criminal justice/public policy

Choose either your major or a major you’re interested in as the field this paper will center. In your GoogleDoc, leave some notes on what it is, how they write, and and what kinds of problems your major engages with, both past and current. This will take some research. Be sure to use my module materials and reach out if you’re stuck. Prompt: In our previous paper and its process, we considered how class, learning, media framing, and coverage selection impact our understanding of issues in the US. In this paper, I’d like you to examine an issue of your intellectual interest: environmental issues, technology, criminal justice/public policy, or art/culture. Identify and explore a contemporary problem our culture is grappling with that your major researches/discusses. What is it, why does it matter, and what might your major’s research do to understand it? Advance an argument, as modeled below. Syllabus reminder: this paper must be in MLA format (and all that entails), use the comment feature as required, and should be four pages long with four sources integrated and cited. Find articles, interviews, popular sources from your field/major’s perspective. To plan for this paper, email me to brainstorm OR set up a Zoom. In our module, you will find sample popular sources for each topic; some we have read together and some you’ll select and read on your own. Read your sources critically, using the strategies from The Working Life and our previous work, and create a thesis that offers a nuanced argument. That is, one which suggests the complexity of your ideas and their importance. Sample thesis: Because the cash bail system puts people in jail for being unable to afford bail, our judicial system disproportionately impacts poorer people specifically; this asymmetrical practice of justice harms us all collectively, however, in ways this paper will discuss. A paper developing that thesis would first examine what cash bail is (this is the context a reader might need in an intro, along with numbers of cases), then the writer will write themselves and their readers through how non-rich people are harmed by this beyond imprisonment alone. Then, the writer would theorize ways this is harmful for the US in general: what is lost when so many of our population are disconnected from their communities, jobs, families, educational opportunities, and sequestered away from the rest of us? What does that reveal, result in, and what kind of US does it reproduce? See the kinds of critical thinking needed to sustain such a paper? These ideas, though, are worth your time in thinking about and reading on. See what the sources have to say; feel free to compare them against others if you wish, but use the paper’s process to better understand how we live and work in the US, and how that recreates the US we inhabit every day.