last name_first two letters of first name_assignment number
Note:
A) This homework will be impossible to do if you have not already read the material on claim/evidence/warrant.
B) There are three exercises (A, B, and C) for this homework and you (obviously) need to do all three.
You’ll know you are done when you see “End of Assignment”
Exercise A:
Read this passage from an article by journalist Sasha Abramsky on America’s prison system.
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2 Questions for Exercise A:
1) Abramsky uses both direct and indirect quotations. Identify one example of each from Abramsky’s text. (If you are uncertain of the distinction between direct and indirect quotations, see here.) By “identify” here, I mean, copy an example of each.
(Remember: even indirect quotations require citations.)
2) Identify Abramsky’s claim and his warrant. By “identify” here, I mean, copy and label both the claim and warrant.
Exercise B
Re-read the following passage from the reading by (liberal) writer and policy analyst Helen Epstein that you have already done and then do the exercise that follows.
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Above, Epstein explains why police harassment can not explain racial disparities in violent crime. In this exercise, you will add a new, additional paragraph to Epstein’s article to make an argument that Epstein might have made, but did not.
Let’s look at a passage by Heather Mac Donald, a (conservative) journalist, on mandatory sentencing laws; you will be taking information from this passage to write the new paragraph for Epstein’s article.
Unfair drug policies are an equally popular explanation for black incarceration rates…Playing a starring role in this [argument] are federal crack penalties, the source of the greatest amount of misinformation in the race and incarceration debate. Crack is a smokeable and highly addictive cocaine concentrate, created by cooking powder cocaine until it hardens into pellets called “rocks.” Crack produces a faster—and more potent—high than powder cocaine, and it’s easier to use, since smoking avoids the unpleasantness of needles and is more efficient than snorting. Under the 1986 federal Anti-Drug Abuse Act, getting caught with five grams of crack carries a mandatory minimum five-year sentence in federal court; to trigger the same five-year minimum, powder-cocaine traffickers would have to get caught with 500 grams. On average, federal crack sentences are three to six times longer than powder sentences for equivalent amounts.
The media… target the federal crack penalties because crack defendants are likely to be black. In 2006, 81 percent of federal crack defendants were black, while only 27 percent of federal powder-cocaine defendants were. Since federal crack rules are more severe than those for powder, and crack offenders are disproportionately black, those rules must explain why so many blacks are in prison, the conventional wisdom holds. [NOTE: The phrase in red is the author’s summary of the viewpoint she is criticizing. The phrase “the conventional wisdom holds” tells you that the preceding material is NOT what she thinks to be true but rather what she claims her opponents claim. In short, she does NOT think the sentencing guidelines can explain “why so many blacks are in prison.”] But consider the actual number of crack sellers sentenced in federal court each year. In 2006, 5,619 were tried federally, 4,495 of them black. From 1996 to 2000, the federal courts sentenced more powder traffickers (23,743) than crack traffickers (23,121). It’s going to take a lot more than 5,000 or so crack defendants a year to account for the 562,000 black prisoners in state and federal facilities at the end of 2006—or the 858,000 black prisoners in custody overall, if one includes the population of county and city jails. Nor do crack/powder disparities at the state level explain black incarceration rates: only 13 states distinguish between crack and powder sentences, and they employ much smaller sentence differentials.
Now we are ready to take the concept from the journalist’s passage above and fold it into Epstein’s article.
Below, you will find the Epstein passage above with the start of a new paragraph inserted.
In the text below, (TR) indicates the transitional phrase that explains the logical connection between the new paragraph and the preceding material. (CL) indicates the CLAIM of the new paragraph. YOU will write the EVIDENCE and the WARRANT (look for the “insert evidence here” and “insert warrant here). For the evidence, you will want to use a combination of a direct and an indirect quotation. Your direct quotations should take the form of method 3 or 4 from your readings (7 points off if you do not).
What accounts for the high rate of incarceration in the US, particularly of black males? Opinions vary, but for drug crimes in particular, part of the problem has to do with excessive surveillance of young black men by the police and other authorities. White youths may carry and use drugs just as often as blacks, but they seldom get caught, and if they do, they may be more likely to get off with a warning. In one recent study, 60 to 75 percent of black teenagers in Baltimore and Chicago said they were routinely harassed by the police. “Everywhere we go, we going to get stopped,” said one Chicago youth. Once he was approached by detectives as he and a friend were leaving the church they regularly attended:
They was like, “Do y’all got guns?” or something. “We heard shooting on the next block, y’all match the description. Where y’all just come from?” We like, “We just come out the church, y’all done seen it.” You know just, they stopping us for no reason.
While police surveillance and harassment may explain the racial discrepancy in drug-related crime, (TR) one commonly heard explanation can not explain the very different incarceration rates for blacks and whites. (CL) The consequences of mandatory sentencing law for crack cocaine are too small to explain why so many black men are in prison. [INSERT EVIDENCE HERE] [INSERT WARRANT HERE]
Nor can police surveillance and harassment explain the discrepancy in violent crime. When it comes to homicide, which is the most accurately measured crime of all, the data are clear: blacks are seven times more likely to be offenders and six times more likely to be victims than whites. This cannot be explained by discrimination in arrests and sentencing alone.
Exercise C
At times, The Wire likens the drug trade to other enterprises that are legal; other times the show draws a number of comparison between drug trafficking and legal businesses by highlighting the violence that accompanies the trade. When The Wire makes such comparisons, it echoes the arguments of Epstein from this week’s reading:
What most studies do find, however, is that violent crime is strongly associated with the activity of illegal drug markets, which tend to thrive in black neighborhoods.A 1988 study of homicide in New York found that 40 percent were associated with drug trade–related disputes, mostly among black men. So while whites and blacks may use drugs with equal frequency, blacks are more likely to be involved in the highly lucrative and dangerous business of packaging, distributing, and marketing them. The drug trade is violent because when disputes arise over prices, turf, or customers, there are no peaceful means of resolving them. Adversaries battle out such conflicts with weapons instead of lawyers. It is probably no coincidence that murder rates doubled during Prohibition in the 1920s, and fell sharply with the repeal of the Volstead Act in 1933. Similarly, murder rates doubled again during the “crack epidemic” in the 1970s and 1980s, when the drug trade became more lucrative and competitive, and more dangerous.
In this exercise, you will write a cl/ev/wa paragraph that uses evidence from episode 1 to demonstrate how The Wire illustrates Epstein’s arguments above.
You may want way to begin your paragraph with a claim on the order of:
| The Wire illustrates Epstein’s arguments for [insert your reason here, keeping in mind evidence is not part of your claim] |
Then, find evidence to support the claim in the form of direct quotations of 10 words or less from the episodes. Your direct quotations should take the form of method 3 or 4 from your readings (7 points off if you do not).
After you have written you claim and your evidence, write a warrant that explains how and why your evidence make your point. Only paragraphs with a strong warrant will receive full credit. Be sure to put a (CL) before your claim, (EV) before your evidence and (WA) before your warrant.
End of assignment
