Students will choose one topic about which to write a detailed analysis essay. Your 3-page paper will include two parts. Please organize your paper in essay format, with a thesis statement, sub-claims, and evidence for each of your points. This assignment will build student skills in summarizing and synthesizing different perspectives, as well as capacity for imagination and creative problem-solving.
Part 1: Harms of Criminalization (1 page)
Part 2: Evaluation of Alternatives (2 pages)
Part 1: Harms of Criminalization (1 page)
In the first part of your essay, you will summarize Vitale’s argument about why criminalization of this particular group of people, activity, or condition is harmful.
(Part 1) Should be clearly organized with a thesis statement and sub-claims and must include:
A summary of the Vitale’s main argument about why criminalization of this particular group or activity is harmful (main point or thesis statement);
Three pieces of evidence (facts) that support the author’s argument
your interpretation and analysis of the evidence as it relates to the overall argument of the chapter.
Your essay should include in-text citations with page numbers in parentheses to show readers how to find the specific information you reference in your paper.
(Part 2:) Analysis of Alternatives (2 pages)
In the second part of your essay, you will explain or evaluate one or more proposals for shifting responses to social problems to institutions outside of the carceral system. Using the assigned panel discussion, webinar, activist website or documentary film that corresponds with the topic you chose, you will analyze and evaluate the ways that organizations or activists are responding to social issues such as poverty, addiction, violence and harm without policing or prisons.
Part 2 will synthesize and analyze the arguments of practitioners outside of the carceral system. This section should be organized with a thesis and sub-claims. Address the following questions at some point in your paper:
How, specifically, do the speakers or organization(s) propose that the social issue should be addressed without policing, and outside of the carceral system?
Introduce the people or organizations who are proposing this alternative response. What is each one working on? Include at least 2 quotes from the guest speakers and explain what these quotes tell us about how abolitionists plan to build alternative systems for responding to the issue. Note points of agreement and distinction between the speakers.
Describe the guest speaker or filmmaker’s vision for an ideal (utopian) response to this issue. What does the speaker or filmmaker hope that their advocacy will achieve?
What legal, budget or policy changes do the speakers or filmmakers say are needed in order to build these utopias? (If they don’t say, what changes do you think would need to occur in order to make their vision a reality?)
How could the guest speakers’/filmmakers/organizations’ proposals solve the problems Vitale has identified? What are some shortcomings or unanswered questions?
End your analysis paper with a paragraph assessing the fit between the speakers’ utopian visions and the steps they are taking to reach their desired outcomes.
Note: You may engage with organizations or policies that we have not yet studied in class, as long as they do not work with police or the carceral system, and as long as you connect your analysis to the assigned reading.
(In other words, the paper must analyze alternatives to criminalization by focusing on activists’ proposals to replace police responses with other types of institutional or community-based responses.)
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