Week 59: College Reading and Writing: Matthew Shaer


Week 59: College Reading and Writing: Matthew Shaer
  
Matthew Shaer: Annotating, Summarizing, Analyzing, Imitating
  
to annotate: to make notes on something to help you understand it better
to summarize: to put something in your own words
to analyze: to consider a question on the text, providing supporting examples from the text
to imitate: to create an original piece of writing based on something you have read
 
Exercise: Read and annotate
  
1. Read the article out loud and underline any words you need to look up
2. Write any questions you have in the margins or in your notebook
3. Put tricky parts into your own words in notes in the margins or in your notebook
 
Exercise: Questions for comprehension of the article    
  
1. Who does not comment in this article?
2. How many Corinth residents give testimonials?
3. Who is Judge John C. Ross? Why is he important?
 
Exercise: Summarize the article
  
Write a paragraph summarizing the article with quotations, in-text citation, and a Work Cited Page.
 
Example too-short summary, incorporating quotation and in-text citation:
  
Brenda Hillman’s poem “The Family Sells the Family Gun” tells the story of siblings getting rid of their father’s gun after “his ashes...were lying” (87). The speaker questions what it means to own and get rid of a gun in America, saying, “[w]e couldn’t take it to the cops even in my handbag” (Hillman 88).
 
Work Cited Page (for today’s article)
 
Shaer, Matthew. How Cities Make Money by Fining the Poor.” The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/08/magazine/cities-fine-poor-jail.html 

Exercise: Analysis
Question for analysis: Why do you think Corinth is used as the primary example in this article? What makes Corinth special? Is Corinth a “universal” city? How does your own experience compare with the examples in Corinth?  Remember to use quotation and citation as you support your points.



 
Exercise: Imitation
Write about a place that is important to you. A place is made up of location, locale, and sense of place. Location is the where: the corner of Dennis and Washington, the park on the hill overlooking Dorchester, exit 15 on I-93 S. Locale is the context or situation: a school, or jail, or family home. And the sense of place is your experience, what makes it important to you. Use elements from Shaer’s article that you admire to make your own story stronger.
 
Homework:
           
1.      Summary of Article                   
1.      Analysis of Article          
1.      Imitation of Article        
  
About this class:
Your notebooks belong to you; you can write first drafts in them, and make notes for yourselves.  To turn in homework, revise your work in a blue book or sheets of paper you can get from your instructor. In this class, you are welcome to submit homework for a grade. If it’s not strong enough to earn an A, I’ll give you some comments to help you revise it, and let you do it over again. You have as many chances as you want to complete and perfect the work in this class, and you are welcome to do more than one week’s worksheet for homework at a time; ask me for sheets you’ve missed. Students who complete 15 weeks of graded assignments and a longer paper can qualify for college credit. When you get close to completing 15 weeks, I’ll help you get started on your longer paper.



How Cities Make Money by Fining the Poor (Part 2)
By Matthew Shaer

Corinth occupies an important place in Mississippi history. During the Civil War, the South lost two bloody battles trying to defend the rail lines that bisected the city, which Confederate leaders regarded as second only to Richmond, their capital, in terms of strategic importance. Today the rails remain, as do the battlefield and a handful of grand antebellum homes, but driving around the area, you get a sense that the place has been hollowed out. As of 2016, a quarter of the 14,600 residents, 70 percent of whom are white, lived at or below the federal poverty line (about $12,000 in annual income for an individual).

Drug use is endemic — primarily opioids and methamphetamine. So, too, are the hallmarks of a specific kind of rural, Southern poverty: stray dogs in the streets, sun-blasted trailers that seem to be sinking back into the earth, yards occupied by rusting school buses and old sedans. “You grow up around here, and you have two options,” one resident told me. “You can either get the hell out, go on up to Tupelo or wherever. Or you stay and try to figure out a way to live without having the cops on you all the time. Which sure ain’t easy.”

Corinth’s infrastructure runs so leanly as to be almost invisible: There are no public buses, and Alcorn County recently announced that it would stop funding the local railroad museum. Tax rates in Corinth have dropped slightly in recent years, while the percentage of revenue generated by criminal-justice-related debt has grown. According to the annual audit submitted by Corinth to the state, in fiscal year 2017, the year Jamie Tillman was arrested for public intoxication, general fund revenues for the city were just $10.8 million. Total revenue for the year was $20.3 million, half of which came from taxes; close to $7 million came from “intergovernmental revenue,” or grants and funds from the state and federal authorities. And approximately $623,000 came from what the city defines as “fines and forfeitures.”

The Corinth city clerk declined to answer questions about the breakdown of the budget or how the revenue from fines compares with those of neighboring towns, referring questions to the city attorney, Wendell Trapp, who did not respond to emails seeking comment. But a report completed in 2017 by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights offers some answers. Combing Census Bureau data and city audit documents, the commission noted that of nearly 4,600 American municipalities with populations above 5,000, the median received less than 1 percent of their revenue from fines and fees. But a sizable number of cities, like Doraville, Ga., or Saint Ann, Mo., a suburb of St. Louis, have reported fines-and-fees revenue amounting to 10 percent or more of total municipal income.

Corinth’s revenue from fines in 2017 was 5.7 percent of its general fund revenues, putting it — if not quite at the Saint Ann level — at the high end when compared with the municipalities in the Commission on Civil Rights’s report. When I sent Joanna Weiss, of the Fines and Fees Justice Center, a copy of the 2017 Corinth audit, she noted that this would be dismaying enough in itself. “But you can also see,” she added, “that the biggest expenditure, by far, for the city of Corinth is public safety” — including court and police services, or the very people extracting the fines.

In 2017, Micah West and Sara Wood of the S.P.L.C. drove to Corinth to open an investigation into the Municipal Court, with an eye toward later filing a lawsuit — the most effective way, they believed, to halt Judge John C. Ross’s jailing of low-income defendants. During court sessions, they would often walk down the hall to the clerk’s office, where defendants were permitted to use a landline phone to make a final plea for the cash that would set them free. The space amounted to an earthly purgatory: Secure the money, and you were saved. Fail, and you’d be sent to jail. “All around us, people would be crying or yelling, getting more and more desperate,” Wood recalled.

That October, she watched a 59-year-old man named Kenneth Lindsey enter the office, his lean arms hanging lank by his side, his face gaunt and pale. Lindsey had been in court for driving with an expired registration, but he hadn’t been able to afford the fines: He was suffering from hepatitis C and liver cancer, and he had spent the very last of his savings on travel to Tupelo for a round of chemotherapy. Until his next state disability check arrived, he was broke. “Can you help?” Lindsey whispered into the phone.

A few seconds of silence passed. “All right, then. Thanks anyway.”

Finally, around 1:45 p.m., Lindsey managed to get through to his sister. She barely had $100 herself, but she promised to drive it over after her shift was through.

Wood caught up with Lindsey in the parking lot later that day, and after identifying herself, asked if he would consider being interviewed by the S.P.L.C. “I don’t know,” Lindsey said, studying the ground. But soon enough, he called Wood to say he had changed his mind. “I’ve been paying these sons of bitches all my life,” he told her. “It’s time someone did something about it.”

Traveling around Corinth, Wood found that nearly everyone she met had experience with the local courts or could refer her to someone who did. Soon her voice mail inbox filled with messages from people who wanted to share their stories. The callers were diverse in terms of age and race. They were black and white; they were young and old. But they shared with Kenneth Lindsey a precipitous relationship to rock-bottom poverty. If not completely destitute, they were close — a part-time job away from homelessness, a food-stamp card away from going hungry.

There was the man who couldn’t read and hadn’t said a word until he was 5 years old. Not long after his 35th birthday, he was arrested for public drunkenness. When he got in touch with Wood, he had been in jail for three days, unable to decipher the charging documents filed against him or figure out a way to access his disability check — his lone source of income.

There was the woman, Latonya James, with a daughter who had been intentionally scalded with boiling water by her stepmother as an infant; now a teenager ashamed of the scars that covered her chest and neck, the girl had stopped going to her high school. The city charged James, then living in a home without electricity or running water, with truancy, on her daughter’s behalf, and Judge Ross ordered her to pay $100 of the $163 fine or go to jail. (She managed to scrape together the money.)

And there was Glenn Chastain, who owed $1,200 for expired vehicle tags — and, because he had missed one hearing, was denied the chance to pay a partial fine. Chastain spent 48 days at the Alcorn County Correctional Facility. He said he was in a unit occupied by accused rapists and murderers and was beaten by inmates until his ribs were bruised and his face was a mask of blood. He smiled to show me where one of his teeth had been knocked out. (Alcorn County authorities offered no comment on the fight.)




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