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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