WRT 205-M260: Critical Research and Inquiry The Prison and the American Imagination

Spring 2014, Tuesdays and Thursdays, 12:30-1:50 p.m., HB Crouse 306 Patrick W. Berry, pwberry@syr.edu, office: HBC 235 office phone: 315-443-1912 office hours: Fridays, 1:00-3:00 p.m. and by appointment http://patrickberry.com/wrt205spring2014

Introduction to Critical Summary So what exactly is a critical summary? You likely have been asked to write summaries before. It is a necessary early step to learning more about a subject. As a researcher in this course, it will be important for you to do more than simply report someone elses words in a smaller form. In fact, as youll see when you read the first chapter of Harris, this is not even really possible, because each of us comes to a text with our own perspectives. Harris explains: [t]here is no such thing as a completely accurate or objective summary, a view from nowhere. All readings are interested(15). So what can you do as a reader, trying to summarize? You can strive to be fair and self-reflective and try to give a text its due and to show what uses you want to make of it(Harris 15). So a critical summary is a fair and generous overview of a text, but an overview that takes into account the fact that as a researcher, you will have a project of your own in mind, that there will likely be some principle other than simple coverage that helps you select the information you decide to highlight in your summary. What is meant by critical? In the university, as you may have already learned, the word critical or critique does not mean that you are necessarily criticizing in a negative way. Instead, it means that you are reading a text (or image, or film clip) in order to evaluate the content or reliability as well as why a particular work was written, by whom, under what conditions and context, and perhaps most importantly, how it fits into your own thinking, interests and exploration of a topic. Why are we working on critical summary in this class? This class is designed to help you learn to do critical research: to find questions that interest you within the class inquiry, to learn all you can about how the question has been approached by others, and to offer your own thinking on the question in the form of an academic essay. In order to do this, youll need to read carefully, generously, skeptically, and with your own questions in mind. These critical summaries are an important first step.
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Some Practice Read Jim Dwyers Rewriting the Citys Record on Prisons and practice writing a critical summary with a partner in class. Youll be asked to share these. Here are some guidelines to help get you started: 1. Read carefully. Be sure you fully understand what the article is saying. 2. Shift your focus from what the article is saying, to how and why it is saying what its sayingin other words read for what the writer is trying to do in the text [this is what Harris refers to as the writers project]: that is, how the writer gets from point A to point B; how the writer works with and through a question or an issue; how the writer evolves his or her thinking. Look at the underlying structure of the textwhats repeated? What seems significant or strange or important? 3. Find a focal point. Select something other than simple coverage or re-presenting (Harris) the ideas in the article. Focus your summary on a smaller section or cross-section of the ideas. What would you like to make visible to a reader through your summary? What is your interest? 4. Choose key words or phrases that help you show YOUR reader a perspective on the article. And try to integrate a few into your summary as quotations.

Rewriting the Citys Record on Prisons Jim Dwyer, New York Times, January 4, 2014 First to the microphone at the inauguration of Mayor Bill de Blasio, Harry Belafonte got 60 seconds into his talk before grievously mangling history. New York, he said, alarmingly, plays a tragic role in the fact that our nation has the largest prison population in the world. That is the opposite of true. New York is one of the first states to significantly reduce its entire correctional population, according to a 2013 study by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law. It reduced the number of people in prison and jail, and on probation and parole. This drop was driven exclusively by declines in New York Citys correctional population. The title of the report is How New York City Reduced Mass Incarceration: A Model for Change? New York City sending fewer people into the justice system reduced mass incarceration in the entire state, the study found. In 2012, the citys incarceration rate was 30 percent below the nations, according to figures released last month. Over the past decade, the citys rate dropped by a third, while the national rate increased by 3 percent.
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How could those numbers possibly be true, with all the stopping and frisking that went on over the last decade? A good question. Think about this: Hardly any of the people who were stopped and frisked wound up being arrested, so those stops did not add to the national prison or jail population. The people werent doing anything wrong. Their blamelessness the very fact that they couldnt be locked up helped to expose the folly of the stop-and-frisk program, and to persuade a federal judge that it was being unconstitutionally practiced. Mr. de Blasio ran against an effigy of Michael R. Bloomberg, and there was not much in the way of nuance on the new mayors inaugural stage. Mr. Belafonte could not be reached for comment, but the mayor stood by those remarks. Mr. Belafonte was speaking to a truth known all too well by tens of thousands of New Yorkers that our state and our nations drug laws, as well as broken policies like the overuse of stop-and-frisk and lowlevel marijuana arrests, contribute to a national tragedy of overincarceration, Phillip Walzak, a spokesman for Mayor de Blasio, said. He may have been speaking to a truth; he just wasnt speaking the truth about New York. The city under Mayor Bloomberg did indeed have an iniquitous record when it came to marijuana misdemeanor arrests, with roughly half a million people, about 87 percent of them black or Latino, being charged for things that white people do at a much higher rate. Still, many of those pot arrests, grotesquely unfair as they were, resulted in summonses, not incarcerations. There is no doubt that the criminal justice system is warped by race. The federal government enacted laws that punished the use of crack cocaine at 100 times the severity of powder cocaine; that is, the form of cocaine used in black and Latino communities was penalized far more heavily than the one used among whites. And race is a stronger predictor of whether someone will get the death penalty than smoking is for heart disease. As Mr. Belafonte said Mr. de Blasio would be fixing our deeply Dickensian justice system, the progressive in chief on stage, former President Bill Clinton, nodded, according to Melinda Henneberger with The Washington Post. He may have been nodding on Wednesday, but as president, Mr. Clintonsigned a law extending the 100to-1 punishment ratio for crack cocaine, over the pleas of civil rights leaders who correctly predicted that this would be an anvil dropping on the black community. And Mr. Clinton suspended his primary campaign in 1992 to oversee the execution of a brain-damaged murderer in Arkansas, a black man. But it was Mr. Bloomberg, not Mr. Clinton, who played the role of teething biscuit for the de Blasio chorus, and it was an unedifying spectacle. On Thursday, as Mr. de Blasio made the rounds, he said he was comfortable with the tone of his inaugural event. Yet incantation of the word progressive doesnt push the world forward; on the other hand, cutting the incarceration rate substantially, in defiance of national trends, is a pretty good seasons
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work. At a memorial service in 2000 for Lars-Erik Nelson, a writer of great wisdom for The Daily News, his friend Pete Hamill recalled an observation Mr. Nelson once made: The enemy isnt liberalism; the enemy isnt conservatism. The enemy, Mr. Nelson had said, is baloney. !