, not including the Works Cited page, which is also required.  The Works Cited page does NOT count toward length requirement. 

Four. Within your argument, address issues of bias, credibility, and relevance.  

Five. Analyze and employ logical structural methods such as inductive and deductive reasoning, cause and effect, logos, ethos, and pathos, and demonstrate understanding of formal and informal fallacies in language and thought.  

Six. You must use MLA format for the document, in-text citations, and Works Cited page.

Seven. You must integrate quotations and paraphrases using signal phrases and analysis or commentary.

Eight. You must sustain your argument, use transitions effectively, and use correct grammar, spelling, and punctuation. 

 

Study Questions (1-58) (Leftover from Lesson 1)

One. In the New Jim Crow, or Jim Crow 2.0, we replace racial names, now banned, with the term “criminals.”

These "criminals" are mostly poor people of color and they are the new undercaste and they are denied human rights. They can’t vote, get housing, jobs, etc.

The author thought ten years ago it was stupid to compare today’s war on drugs to Jim Crow (post civil war oppression of African Americans), that such a comparison would make people think you’re crazy, but the evidence has shown that indeed such a comparison is compelling.

"Only crackpots would compare the plight of black America today with Jim Crow, or worse, with slavery." The author had these thoughts but her research showed her otherwise. There is a system designed to incarcerate black and brown Americans and this system makes money, a huge prison system. And it gains political points for politicians. Both the prison industry and the politicians, MA will show, make their careers off the blood and backs of brown and black people.

Here are some key features of the New Jim Crow, AKA, The War on Drugs:

The War on Drugs started in 1982 and picked up momentum in 1985 when the black community was demonized as a Crack Den. These demonized images saturated TV news and gave a very thin slice of African Americans, not the whole picture. 

The Drug War started when crime and drug use was on decline and the author suggests that it started as a form of social control.

In thirty years, the number of US prisoners increased from 300,000 to over 2 million.This number has gone unquestioned

The US has the highest incarceration rate of any industrialized country. Such a fact speaks volumes about our freedom and our democracy and our morality. 

In Germany, 93 out of 100,000 adults are incarcerated; in the US, the number is 8 times that amount or 750 out of 100,000.

Between 1960 and 1990 crime rates in Finland, Germany, and US were the same but during that time the US incarceration rate quadrupled, the Finnish rate decreased 60 percent, and the German rate remained unchanged. The author seems to suggest we have unsavory motives for our high incarceration rate. 

Indeed, a New Yorker essay "The Caging of America" traces the moral bankruptcy that informs the US prison system.

The majority of US prisoners are black and brown men. Black men outnumber white men 7 to 1 yet are only 13 percent of the population. We call this disparity the "racial caste system."  

Black and brown men are, in spite of similar rates of drug activity to whites, imprisoned 20-50 times greater than whites.

In Washington D.C. 3 out of 4 black men will be in prison.

In major cities throughout the US, 80% of black men have criminal records.

But illegal drug activity is not greater among blacks. Illegal drug activity happens in similar numbers among the different races.

The growth of US prisons is the largest form of race-based social control in world history.

Experts agree that prisons make more crime; they don’t reduce crime, yet there is an incentive to grow the prison industry: It makes billions of dollars (and employs about 2.5 million people) and as long as this money is made on the backs of black and brown men, the media and the public remain indifferent.

Two. Why is this racial caste system so hard to fight?

Because it is largely invisible and insidious with code words but evidence for its existence is overwhelming as we can see from the statistics above.

And because we throw people in prison under "due process," from the Bill of Rights, which we worship like some kind of God. We get so caught up with "due process," that we become blind to the results of this "due process." 

Three. On page 12, what is the continuum of the racial caste system?

Slavery, Jim Crow, and Jim Crow 2.0, AKA The War on Drugs, is “a stigmatized racial group locked into an inferior position by law and custom.” The new laws and customs put black and brown men into mass incarceration at disproportionate rates when their drug activity is not higher than other people’s.

This incarceration makes black and brown men members of the undercaste or second-class citizens based on prison label or criminal label, not prison time. Once labeled, they are denied citizen rights to vote, to serve jury duty, to work, etc.

On page 21, we see that when one type of racial oppression dies, a new one takes its place, what Reva Siegel has called “preservation through transformation.”

We no longer use racist language; we call people of color criminals or felons. Prison is the new form of control.

In American history, we see control over people of color has been largely to appease lower-class whites, who feel trapped at the bottom of society. The privileged whites throw the poor whites a dog bone: “Even though you’re poor, we’ll make people of color even more poor and even less privileged than you.”

We read further that Jim Crow was a reaction to the Emancipation Proclamation, the abolishment of slavery and it is the author’s contention that Mass Incarceration is the reaction to the Civil Rights Movement. See page 22.

Four. How does our modern society, bathing in the glory of colorblindness and black exceptionalism (the idea that great blacks such Obama, Oprah, Bill Cosby, etc., are proof that blacks with intelligence and strong character can climb the American ladder), actually provide the essential tools for Jim Crow 2.0?

On page 14 we read, and this point will be developed later in the book, that they make us feel good for not having bigotry and hostility toward people of color while we have something far worse: indifference. Indifference to what? To quote the author, “A human rights nightmare is occurring on our watch” (15).

The privileged whites had to appease poor whites. See the case of Nathaniel Bacon’s Rebellion on page 24. By appeasing Bacon, rich whites broke up the alliance between poor whites and blacks.

Five.  What is the tragedy of racism discussed on pages 22 and 23?

During America’s Colonial period, there was no such thing as race. People of light and dark skin color worked side by side oblivious of race. The idea of race didn’t become prominent until European imperialism and American slavery a few hundred years ago. To kill and exploit people with justification, the term “savages” was created to replace human beings.  

During slavery, white supremacy became a religion that “served to alleviate the white conscience and reconcile the tension between slavery and the democratic ideals espoused by whites . . .” (26).  This religion endured beyond slavery.

Six. How is the American government founded on property ownership and privilege over equal rights?

We see on page 25 that James Madison said the nation ought to be constituted “to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority.”

We read further that the Constitution “was designed so the federal government would be weak” in relation to private property and the “states to conduct their own affairs.”

Seven. On page 27 we read what economic incentives to implement Jim Crow in the aftermath of slavery’s abolishment?

Southern regions depended on the labor of former slaves or those economies “would surely collapse.”

Eight. What were the attributes of Jim Crow?

Backlash and hostility against blacks in the face of the Reconstruction Era, a period of poor white resentment

Stereotypes of black males and predators and lazy ne’er-do-wells.

Strict unemployment laws against blacks and job discrimination, a disastrous combination.

No interracial relationships, seating, eating, hotels, rooms, etc. In other words, complete segregation. These laws kept a rift between poor whites and blacks and prevented them from forming an alliance.

KKK interference with black voting.

KKK lynchings of black men with no arrests.

An overall “terrorist campaign” against blacks (31)

Tens of thousands of blacks were “arbitrarily arrested” for “mischief” and “insulting gestures” (31).

Let's be clear: Mischief and insulting gestures are terms open to wide interpretation. 

Black prison convicts had no human rights; they were as good as dead (31)

A new form of slavery emerged: black labor from prison (32)

Nine. What foreshadowed the Birth of Mass Incarceration, AKA Jim Crow 2.0?

The Civil Rights Movement merged with the Poor People’s Movement and this alliance between poor whites and blacks threatened to challenge the distribution of wealth. A new racial control, splitting whites and blacks again (see 47-49), had to be established. See pages 39 and 40. Whites had to see blacks as “criminals” and pay taxes to erect a multi-billion-dollar prison system that employs over 2.5 million people.

Ten. What did President Reagan and other conservatives do to demonize the Civil Rights Movement?

We see on page 48 that the helping of the poor became “enabling welfare queens and criminal predators,” and in essence was ballooning this huge criminal underclass, which had to be controlled with The War on Drugs and Mass Incarceration.

In this Jim Crow 2.0 there was no explicit racist language. Instead a new language was created based on words like criminality, welfare bums, food stamp abusers and these terms became codes for poor black people, the “undeserving others” (49). 

Eleven. What were the effects of the War on Drugs and Criminals? 

On page 49 we read that “overnight the budgets of federal law enforcement agencies soared. Between 1980 and 1984, FBI antidrug funding increased from $8 million to $95 million.”

Department of Defense antidrug allocations increased from $33 million in 1981 to $1,042 million in 1991. 

Antidrug spending  grew from $38 to $181 million. 

Agencies for drug treatment, prevention, and education were dramatically reduced. 

The budget for National Institute on Drug Abuse was reduced from $274 to $57 million from 1981 to 1984. 

Department of Education suffered cuts from $14 million to $3 million.

All of these cuts and the demonization of the black inner cities as crack dens happened during huge economic collapse, a time when poor blacks were most vulnerable. We read, for example, that in the big cities black employment for blue-collar jobs went from 70% of all blacks working, in the late 1970s, to 28% by 1987. 

During this time manufacturing jobs moved to the white suburbs and only 28% of black fathers had access to an automobile so they could drive from the cities to the suburbs.

These job losses were accompanied by increased incentives to sell drugs. “Crack hit the streets in 1985” (51).

Crack did indeed eviscerate the black community. But the government response was wrong. The correct response can be seen in Portugal. During a period of high drug use, Portugal decriminalized drugs and invested in treatment, prevention, and education and in ten years addiction and drug-related crime plummeted (51). But conservatives decided to wage a war against the “enemy.” And the media got into the act with images of “crack whores,” “crack babies,” and “gangbangers.” See page 52.

The Portugal study speaks to America's motives. Do we choose a solution, prison, that makes more criminals or do we choose a solution, decriminalization, which reduces drug use? Why would we choose the wrong path? If a parent learns that education disciplines a child more than spanking, why would the parent stick to spanking? 

In 1988, Congress passed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act with a five-year mandatory minimum sentence for possession of cocaine base with no evidence of intent to sell. And this law applied to first-time offenders. 

The American people, 64%, supported this new drug war and they imprisoned huge numbers of black men but could feel colorblind and non-racist, because in their minds this was not about race; it was about criminality and drug use. But white drug users weren’t going to prison in the same numbers. A new racial caste system through mass incarceration was born (55).

Democrats didn’t want to appear soft on crime, so Clinton more than any other president did more to create the racial undercaste with a variety of bills (57).

Under Clinton, felons could not get public housing and other benefits. They lost all rights as human beings and lived under the shadow of oppression, just like in the days of Jim Crow (57). 

By 1996, the penal budget doubled while food stamps and other benefits were slashed. 

Ninety percent of those admitted in prison for drugs were black or Latino and yet the War on Drugs used race-neutral language. Jim Crow 2.0 was born.  

Lesson Two: Pages 59-96

Disagreement with Michelle Alexander in "Black Out: Michelle Alexander's Operational Whitewash"

Another liberal disagreement from the same author above

"Mapping the New Jim Crow" in The Atlantic

Pay Special Attention to the Following:

"Racial Critique of Mass Incarceration: Beyond the New Jim Crow" by James Forman

Lexicon

One. Prison Cash Cow

Two. Reasonable Cause and Fourth Amendment

Three. Forfeiture Law (over billion dollars between 1988-1992)

Four. "Consent search"

Five. Traffic stop trick

Six. "massive bribe" to the police to encourage drug arrests (74)

Seven. Sentencing disparity (drug lords go free; small timers go to prison)

Eight. Legal Counsel Myth: Eighty percent of defendants don't get legal representation. Usually, there is no trial; there's a plea bargain.

Nine. "Closed circuit of perpetual marginality" (95)

Ten. Racial disparity: 80-90 percent of all drug offenders sent to prison are African American. 

One. What is the single leading cause of rising incarceration?

Drug offenses, which account for two thirds of the rise and more than half of the rise in state prisoners between 1985 and 2000 (60). There are more people in prisons and jails today for just drug offenses than were incarcerated for all reasons in 1980.

We read on page 60 that most prisoners are first offenders arrested for possession, not selling. In 2005, four out of five were arrested for possession only, not selling.

Another glaring fact: In the 1990s, marijuana was the leading cause for arrest. Marijuana is less dangerous than alcohol. By 2007 one in every 31 adults were behind bars, on probation, or on parole.

Two.  What rules, if any, dictate the War on Drugs?

First, the Fourth Amendment, the law against search and seizures, has been eradicated since a cop can say he had “reasonable cause” to do a drug search. This results in police harassment and intimidation in poor communities as the police can do warrantless searches (63).

Second, law enforcement can now use invasive means to do drug surveillance and forced drug tests and use of informants and allow the forfeiture of cash, property, and other belongings (62). So we see a huge economic motive to make these arrests. 

Third, consent searches are now police policy and studies show that most people, intimidated by the police, will consent (66). As a result, human rights are being violated under the huge umbrella of "reasonable cause."

Fourth, the police can now rely on a pretext traffic stop (failing to make a turn signal or going 1 MPH over speed limit, to cite 2 examples) and use that stop as an excuse to do a drug search (67). Many people are forced to spread eagle on the ground during these searches. Ninety-nine percent of these people being investigated are innocent but left humiliated. The majority of these people are of color. 

Three. The author asks on page 72, why would the police choose to arrest such an astonishing percentage of the American public for minor drug crimes (between 1980 and 2005 drug arrests more than tripled)?

Especially since drug use was in decline when the War on Drugs began in the early 1980s.

Here we get to the crux of the matter: The system’s design was control with tangible and intangible benefits. And these benefits were a “massive bribe” offered to state and local law enforcement. Millions of dollars are given to local law enforcement. The military gives weapons, including bazookas, helicopters, night-vision goggles (74). 

Four. Why is a SWAT raid inappropriate for the War on Drugs? Trauma, disproportion, and financial incentives. Each drug arrest brought $153 in funding, so the more arrests, the more money. See page 78.

Five. What other dramatic change took place under the Reagan Administration during the War on Drugs? On page 78, we see that the police now had the right to seize and keep everything for themselves, including cash and other assets. State and local police could keep up to 80 percent of assets’ value. This in turn increased police budgets. So not only was the prison industry expanding into a multi-billion-dollar business, police departments were getting richer with the incentive to make more arrests. Between 1988 and 1992 alone, this forfeiture law amassed over a billion dollars in assets. 

And the targets of these arrests were poor because they lack the means to hire an attorney and defend themselves. And since the poor represent easy cash, the police are encouraged to engage in illegal shakedowns, searches, and threats in search of forfeitable cash (80).

The big drug kingpins, the ones presumably targeted by the Drug War, go free because they can afford attorneys. It’s the little man who gets put in jail, so the War on Drugs fails on that level as well (79). For example, an investigation showed that when a person arrested can pay 50,000 dollars from drug profits seized would earn 6.3 year sentence reduction and agreements of $10,000 reduced trafficking charges by three-fourths (80).

Six. Why is it that after a poor person is arrested his chances of being free from the legal system are forever thin? On page 84 we see that thousands of defendants are escorted through the courts with no legal counsel at all. Eighty percent of the defendants cannot hire a lawyer. In Lake Charles, Louisiana, we read that the defender office had only two investigators for the 2,500 new felony cases and 4,000 misdemeanor cases each year (85). We further read that defendants often plead guilty, even when innocent, without understanding their legal rights or what is occurring (86).

In most cases there is not trial because there is a plea bargain which results in a reduced sentence but carries with it a lifetime of stripped human rights: he can’t get government benefits or get a job. He’ll be under constant surveillance. The condition is called by Loic Wacquant a “closed circuit of perpetual marginality” (95).

We currently have 2.3 million in the prisons and another 5.1 million on probation or parole (94).

According to Human Rights Watch, 80-90% of all drug offenders sent to prison are African American (98).

Violent crimes are at historically low levels yet mass incarceration is on the rise (101). 

Of the 7.3 million under correctional control, only 1.6 million are in prison (101). 

The prison system encourages criminality so that 68% of those released from prisons are back in 3 years (94). And only a small minority for violent crimes. 

The poor were targeted by the media at the onset of the Drug War as pathological and created an “us vs. them” mentality (105).

“Drug criminals” became a code word for black and this makes sense when we consider that about 90% of those arrested are poor black males (105).

 

 

 

Prison Labor Abuses on Huffington Post

Prison Labor Abuses Reported in The Nation

"Leader of the Unfree World"

Writing the Essay

We will write an argument essay that answers the question: Does Michelle Alexander's book convincingly make the case that America's War on Drugs is "The New Jim Crow"? 

Essay Structure Suggestion 

For paragraph 1, I'd write an introduction that does four things: 

Defines Jim Crow 

Summarizes Alexander's major points and how they add up to support her main argument 

Introduce the question: How convincing is her argument? 

Answer the question with a thesis that includes 4 mapping components that will corrospond to the supporting evidence paragraphs 

Paragraphs 2-5 would be the supporting evidence paragraphs 

Paragraphs 6-7 would be counterarguments in which I'd anticipate my opponents' disagreement with Alexander and show why those opponents are wrong and/or misguided. 

Paragraph 8, my conclusion, would sum up my supporting evidence and restate my thesis in a dramatic fashion.  

Each paragraph would be approx. 150 words for 1,200-word total.

Work on Introduction

For paragraph 1, I'd write an introduction that does four things:

Defines Jim Crow

Summarizes Alexander's major points and how they add up to support her main argument  

 

 

Related articles

New Jim Crow Lesson One with Book Reviews and Critiques

New Jim Crow Lesson 6, Chapter 6. The Fire This Time

"The New Jim Crow" Author Michelle Alexander Talks Race And Drug War

From The New Jim Crow: Legal Rules Surrounding the War on Drugs (Part 2)

"The New Jim Crow"

From The New Jim Crow: Legal Rules Surrounding the War on Drugs (Part 1)

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

New Jim Crow Lesson 5, Chapter 5. The New Jim Crow

Michelle Alexander: The New Jim Crow: How the War on Drugs Gave Birth to a Permanent American Undercaste

New Jim Crow Lesson One Updated for 11-12-15: Rebirth of the Caste System

McMahon Grammar Lesson: Comma Rules (based in part by Diana Hacker’s Rules for Writers)

Commas are designed to help writers avoid confusing sentences and to clarify the logic of their sentences.

If you cook Jeff will clean the dishes. (Will you cook Jeff?)

While we were eating a rattlesnake approached us. (Were we eating a rattlesnake?)

Comma Rule 1: Use a comma before a coordinating conjunction (FANBOYS) joining two independent clauses.

Rattlesnakes are high in protein, but I’d rather eat a peanut butter sandwich.

Rattlesnakes are dangerous, and the desert species are even more so.

We are a proud people, for our ancestors passed down these famous delicacies over a period of five thousand years.

The exception to rule 1 is when the two independent clauses are short:

The plane took off and we were on our way.

Comma Rule 2: Use a comma after an introductory clause or phrase.

When Jeff Henderson was in prison, he developed an appetite for reading.

In the nearby room, the TV is blaring full blast.

Tanning in the hot Hermosa Beach sun for over two hours, I realized I had better call it a day.

The exception is when the short adverb clause or phrase is short and doesn’t create the possibility of a misreading:

In no time we were at 2,800 feet.

Comma Rule 3: Use a comma between all items in a series.

 

Jeff Henderson found redemption through hard work, self-reinvention, and social altruism.

Finding his passion, mastering his craft, and giving back to the community were all part of Jeff Henderson’s self-reinvention.

Comma Rule 4: Use a comma between coordinate adjectives not joined with “and.” Do not use a comma between cumulative adjectives.

 

The adjectives below are called coordinate because they modify the noun separately:

Jeff Henderson is a passionate, articulate, wise speaker.

The adjectives above are coordinate because they can be joined with “and.” Jeff Henderson is passionate and articulate and wise.

Adjectives that do not modify the noun separately are cumulative.

Three large gray shapes moved slowly toward us.

Chocolate fudge peanut butter swirl coconut cake is divine.

Comma Rule 5: Use commas to set off nonrestrictive (nonessential) elements. 

Restrictive or essential information doesn’t have a comma:

For school the students need notebooks that are college-ruled.

Jeff’s cat that just had kittens became very aggressive.

Nonrestrictive:

For school the students need college-ruled notebooks, which are on sale at the bookstore.

Jeff Henderson’s mansion, which is located in Las Vegas, has a state-of-the-art kitchen.

My youngest sister, who plays left wing on the soccer team, now lives at The Sands, a beach house near Los Angeles.

 

 

Essay Four (Final): The New Jim Crow

Support, refute, or complicate Michelle Alexander's thesis that the current justice and prison system are perpetuating the old Jim Crow into a new Jim Crow. Use Toulmin or Refutation model.

Because this is your Final, it is a bit longer than your previous typed papers. While they are four pages (1,000 words), this essay is five pages (closer to 1,200 words).

Be sure to have a Works Cited page with no fewer than three sources and be sure one of the sources is from the El Camino College database. 

Essay Requirements: 

One. Students will express critical viewpoints and develop original thesis-driven arguments in response to social, political, and philosophical issues and/or to works of literature and literary theory.  This argumentative essay will be well organized, demonstrate an ability to support a claim using analysis and elements of argumentation, and integrate primary and secondary sources.  

 Two. The paper should use at least three sources and not over-rely on one main source for most of the information.  Rather, it should use multiple sources and synthesize the information found in them.  Three.  This paper will be approximately 5-6 pages in length, not including the Works Cited page, which is also required.  The Works Cited page does NOT count toward length requirement. 

Four. Within your argument, address issues of bias, credibility, and relevance.  

Five. Analyze and employ logical structural methods such as inductive and deductive reasoning, cause and effect, logos, ethos, and pathos, and demonstrate understanding of formal and informal fallacies in language and thought.  

Six. You must use MLA format for the document, in-text citations, and Works Cited page.

Seven. You must integrate quotations and paraphrases using signal phrases and analysis or commentary.

Eight. You must sustain your argument, use transitions effectively, and use correct grammar, spelling, and punctuation. 

Student Learning Outcomes:

Upon completion of this course, students will: 

One. Compose an argumentative essay that shows an ability to support a claim using analysis, elements of argumentation, and integration of primary and secondary sources. 

Two. Identify and assess bias, credibility, and relevance in their own arguments and in the arguments of others, including primary and secondary outside sources. 

Three. Organize an essay in proper MLA format and will also be technically correct in paragraph composition, sentence structure, grammar, spelling, and usage.

Work on introduction.

I recommend you choose one of the following:

One. Introduce both sides of the debate.

Two. Use a quotation from Alexander’s book or some other relevant quotations.

Three. Refer to a news event that is relevant to your thesis. 

Work on preliminary or tentative thesis. I recommend you use a thesis with a concession clause as we’ve seen in earlier templates such as these two:

While Writer X makes a strong case that __________________, the preponderance of evidence points to _________________, _________________, ________________, and _____________________.

 

Although Writer X makes some good points regarding _________________, those points fail to address __________________, ___________________, ___________________, and _______________________.

 

Write your conclusion and your two counterarguments followed by rebuttals.

Restate your thesis with different wording and show the general, far-reaching importance of your claim. You may also return to an image, quote, or anecdote to raised in your introduction to give your essay the “full circle” effect. 

Essay Structure

Use Toulmin Model 

Work on two counterarguments to your thesis and two rebuttals to those counterarguments. 

Introduction

Claim or Thesis

Evidence, Reasoning, and Logic That Supports Your Claim

Rebuttal Section

Conclusion, a restatement of your thesis in dramatic terms

or

Use Refutation Model

Introduce your opponents' argument

Claim: Explain why your opponents are wrong

Body Paragraphs: Point by point refutation of their reasons for having their position.

Conclusion: Restatement of thesis in dramatic form.

Either way, you'll have to address your opponents' views.

In the New Jim Crow, we see people of color getting pepper-sprayed in their house.

Case for Marijuana Reparations

Atlantic Article: Leader of the Unfree World

The Caging of America

NYTimes Book Review

Socialist Alternative Book Review

Persephone Book Review

Criminal Law and Criminal Justice Book Reviews

Seattle PI Review

Joy's Book Blog

Left Eye on Books

Forbes Book Review

Rita Silva Book Review

Study Guide

Red Sociology Book Review

The Vaults of Erowid

The New York Review of Books

Yale Daily News

Daily Beast

The Caging of America

Six Charts That Show Why Our Prison System Is So Insane

Sample New Jim Crow Research Paper

 

Lexicon

One. Racial Caste System:

We had a caste system, based on the creation of race, during the time of slavery and during Jim Crow, but now we have Jim Crow 2.0 and a new racial caste system: a disproportionate number of black men in prison (7 black men for every white man) based on so-called "due process," which targets the poor and people of color. The United States is 5% of the world's population, yet we imprison 25% of all the world's prisoners.

As a country, we have an immoral appetite for putting people, especially poor people of color, in prison.

Two. Jim Crow:

During Reconstruction after the Civil War poor white farmers were angry that their lives were no better than the recently freed black people. White politicians, who needed those poor white votes, exploited the poor farmers' grievances by implementing Jim Crow, a system that seprated black Americans into horrible conditions, racism, sub-wage work, failed schools, nonexistent government support, etc.

White politicians catered to the white supremacy religion of the poor white people who, having little, only could cling to their pathetic "religion" of white supremacy.

Three. Black Exceptionalism and the denial of racism in America:

Black Exceptionalism is the idea that since Bill Cosby, Michael Jordan, Oprah, and others have "made it,"; therefore, there can't possibly be racism and that any failure on a black person's part results from an individual failure of will and character. 

We read in The Autobiography of Malcolm X that since the beginning of America, white people love to parade black people "who made it" to assuage white guilt for slavery, racism, and Jim Crow. 

Four. Racism of White Supremacy

White Americans who came here from Europe knew the stakes were high: They were fighting for freedom and knew how valuable freedom is, yet they enslaved Africans because of the economic efficacy of a slave economy ("Cotton is King!") How did they overcome this contradiction and hypocrisy, wanting freedom for themselves on one hand but giving up their morals to embrace the efficacy of slavery on the other?

The originators of racism and white supremacy, ironically enough, didn't even believe in race or racism or white supremacy. These white businessmen were sociopaths who knew that normal white people wouldn't accept the evils of slavery unless they created a toxic religion, White Supremacy, to pour down white America's throats. This evil Kool-Aid created a "mass psychosis," we read in Michelle Alexander's book, that allowed the sociopaths to control the white delusional masses. 

White Supremacy therefore is a false religion created by sociopaths who don't even believe in race. They believe in money. They saw slavery as the most expedient way to make profits.

Ninety-six percent of white Americans needed this new religion to use slavery for their own means. The other four percent were sociopaths and needed no justification.

And what is White Supremacy? It's a pseudo-science and mostly a religion designed to fuel the sociopathy of slavery and Jim Crow in all its forms.

As we said, slave owners couldn't do their evil unless they were sociopaths. But only 4% of the population is sociopathic. If white Americans weren't sociopaths, that is to say, if they had a conscience, then they needed this "religion," white supremacy, to tell them what they were doing was okay and was in fact even blessed by God.

People of conscience, the 96%, had to drink the Kool-Aid of White Supremacy in order to exact cruelty against others and be able to sleep at night.

White slaveowners read bedtime stories to their children while their clothes still had the blood of whipped slaves on their clothes and these white slaveowners believed they were "good Christians." Many historians called this white state of mind a "mass psychosis" and in fact this term is used by Michelle Alexander. 

Let's look at white supremacy this way:

White supremacy had to be as strong (potent) as slavery is evil in order to assuage white guilt.

The strength of this religion is so powerful that WS exists today in many ways. There are whites who believe in their hearts they love blacks as much as they love anyone but they'll get scared on an airplane if they discover the pilot is black (one example of many).

Have you known anyone who, consciously or not, evidenced white supremacy? 

Now some people will say, "But other people, including people of color, have enslaved others? What do you say to that?"

My response:

Slavery is unique to America because an entire country of white people drank the White Supremacy Kool-Aid to justify an evil that was exacted for over 100 years, perpetuating in ugly forms of Jim Crow to this day.

So when we talk about slavery, we must consider

scale

duration

brainwashing

pervasiveness (an entire country brainwashed or an outlier group of rogue criminal?)

Five. Colorblind Code Language as the New Racist Language: using code words to demonize a race: "thugs, felons, stamp abusers, welfare queens . . ."

Race-Based Social Control (21), various institutions control African Americans; first slavery, then Jim Crow, then the US Prison System, AKA Jim Crow 2.0. Institutions die but "are reborn in new form."

Trifold Narrative of the book: Slavery (born of a religious mass psychosis called White Supremacy), Jim Crow, Jim Crow 2.0

Study Questions (1-58)

One. In the New Jim Crow, or Jim Crow 2.0, we replace racial names, now banned, with the term “criminals.”

These "criminals" are mostly poor people of color and they are the new undercaste and they are denied human rights. They can’t vote, get housing, jobs, etc.

The author thought ten years ago it was stupid to compare today’s war on drugs to Jim Crow (post civil war oppression of African Americans), that such a comparison would make people think you’re crazy, but the evidence has shown that indeed such a comparison is compelling.

"Only crackpots would compare the plight of black America today with Jim Crow, or worse, with slavery." The author had these thoughts but her research showed her otherwise. There is a system designed to incarcerate black and brown Americans and this system makes money, a huge prison system. And it gains political points for politicians. Both the prison industry and the politicians, MA will show, make their careers off the blood and backs of brown and black people.

Here are some key features of the New Jim Crow, AKA, The War on Drugs:

The War on Drugs started in 1982 and picked up momentum in 1985 when the black community was demonized as a Crack Den. These demonized images saturated TV news and gave a very thin slice of African Americans, not the whole picture.

The Drug War started when crime and drug use was on decline and the author suggests that it started as a form of social control.

In thirty years, the number of US prisoners increased from 300,000 to over 2 million.This number has gone unquestioned

The US has the highest incarceration rate of any industrialized country. Such a fact speaks volumes about our freedom and our democracy and our morality.

In Germany, 93 out of 100,000 adults are incarcerated; in the US, the number is 8 times that amount or 750 out of 100,000.

Between 1960 and 1990 crime rates in Finland, Germany, and US were the same but during that time the US incarceration rate quadrupled, the Finnish rate decreased 60 percent, and the German rate remained unchanged. The author seems to suggest we have unsavory motives for our high incarceration rate.

Indeed, a New Yorker essay "The Caging of America" traces the moral bankruptcy that informs the US prison system.

The majority of US prisoners are black and brown men. Black men outnumber white men 7 to 1 yet are only 13 percent of the population. We call this disparity the "racial caste system." 

Black and brown men are, in spite of similar rates of drug activity to whites, imprisoned 20-50 times greater than whites.

In Washington D.C. 3 out of 4 black men will be in prison.

In major cities throughout the US, 80% of black men have criminal records.

But illegal drug activity is not greater among blacks. Illegal drug activity happens in similar numbers among the different races.

The growth of US prisons is the largest form of race-based social control in world history.

Experts agree that prisons make more crime; they don’t reduce crime, yet there is an incentive to grow the prison industry: It makes billions of dollars (and employs about 2.5 million people) and as long as this money is made on the backs of black and brown men, the media and the public remain indifferent.

Two. Why is this racial caste system so hard to fight?

Because it is largely invisible and insidious with code words but evidence for its existence is overwhelming as we can see from the statistics above.

And because we throw people in prison under "due process," from the Bill of Rights, which we worship like some kind of God. We get so caught up with "due process," that we become blind to the results of this "due process."

Three. On page 12, what is the continuum of the racial caste system?

Slavery, Jim Crow, and Jim Crow 2.0, AKA The War on Drugs, is “a stigmatized racial group locked into an inferior position by law and custom.” The new laws and customs put black and brown men into mass incarceration at disproportionate rates when their drug activity is not higher than other people’s.

This incarceration makes black and brown men members of the undercaste or second-class citizens based on prison label or criminal label, not prison time. Once labeled, they are denied citizen rights to vote, to serve jury duty, to work, etc.

On page 21, we see that when one type of racial oppression dies, a new one takes its place, what Reva Siegel has called “preservation through transformation.”

We no longer use racist language; we call people of color criminals or felons. Prison is the new form of control.

In American history, we see control over people of color has been largely to appease lower-class whites, who feel trapped at the bottom of society. The privileged whites throw the poor whites a dog bone: “Even though you’re poor, we’ll make people of color even more poor and even less privileged than you.”

We read further that Jim Crow was a reaction to the Emancipation Proclamation, the abolishment of slavery and it is the author’s contention that Mass Incarceration is the reaction to the Civil Rights Movement. See page 22.

Four. How does our modern society, bathing in the glory of colorblindness and black exceptionalism (the idea that great blacks such Obama, Oprah, Bill Cosby, etc., are proof that blacks with intelligence and strong character can climb the American ladder), actually provide the essential tools for Jim Crow 2.0?

On page 14 we read, and this point will be developed later in the book, that they make us feel good for not having bigotry and hostility toward people of color while we have something far worse: indifference. Indifference to what? To quote the author, “A human rights nightmare is occurring on our watch” (15).

The privileged whites had to appease poor whites. See the case of Nathaniel Bacon’s Rebellion on page 24. By appeasing Bacon, rich whites broke up the alliance between poor whites and blacks.

Five.  What is the tragedy of racism discussed on pages 22 and 23?

During America’s Colonial period, there was no such thing as race. People of light and dark skin color worked side by side oblivious of race. The idea of race didn’t become prominent until European imperialism and American slavery a few hundred years ago. To kill and exploit people with justification, the term “savages” was created to replace human beings.  

During slavery, white supremacy became a religion that “served to alleviate the white conscience and reconcile the tension between slavery and the democratic ideals espoused by whites . . .” (26).  This religion endured beyond slavery.

Six. How is the American government founded on property ownership and privilege over equal rights?

We see on page 25 that James Madison said the nation ought to be constituted “to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority.”

We read further that the Constitution “was designed so the federal government would be weak” in relation to private property and the “states to conduct their own affairs.”

Seven. On page 27 we read what economic incentives to implement Jim Crow in the aftermath of slavery’s abolishment?

Southern regions depended on the labor of former slaves or those economies “would surely collapse.”

Eight. What were the attributes of Jim Crow?

Backlash and hostility against blacks in the face of the Reconstruction Era, a period of poor white resentment

Stereotypes of black males and predators and lazy ne’er-do-wells.

Strict unemployment laws against blacks and job discrimination, a disastrous combination.

No interracial relationships, seating, eating, hotels, rooms, etc. In other words, complete segregation. These laws kept a rift between poor whites and blacks and prevented them from forming an alliance.

KKK interference with black voting.

KKK lynchings of black men with no arrests.

An overall “terrorist campaign” against blacks (31)

Tens of thousands of blacks were “arbitrarily arrested” for “mischief” and “insulting gestures” (31).

Let's be clear: Mischief and insulting gestures are terms open to wide interpretation. 

Black prison convicts had no human rights; they were as good as dead (31)

A new form of slavery emerged: black labor from prison (32)

Nine. What foreshadowed the Birth of Mass Incarceration, AKA Jim Crow 2.0?

The Civil Rights Movement merged with the Poor People’s Movement and this alliance between poor whites and blacks threatened to challenge the distribution of wealth. A new racial control, splitting whites and blacks again (see 47-49), had to be established. See pages 39 and 40. Whites had to see blacks as “criminals” and pay taxes to erect a multi-billion-dollar prison system that employs over 2.5 million people.

Ten. What did President Reagan and other conservatives do to demonize the Civil Rights Movement?

We see on page 48 that the helping of the poor became “enabling welfare queens and criminal predators,” and in essence was ballooning this huge criminal underclass, which had to be controlled with The War on Drugs and Mass Incarceration.

In this Jim Crow 2.0 there was no explicit racist language. Instead a new language was created based on words like criminality, welfare bums, food stamp abusers and these terms became codes for poor black people, the “undeserving others” (49). 

Eleven. What were the effects of the War on Drugs and Criminals? 

On page 49 we read that “overnight the budgets of federal law enforcement agencies soared. Between 1980 and 1984, FBI antidrug funding increased from $8 million to $95 million.”

Department of Defense antidrug allocations increased from $33 million in 1981 to $1,042 million in 1991. 

Antidrug spending  grew from $38 to $181 million. 

Agencies for drug treatment, prevention, and education were dramatically reduced. 

The budget for National Institute on Drug Abuse was reduced from $274 to $57 million from 1981 to 1984. 

Department of Education suffered cuts from $14 million to $3 million.

All of these cuts and the demonization of the black inner cities as crack dens happened during huge economic collapse, a time when poor blacks were most vulnerable. We read, for example, that in the big cities black employment for blue-collar jobs went from 70% of all blacks working, in the late 1970s, to 28% by 1987. 

During this time manufacturing jobs moved to the white suburbs and only 28% of black fathers had access to an automobile so they could drive from the cities to the suburbs.

 These job losses were accompanied by increased incentives to sell drugs. “Crack hit the streets in 1985” (51).

 Crack did indeed eviscerate the black community. But the government response was wrong. The correct response can be seen in Portugal. During a period of high drug use, Portugal decriminalized drugs and invested in treatment, prevention, and education and in ten years addiction and drug-related crime plummeted (51). But conservatives decided to wage a war against the “enemy.” And the media got into the act with images of “crack whores,” “crack babies,” and “gangbangers.” See page 52.

The Portugal study speaks to America's motives. Do we choose a solution, prison, that makes more criminals or do we choose a solution, decriminalization, which reduces drug use? Why would we choose the wrong path? If a parent learns that education disciplines a child more than spanking, why would the parent stick to spanking? 

In 1988, Congress passed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act with a five-year mandatory minimum sentence for possession of cocaine base with no evidence of intent to sell. And this law applied to first-time offenders. 

The American people, 64%, supported this new drug war and they imprisoned huge numbers of black men but could feel colorblind and non-racist, because in their minds this was not about race; it was about criminality and drug use. But white drug users weren’t going to prison in the same numbers. A new racial caste system through mass incarceration was born (55).

Democrats didn’t want to appear soft on crime, so Clinton more than any other president did more to create the racial undercaste with a variety of bills (57).

Under Clinton, felons could not get public housing and other benefits. They lost all rights as human beings and lived under the shadow of oppression, just like in the days of Jim Crow (57). 

By 1996, the penal budget doubled while food stamps and other benefits were slashed. 

Ninety percent of those admitted in prison for drugs were black or Latino and yet the War on Drugs used race-neutral language. Jim Crow 2.0 was born. 

 

 

Sample New Jim Crow Research Paper

Mass Incarceration and the New Jim Crow

Please read "Leader of the Unfree World"

Michelle Alexander Lecture on Video

Prewriting Strategies

Questioning (series of questions)

1. Why are Americans so willing to spend their tax dollars on prisons when mass incarceration, it is shown, does nothing to impede crime?
2. How should America react to leading all other countries in the rate of its people it imprisons? How do we react? What does this say about us?
3. How does accepting Michelle Alexander's narrative affect our view of living in America?
4. Why would it be easier to disagree with Michelle Alexander and dismiss her as a "radical"?

Other strategies:

Listing (brainstorming)

Clustering (another form of brainstorming)

Outlining

Point-Counterpoint (for every argument you can list to support one view, find a counterargument for it)

 

 

 

Related articles

New Jim Crow

The New Jim Crow

Jim Crow Livez: The Ugly Face of Racism Behind the Barz

What Was Jim Crow?

New Jim Crow Lesson 6, Chapter 6. The Fire This Time

New Jim Crow Lesson 5, Chapter 5. The New Jim Crow

"The New Jim Crow" Author Michelle Alexander Talks Race And Drug War

New Jim Crow Lesson Four

New Jim Crow Lesson Three

Autobiography of Malcolm X, Lesson 4, Chapters 13-15

The New Jim Crow Lesson 6: Review: Ted Talk, Introduction, Thesis Templates

 

 

"The Top 10 Most Startling Facts About People of Color and Criminal Justice in the United States"

How does the New Jim Crow exist today? See this NYT Short Documentary: "A Conversation About Growing Up Black"

Some people frame the problem of criminality, not on The New Jim Crow, but on cultural pathology as made popular by the 1965 study called The Moynihan Report. 

The narrative provided by The Moynihan Report has its supporters and critics. 

See "What the Left and Right Both Get Wrong About the Moynihan Report" in The Atlantic.

 

Mapping the New Jim Crow from The Atlantic

Truth Dig Interview

"Black Teens Vastly More Likely to be Killed by Police Than Whites"

"White People Are Fine With Laws That Harm Blacks"

The above article explains why white America supports "tough crime laws," which in fact reveal racial bias, fear of "The Other," and tribalism ("not like us"). 

Introducing Your Research Paper (from Writing Argumentative Essays)  

Task 1: The four parts of an introduction
A simple introduction to an argumentative assignment has four parts. Read the following description of the parts. Then circle the sentences in the introduction above which cover each part and write the number for each part in the margin next to it, e.g. for the first part draw a circle around the sentence(s) that introduce(s) the topic and write "1" in the margin next to it.  

1.	Introduces the topic
2.	States why the topic is important
3.	States that there is a difference of opinion about this topic
4.	Describes how the assignment will be structured and clearly states the writer's main premise

 

Do’s and Don’ts of Writing an Introduction

 Don’t

Use a trite quotation like “We have nothing to fear but fear itself.” 

Don’t use any cliché like “All talk and no action” or any other over-familiar phrase that has no freshness. 

Begin your introduction by writing, “In this essay it is my objective to . . .”

Don’t use a common dictionary definition of a term you want to define. 

Don’t begin with “In today’s society” or “In society today” or “In today’s modern world” or “The modern world in which we live in” because all are lame. 

Don’t be trite or boring. 

Do’s 

Do establish relevance. Why is your topic compelling, a topic your reader needs to reckon with? 

Do begin with a compelling cultural reference. 

Do begin with an extended definition that helps your reader understanding a term that is central to your essay. 

Do begin with a refutation of a commonly held opinion: “Most United States prison sentences don’t make us safer; they increase crime and feed business interests, not human interests.” 

Do begin with a series of rhetorical questions: “Have you ever wondered by so many Americans are apathetic to the very issues that determine the core of their morality and quality of life?” 

Do begin with a “delicious quote” or paraphrase that captures your reader’s attention: “Economist Paul Krugman said it would be cheaper for insurance companies to fire their underwriters who are paid to deny medical claims and simply not deny medical claims.” 

 Thesis checklist from Purdue Owl 

Your thesis is more than a general statement about your main idea. It needs to establish a clear position you will support with balanced proofs (logos, pathos, ethos). Use the checklist below to help you create a thesis. 

This section is adapted from Writing with a Thesis: A Rhetoric Reader by David Skwire and Sarah Skwire: 

Make sure you avoid the following when creating your thesis:

 

• A thesis is not a title: Homes and schools (title) vs. Parents ought to participate more in the education of their children (good thesis).
• A thesis is not an announcement of the subject: My subject is the incompetence of the Supreme Court vs. The Supreme Court made a mistake when it ruled in favor of George W. Bush in the 2000 election.
• A thesis is not a statement of absolute fact: Jane Austen is the author of Pride and Prejudice.
• A thesis is not the whole essay: A thesis is your main idea/claim/refutation/problem-solution expressed in a single sentence or a combination of sentences.
• Please note that according to the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers, Seventh Edition, "A thesis statement is a single sentence that formulates both your topic and your point of view" (Gibaldi 42). However, if your paper is more complex and requires a thesis statement, your thesis may require a combination of sentences. 

 

Quick Checklist for Your Thesis Statement:

 

_____ The thesis/claim follows the guidelines outlined above

 

_____ The thesis/claim matches the requirements and goals of the assignment

 

_____ The thesis/claim is clear and easily recognizable

 

_____ The thesis/claim seems supportable by good reasoning/data, emotional appeal

Your Essay Assignment

In a 1,200-word essay defend, critique, or outright refute Michelle Alexander's argument that mass incarceration represents the "New Jim Crow" by analyzing the legitimacy of her claims, the quality of her rhetoric and moral appeals, and by examining possible opposition to her logic and reasoning. Be sure you have a thesis statement with mapping components that will direct the organization of your essay.  

Perhaps the Best Criticism of the Book Comes from Someone Who Admires Much In It

 

From New York Times book review, we read:

In an article to be published next month in The New York University Law Review, James Forman Jr., a clinical professor at Yale Law School and a former public defender, calls mass incarceration a social disaster but challenges what he calls Professor Alexander’s “myopic” focus on the war on drugs. 

Painting the war on drugs as mainly a backlash against the gains of the civil rights movement, Professor Forman writes, ignores the violent crime wave of the 1970s and minimizes the support among many African-Americans for get-tough measures. Furthermore, he argues, drug offenders make up less than 25 percent of the nation’s total prison population, while violent offenders — who receive little mention in “The New Jim Crow” — make up a much larger share. 

“Even if every single one of these drug offenders were released tomorrow,” he writes, “the United States would still have the world’s largest prison system.” 

To Professor Alexander, however, that argument neglects the full scope of the problem. Our criminal “caste system,” as she calls it, affects not just the 2.3 million people behind bars, but also the 4.8 million others on probation or parole (predominately for nonviolent offenses), to say nothing of the millions more whose criminal records stigmatize them for life.

 

“This system depends on the prison label, not just prison time,” she said. 

In a telephone interview, Professor Forman, a son of the civil rights leader James Forman, praised the book’s “spectacular” success in raising awareness of the issue. And some activists say their political differences with Professor Alexander’s account matter less than the overall picture she paints of a brutal and unjust system.

Here is James Forman's book review of The New Jim Crow in the Boston Review.  

Here is the final part of Forman's critique:

This account of the origins of mass incarceration reinforces the Jim Crow analogy by tracing a direct line from a profound social ill (mass imprisonment) to a well-known enemy (racist voters and politicians who pander to them). But the account is incomplete. Something else was going on in the United States in the 1960s and early 1970s: violent crime shot up dramatically just before the beginning of the prison boom. Homicide rates doubled between 1965 and 1975, and robbery rates tripled.

The increase in crime helped to fuel demands for more punitive policies. In The Politics of Imprisonment, Vanessa Barker describes how black activists in Harlem fought for what would become the notorious Rockefeller drug laws. Harlem residents were outraged by rising crime rates in their neighborhoods and sought increased police presence and stiffer penalties. The NAACP Citizens’ Mobilization Against Crime demanded longer minimum prison terms for “muggers, pushers, 1st degree murderers.” New York’s leading black newspaper, the Amsterdam News, advocated mandatory life sentences for the “non-addict drug pusher of hard drugs” because such drug dealing “is an act of cold, calculated, pre-meditated, indiscriminate murder of our community.” What these concerned citizens got were some of the strictest drug penalties in the nation. Under the original Rockefeller laws, possessing four ounces of heroin or cocaine was punishable by a minimum of fifteen years in prison.

Today the Rockefeller laws have become emblematic of the futility and destructiveness of the drug war. We now know that America’s punitive turn has been less successful than its defenders claim: Alexander cites studies indicating that mass imprisonment is responsible for only 3–25 percent of the crime reduction that has occurred since the early 1990s. For his part Perkinson reminds us that longer prison sentences were not the only possible response to the increase in violent crime. The country could have chosen the path recommended by President Johnson’s 1967 Commission on Crime in the United States: crime prevention through “hope and economic opportunity.” And both authors are right to insist that mass imprisonment, whatever its popular appeal, has been a mistake. But the fact remains that mass imprisonment has a complex political and social history that, unlike Jim Crow’s, cannot be neatly reduced to “proponents of racial hierarchy . . . seeking to install a new racial caste system.”

In her account of the prison boom, Alexander employs a rhetorical strategy common to critics of mass imprisonment: she speaks almost exclusively about the war on drugs. This avoids drawing our attention to the less sympathetic violent offender. (To be fair, mass imprisonment’s defenders speak almost exclusively about violent crimes, the more heinous the better.) But it is ironic that Alexander should concentrate on the most sympathetic defendants, for she criticizes civil rights organizations like the early NAACP for avoiding criminal cases unless the lawyers were convinced of the defendants’ innocence. In her view, “Challenging mass incarceration requires something civil rights advocates have long been reluctant to do: advocacy on behalf of criminals.” Just so. And not only the drug kind.

The war on drugs is an unmitigated disaster, and The New Jim Crow makes that case better than anything else I’ve read. But ending the drug war is only a partial response to the problem of mass incarceration. Our prison system has become so enormous not only because of the drug war, but also because we send non-drug offenders to prison more often and for much longer periods of time than virtually any nation on earth.

Most of America’s 2.3 million inmates are held in state prisons. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, 49 percent of state prisoners are serving time for violent offenses, 21 percent for drug offenses, 20 percent for property offenses, and 10 percent for public-order offenses. In federal prison half of the prisoners are serving time for drug offenses, but federal prisons hold many fewer people overall—200,000 in 2008, while state facilities held 1.4 million. In jails, which hold about 750,000 people nationwide, the split among the four major categories (violent, drug, property, and public order) is roughly even. Thus, more prisoners are locked up for violent offenses than for any other type, and just under 25 percent (550,000) of our nation’s prisoners are drug offenders. If every person in prison and jail for a drug offense were released tomorrow, the United States would still have the world’s largest penal system.

Turning our attention from drug offenders to others (including violent offenders) requires that we confront issues that do not arise when we talk about the old Jim Crow. Blacks in the era of segregation did nothing to incur the treatment they suffered. But the same cannot be said for all blacks affected by today’s system of mass incarceration. Alexander’s account blurs this distinction. Consider the case of Jarvious Cotton, whose story opens The New Jim Crow:

Cotton’s great-great grandfather could not vote as a slave. His great-grandfather was beaten to death by the Ku Klux Klan for attempting to vote. His grandfather was prevented from voting by Klan intimidation. His father was barred from voting by poll taxes and literacy tests. Today, Jarvious Cotton cannot vote because he, like many black men in the United States, has been labeled a felon and is currently on parole.

Cotton is like his ancestors in that he cannot vote. But, unlike his ancestors, he was convicted of murder. Alexander’s passive construction—Cotton “has been labeled a felon”—suggests that he had no choice in the matter. The compelling arguments against felon disenfranchisement would lose none of their force if Alexander were to acknowledge Cotton’s crime, but she never does.

Those who call attention to the harm caused by our current criminal-justice policies must also be ruthlessly honest about the harm caused by crime. This, too, is a matter of racial justice: victims of crime—especially violent crime—are disproportionately poor, young, and black or brown. It is also a strategic imperative. Tough-on-crime advocates are not going to stop talking about violent offenders and the need to protect communities from them. If reformers shy away from the topic, their chances of building a broad movement for change will suffer.

• • •

The final distinction between Jim Crow and mass imprisonment concerns the race of the victims. Whites were not direct victims of Jim Crow, but today, many whites—most of them poor—are behind bars. One-third of U.S. prisoners are white, and incarceration rates have risen steadily even in states where most inmates are white. Perkinson tells us that one in 39 white men has been incarcerated. This is astonishing, even if African American men are imprisoned at much higher rates. Charges for some of the offenses that we punish most severely, such as possession of child pornography, are mostly brought against middle-aged white men.

Alexander claims that mass imprisonment’s true targets are blacks, and that incarcerated whites are collateral damage. But that’s a lot of collateral damage. And in strategic terms, it is clear that this approach to mass incarceration has costs. Although defining mass imprisonment as a black thing may be effective in garnering support from fellow racial-justice advocates, it is likely to discourage whites (including white prisoners, ex-prisoners, and their families) from joining efforts to fight mass imprisonment. Thus the Jim Crow analogy threatens to undermine a goal that Alexander and Perkinson share: forging a multiracial grassroots movement against mass imprisonment.

Advocates for a smaller, less harsh prison system must approach the problem in a way that crosses racial lines. The Sentencing Project recently did this in a report noting that although whites remain relatively underrepresented as drug offenders, the percentage of drug offenders who are white has risen since 1999, while the percentage of drug offenders who are black has declined. (The Hispanic percentage has remained constant.) And the ACLU has taken a multiracial approach by targeting intolerable prison conditions not only in Mississippi, but also in Idaho, where 76 percent of the prisoners are white.

Finally, advocates must also marry their moral claims with appeals to society’s collective interest. On this last point, there is some reason for hope. Fiscal considerations may induce increasing numbers of policymakers, politicians, and voters to support measures to reduce our bloated prison system. Downscaling Prisons, a recent report published by The Sentencing Project, documents how four states have recently reigned in their prison systems to some degree. From 1999 to 2009 New York’s prison population declined by 20 percent, while New Jersey’s declined by 19 percent. Michigan’s dropped 12 percent from 2006 to 2009, and Kansas’s fell 5 percent from 2003 to 2009. Just as important, crime rates in these states continued to fall even as prisons got smaller. Criminologist Franklin Zimring documents this phenomenon in a forthcoming book about New York City, which has seen dramatic crime reductions even as it has reduced the number of offenders sent to state prisons.

Given the magnitude of the crisis Perkinson and Alexander describe, reducing the prison populations in four states is slight progress. But if we are to mobilize effectively against the punitive overreach these authors document, we must celebrate and learn from even small victories.

 

Examples of Thesis Templates

The devil is in the details, to use a cliche. While students can write thesis templates, they have a difficult time writing specific, clear, parallel structured mapping components.

Thesis Template Examples

The New Jim Crow is a failed/successful analogy to the original Jim Crow because __________________, ________________, _____________________, and __________________.

While Alexander makes a compelling critique of the mass incarceration system, her analogy between Jim Crow and incarceration as "The New Jim Crow" collapses when we consider ______________, ______________, ___________, and ______________.

While through Alexander's own admission the analogy between Jim Crow and mass incarceration as "The New Jim Crow" is not a perfect one, we can make the case that those who would dismiss her analogy entirely are in grave error when we consider these major flaws in their thinking, which include ___________, ___________, _____________, and _______________.

Michelle Alexander has written a brilliant critique of mass incarceration in which she points out its moral bankruptcy in ways that are beyond dispute. However, her book is a failure because she squandered the opportunity to point out the real causes of this moral bankruptcy, which include __________, ___________, __________, and ____________.

The assertion that Alexander's book falls short because it fails to address the deeper problems caused by free market capitalism collapses when we consider ___________, __________, ___________, and ________________.

While Alexander's book is hardly perfect and contains some serious flaws, her overall argument is compelling when we consider ____________, ____________, __________, and _______________.

Here's a link to a Slate interview about a new theory for the growth of mass incarceration.  

 

 

 

 

Class Exercise:

Write your thesis for your final paper. You can use one of the above templates, but of course you must come up with your own mapping components.

 

 

Nathan Wilson

 

Jeff McMahon

 

English 1C 6597

 

10 December 2014

 

Monochromatic Racism

 

“How much is, uh, residual [racism] of the old days in the antipathy towards welfare programs, poverty programs, and other political, social, and economic programs which give power to black folks, or poor folks?”  This question was posed by Professor Alexander Lamis, political science professor and Southern political specialist, to Harvey LeRoy Atwater, an infamous political consultant who is credited with forming a solid, racist, Republican South.  Atwater responded by saying, “You go to these white country clubs and they’ll say, ‘Shit, I’m tired of them getting everything,’ and all that.  But the bottom line is, it’s a mainstream thing now.  It’s not grounded in racism . . . Now, statistically, the poor people, the people receiving all these things, are black. . . . I think it’s almost developing into a class struggle type issue rather than a racism issue . . . And subconsciously maybe that is part of it” (Hinderaker 1-2).  

 

Michelle Alexander, renowned civil rights advocate, writer, and professor of law, would agree with the uncomfortable, blatant truth in Atwater’s words, with a few additions of her own.  Her recent book, The New Jim Crow, details in a furious tenor the rise of mass incarceration in the United States stemming from the coded racism of the Reagan “War on Drugs.”  She, in line with Harvey Atwater’s scandalous revelations about domineering campaign issues, believes that people of color have become a severely disadvantaged class.  Through vaguely masked racism at the scale of a “new Jim Crow,” she stays, this class has fused with a new caste of rightless criminals into a demonstration of moral dissolution on a national scale.  A debate, silted with racial tension, anti-police, and anti-government arguments alike, has broken out between those who rally behind Alexander in denouncing the United States prison system as a New Jim Crow and those who find such a comparison fatuous and distracting from proper political issues.  Although distinct in its far-reaching brand of “colorblind” racism, the New Jim Crow bears many of the identifying marks set by Reconstruction segregation and the Jim Crow and Black Code laws, such as mass paranoia, white supremacy, and bred social control, leaving blacks “and all coloreds like them” in the mires of something more akin to criminal serfdom than any other social, political, or racial precedent.

 

Modern anti-colored racism and old South segregation both share the invisible-yet-undeniable filter of paranoia and a disgusting confirmation bias.  In the Jim Crow of the past, the white man was unduly afraid of the freed slave because of repressed guilt; “He’s going to hurt me because he’s mad we enslaved him!”  While that latent guilt is not present in whites today, criminality is still associated with blacks and other coloreds, even above the degree to which Hispanics are accused of stealing jobs.  I know, personally, a great many whites, who, upon hearing of a crime committed, would question whether or not the criminal was black.  In a psychology paper on race, crime, and visual processing, Jennifer Eberhardt affirms, “The mere presence of a Black man, for instance, can trigger thoughts that he is violent and criminal” (Eberhardt, et al. 1).  This subconscious racism shows that whites hold an unshakeable feeling of paranoia regarding blacks; they understand that stereotypes are founded in a widely applicable truths, even if they use this knowledge to brand races as a whole.  These stereotypes, pressed until colored folk believe it themselves, evenly predict and affirm to blacks and browns that they are criminals.  The only differences between the Jim Crow 1.0 and 2.0 are that current whites do not simply shout “Oh my God there’s a black guy in this building!” and, should they find such an intruder, they are not as liberal with lynching.

 

The driving parallel between the Old and New Jim Crow- and slavery, for that matter -is supremacism.  This white supremacy has expanded and evolved from dominating simply blacks (African savages) to a broad superiority over a sort of criminal under-race, rife with coloreds. While whites are hardly a minority in prison, they only constitute one-third of the United States prison population.  Yet, they have nor will never appear on crimestopper and neighborhood watch pamphlets.  This point is demonstrated well in an essay by Yale Law attorney and professor, James Forman Jr., who stuns, saying, “When asked to envision a drug user, 95 percent of respondents in one survey pictured an African American” (Forman 5).  The supremacist segregation of the unforgettable, intolerant South has penetrated more than a century of “Reconstruction” and half-assed reparations.  Much like the po’ black shantytowns of the Jim Crow South, modern housing projects have morphed into drug-laden ghettos to contain “them colored criminals;” they have since grown to encompass more races of non-whites.  Although many deny segregation still exists, anyone who has seen the look of horror on a white’s face when he gets lost and ends up in the ‘hood has seen proof of its existence.

 

Unbeknownst to the elitist whites, these horrific, violent ghettos operate like anarchist breeding grounds for government intervention and social control.  All children raised in the ‘hood grows up watching their families get raided, arrested, shot, stabbed, or beaten.  Likewise, Old Jim Crow blacks would see the Klan burn or lynch their families just to instill the fear of some corrupt, inbred justice in them.  Today, the government and gangs alike almost encourage future criminals with a neverending cycle of drug business under the “sins of the father.”  This course, as shown by Portugal’s radical experiment to decriminalize and treat drug addiction, is as moronic as it is futile and violent; Joao Goulao, President of the Institute of Drugs and Drug Addiction, rejoiced, “There is no doubt the phenomenon of addiction is in decline in Portugal,” (Kain 1) after a decade of drug decriminalization and rehabilitation.  The police simply reap the harvest of gun-toting, crack-infused coloreds, lock them away, and wait for the next generation to grow.  Perhaps next, prisons will allow parents to raise their children behind bars, and their walls will constitute the new ghettos.

 

Acclaimed Yale Law professor James Forman, Jr., among many critics of Alexander’s Jim Crow analogy, draws attention to Alexander’s omittance of the explosion of violent crime within black communities in the late 1960s to 1970s.  These opponents argue that, by ignoring how at-fault blacks are for their actions, regardless of their situation, Alexander is comparing the suffering of innocents in the era of Reconstruction to the rightful punishment of criminals in the 21st Century.  Although this exclusion of evidence may seem disconcerting, to consider it detrimental to Michelle Alexander’s analogy and argument alike is to ignore the violence enacted by slaves, captive and freed, civil rights activists far less peaceable than Martin Luther King, Jr., and unemployed gangs in jobless cities.  Alexander herself even speaks of how the analogy is not perfect; nay, the brand of “Jim Crow” has evolved beyond what seems now to be such a narrow line of discrimination.  Likewise, critics contend that her focus on the “War on Drugs” limits her vision, barring necessary issues like the uproarious violence and property crimes rampant in many cities.  I concede that “the bible of a social movement” (San Francisco Chronicle) should have a much wider and clearer lens.  However, to tackle such a massive civil issue was never said to be Michelle Alexander’s plan in writing The New Jim Crow; to consider it such is to ignore her fundamentals and appeals to improve life for released convicts, wrongly convicted individuals, and to hinder the bloating of our malignant police forces and prisons.

 

Calling “Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness” the “New Jim Crow” is not as fitting as labeling it, in the words of Jeff McMahon, Jim Crow 2.0; much like human intervention in the creation of pathogenic mycoplasma and myxomatosis, a “naturally occurring”- yet utterly disastrous -phenomenon has evolved to affect a greater population with increased virulence.  Strikingly similar to how the privileged react to the outbreak of a dangerous pathogen, “the mere presence” of coloreds is met with paranoia, haughty judgment, and segregation, however subtle it may now be.  In addition, as disease serves to cull the lesser, “unfit” populace, so does the United States’ system of justice act as a barrier between worthy whites and a Malthusian catastrophe.  Dealing with undesirable criminals and colored folk in a way previously unheard of and far beyond the scope of Nazism and approaching the achievements of Stalin’s USSR, America has decades-past begun the laborious purge of citizens improper for the betterment of society.  “Wake up sheeple,” the masses say, when really only the black sheep have reason to worry.

 

 

 

Works Cited

 

Eberhardt, Jennifer L., Phillip A. Goff, Valerie J. Purdie, Paul G. Davies. “Seeing Black: Race,

 

Crime, and Visual Processing.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 87.6

 

(2004): 876-893. EBSCOhost MasterFILE Premier. Web. 11 Dec. 2014.

 

Forman, James, Jr. “Harm’s Way.” Boston Review. Boston Review, 1 Jan. 2011. Web. 11 Dec.

 

2014.

 

Hinderaker, John. "What Did Lee Atwater Really Say?" Power Line. Power Line, 9 June 2013.

 

Web. 11 Dec. 2014.

 

Kain, Erik. "Ten Years After Decriminalization, Drug Abuse Down by Half in Portugal."

 

Forbes. Forbes Magazine, 5 July 2011. Web. 10 Dec. 2014.

 

Related articles

New Jim Crow Lesson 5, Chapter 5. The New Jim Crow

New Jim Crow Lesson One with Book Reviews and Critiques

Sympathetic Critique of Michele Alexander's The New Jim Crow

In a Yale Law PDF. 

All New Jim Crow Lessons on One Post

 

Lesson One

 

Lesson Two

 

Lesson Three

 

Lesson Four

 

Lesson Five

New Jim Crow Lesson 5, Chapter 5. The New Jim Crow

  

(I've adapted these ideas from Chapter 3 of How to Write Anything by John J. Ruszkiewicz.)  

Know what kind of argument you are writing: 

Argument to advance a thesis: 

You argue for a thesis as you champion an idea or a cause. 

For example, you might argue for eating steamed vegetables three times a day and provide the many benefits of employing such a practice.  

Another example would be a writer who argues that the Paleo diet is the most effective way to maintain lean muscle mass.  

Another example would be for a writer to argue for water rationing and triple water bills for homeowners who go over their water threshold.  

Another example would be to argue for prison reform to address concerns raised in The New Jim Crow. 

Refutation argument: 

You refute an already existing argument or practice, showing point by point why the argument is weak, precarious, or even fallacious (fallacy-laden). 

For example, you might refute Civil War reenactments on the grounds that they are white male fantasies based on the infantile hunger for nostalgia, the toxic Kool-Aid of White Supremacy, and the denial of moral accountability for the evils of slavery. 

In your refutation, you paint Civil War reenactments as a grotesque pageantry akin to a racist Disneyworld where are all the actors are white and black history has been erased because "it would be too disturbing" to the bogus, idealized world inhabited by the emotionally-arrested aspirants of "the good old Confederate days" and their other shameless displays of morally-bankrupt tomfoolery.   

Once you decide on your argument or claim, you must consider finding compelling reasons to support your claim.  

Support Your Claim 

Without support consisting of data, statistics, reasoning, logic, and refutations to counterarguments, your opinion exists in an abyss or a vacuum. You must develop a considered or educated opinion, which is the result of fearlessly studying the pros and cons of your subject in which you try to minimize your prejudices, biases, and other emotional baggage that might blind you from the truth.  

Understand Opposing Claims and Points of View 

You don't have an educated or considered opinion until you have been tested by your opponents' strongest arguments. If you can refute those arguments, then you can continue with your claim.  

You will also gain credibility with your readers for showing your understanding of your opponents' views.  

You will gain even more credibility when you can refute your opponents with assured insouciance rather than infantile hostility. Also choose polite insouciance over hostility as the former is a sign of intellectual superiority; the latter is a sign of juvenile fear and inexperience.  

Give Appropriate Sartorial (Clothing Style) Splendor (Writing Style) to Your Arguments 

Your argument is the "body" of the essay. Your writing style is the fashion or sartorial choice you make in order to "dress up" your argument and give it power, moxie, and elan (passion). 

Here is the same claim dressed up differently in the following two thesis statements: 

Plain 

Civil War reenactments are racist gibberish that need to go once and for all. 

More Dressed Up 

Our moral offense to civil war reenactments rests on our understanding that the participants are engaging in nostalgia for the days when the toxic religion of white supremacy ruled the day, that the participants gleefully and childishly erase black history to the detriment of truth, and that on a larger scale, they engage in the mythical revisionism of the Confederacy narratives, hiding its barbaric practices by esteeming racist thugs as if they were innocent and venerable Disney heroes. Their sham is so morally egregious and spiritually bankrupt that to examine its folly in all its shameless variations compels us to abolish the sordid practice without equivocation.   

Plain 

We need to stop blaming the poor for their poverty. 

More Dressed Up 

The idea that the rich are wealthy because of their superior moral character and that the poor live in poverty because of their inferior moral character is a glaring absurdity rooted in willful ignorance, the blind worship of money, and an irrational fear of poverty as if it were some kind of contagious disease.  

Qualify Your Thesis to Make It More Persuasive and Reasonable 

Qualifiers such as the following will make your thesis more bullet-proof from your opponents: 

some 

most

a few 

often 

under certain conditions 

when necessary 

occasionally 

Example: 

Under most conditions, narcotics should be legalized in order to decrease crime, increase rehabilitation, and decrease unnecessary incarceration.  

Examine Your Core Assumptions 

Assumptions are the principles and values upon which we base our beliefs and actions.  

Claim 

Under most conditions, narcotics should be legalized in order to decrease crime, increase rehabilitation, and decrease unnecessary incarceration.  

Assumption 

Treating drug use as a medical problem that requires rehabilitation is morally superior to relying on incarceration. Some may disagree with this assumption, so the writer will have to defend her assumption at some point in her essay.  

Here's a link (with grammar errors) for writing counterarguments and refutations in your essay. 

Notice the link, which is from a community college, is riddled with grammar errors. We all make mistakes from time to time, especially on the Internet, but a pattern of errors is disturbing indeed. 

 

Study Questions, 221-261 

One. Why would there be huge resistance to reforming the New Jim Crow and Mass Incarceration? 

We read on page 230 that if we got back to the incarceration rates of the 1970s, before the War on Drugs, we’d have release 4 out of 5 prisoners. This would reduce prison jobs and would be met with all-out war from the 700,000 prison guards, administrators, service workers and other prison personnel.

In a report by the U.S. Department of Justice’s Bureau of Statistics in 2006, the U.S. spent $185 billion for police protection, detention, judicial, and legal activities in 2003. This is a tripling of expenses since 1982.

The justice system employed almost 2.4 million people in 2003. If 4 out of 5 prisoners were released, far more than a million prison employees would lose their jobs.

Private sector also has an investment in prison growth and the mass incarceration of helpless and vulnerable people of color. For example, former vice president Dick Cheney has invested millions in private prisons. His bank account depends on the incarceration of more and more black men (230). 

On page 231, the author gives a sample of “prison profiteers” who look for new ways to increase the prison business, with the targets always being the same: poor black men, the people this country has abandoned.

Consider this: On page 237 we read that 75% of all incarceration has no impact on crime, that if between 7 and 8 prisoners out of 10 were released, there’d be no change in crime; however, this 75% generates $200 billion annually. It’s a money-making device.

The moral bankruptcy of the New Jim Crow is that this multi-billion-dollar economy has been built on the backs of poor black men whom America doesn’t give a damn about. There’s an “it ain’t me” mentality that is morally loathsome and detestable. 

Two. What fuels the New Jim Crow in addition to greed? Is it racial hatred?

On page 242, the author argues racial hatred is not the culprit but something far worse: indifference. “My narrow, insular world is not effected so why should I give a damn?” A moral country would be like the group, All of Us or None (255). This group tirelessly advocates the “least among us,” which is the central message of the greatest religions and philosophies. Yet America has turned toward the other direction. 

Review of Alexander's Major Claims and Arguments

One. The NJC was based on race-neutral language to exert racist control and to make a rich prison empire on the backs of poor black men.

Two. Prisons don't reduce crime. They increase it.

Three. NJC was created by elite whites to appease poor whites.

Four. NJC is a reaction to the Civil Rights Movement merging with the Poor People's Movement (threatening to take more pie from the white elite who needed to break the alliance).

Five. Treatment, prevention, education, and decriminalization of drugs reduces drug use; mass incarceration increases it.

Six. War on Drugs threw away the Fourth Amendment for people of color.

Seven. Poor people don't get legal representation.

Eight. U.S. legal system accomodates white crimes (alcohol, powder cocaine, marijuana) but prosectutes to the full extent black crimes.

Overview of "The Caging of America" by Adam Gopnik

 

Adam Gopnik from “The Caging of America”

1. We give longer sentences for the same crime than all other countries in the world.
2. Over 400 teen-agers in Texas have life sentences.
3. 6 million Americans are under “correctional supervision.” There are 2.4 Americans in prison.
4. In 1980, there were 220 Americans in prison for every 100,000 people. In 2010 that number has jumped to 731. No developed country in the world comes close to this.
5. Here’s some evidence or data for our immoral prison system being part of The New Jim Crow: In two decades prison spending is up 600%. Here’s the warrant, the logic that connects the data to the claim that the modern prison system is part of The New Jim Crow: The money incentive, not smart and moral public policy, is the driving force.
6. Gopnik: The US prison system is the “moral scandal of American life.” It’s a scandal most Americans are indifferent to because they’re sedated by the blue pill in The Matrix. Reading Gopnik’s essay and Alexander’s book is the equivalent of taking the red pill.
7. Today’s prison policy is influenced by 19^th Century America when prison was seen as a slave plantation.
8. There is a landmark book that analyzes the corruption of our prison system. It’s Collapse of American Criminal Justice by William J. Stuntz. It reinforces many of the points made in The New Jim Crow.
9. We see an evil marriage of public policy and private interests: Corrections Corporation of America, a private prison company, enjoys financial growth that is dependent on America’s growing arrest rate (which is 90% people of color). The company’s stockholders want more arrests (not caring about the racial disparities and draconian nature of those arrests for all people) because they want to see their stock grow and grow. To make sure their stockholders are happy, CCA “spends millions lobbying legislators” to serve the purpose of the stockholders. Human rights can be damned as far as they’re concerned. They want their money.
10. The above example evidences that America is less of a democracy and more of an oligarchy. The word oligarchy is Greek which means the state is ruled by a only a few. In fact the Greek root oligos means “few.” We can conclude—and this would be in my conclusion of my paper when I restated my thesis—that to perpetuate The New Jim Crow is not only about the perpetuation of racism, slavery, and Jim Crow; it’s about a country being degraded into a corrupt oligarchy. I emphasize this because a conclusion should show the wider ramifications of your claim’s message.

 

Review of Principles of an Argumentative Essay

The Rhetorical Triangle Connects All the Persuasive Methods

Logos, reason and logic, focuses on the text or the substance of the argument.

Ethos, the credibility or expertise from the writer, focuses on the writer.

Pathos, the emotional appeal, focuses on the emotional reaction of the audience. 

The Elements of Argument

Thesis Statement (single sentence that states your position or claim)

Evidence (usually about 75% of your body paragraphs)

Refutation of opposing arguments or objections to your claim (usually about 25% of your body paragraphs)

Concluding statement (dramatic restatement of your thesis, which often also shows the broader implications of your important message).

Thesis

Thesis is one sentence that states your position about an issue.

Thesis example: Increasing the minimum wage to eighteen dollars an hour, contrary to “expert” economists, will boost the economy.

The above assertion is an effective thesis because it is debatable; it has at least two sides.

Thesis: We should increase the minimum wage to boost the economy.

Antithesis: Increasing the minimum wage will slow down the economy.

Evidence

Evidence is the material you use to make your thesis persuasive: facts, observations, expert opinion, examples, statistics, reasons, logic, and refutation. 

Refutation Section (also called Counterargument and Rebuttal)

Your argument is only as strong as your understanding of your opponents and your ability to refute your opponents’ objections.

If while examining your opponents’ objections, you find their side is more compelling, you have to CHANGE YOUR SIDE AND YOUR THESIS because you must have integrity when you write. There is no shame in this. Changing your position through research and studying both sides is natural.

Conclusion

Your concluding statement reinforces your thesis and emphasizes the emotional appeal of your argument. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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