Week 60: College Reading and Writing: Matthew Shaer

Week 60: 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. What is wealth-based detention? Is it legal?

2. How will Judge John C. Ross rule in the future?

3. Who is Rebecca Phipps? Why is she 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: This article is about poor people going to jail because they can not pay fines.  I think it is wrong to jail people who can not pay fines; a payment plan or community service seems like a reasonable alternative. What do you think? 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 being stuck between a rock and a hard place. Kenneth Lindsey said that “Hitchhiking scared him, and he didn’t want to bother his friends more than he had to” (Shaer).  When in your life have you felt stuck like that? Maybe you had to take your grandma to the hospital, but had a date scheduled with the love of your life; maybe you wanted to go to school on time, but had to drop off your younger sibling; maybe you wanted to make dinner, but there was no food in the house and no money in your bank account. 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 3)

By Matthew Shaer

Starting in October, with West in Corinth and his boss, Sam Brooke, in Montgomery, the S.P.L.C. set about drafting the lawsuit, which accused Ross of “wealth-based detention.” The Corinth court had done more than violate the Constitution, the attorneys wrote. It had broken state law, which says that “incarceration may be employed only after the court has conducted a hearing and examined the reasons for nonpayment and finds, on the record, that the defendant was not indigent or could have made payment but refused to do so.” Ross, they asserted, had never bothered to ask for that information.

A few months ago, I found Kenneth Lindsey standing on the porch of his home in Corinth, dressed in faded jeans and a shirt that was mostly unbuttoned, exposing the thin gold chain around his neck. The house had belonged to his mother, he confessed, and he hadn’t messed around much with the decorating since she died — the place, a converted double-wide trailer, was full of old family photos. He plummeted into a reclining armchair with a sigh.

Theoretically, he explained, his liver cancer was in remission, although he acknowledged he had no concrete proof. In the time since his first conversation with Wood, he had been back and forth to jail two more times, and he had been to the hospital in Tupelo just once. “I would estimate that I’ve spent a quarter of the last year behind bars,” he told me. Could he calculate exactly what he owed? “$10,000?” he responded. “$11,000?” The way he said it, it might as well have been a million dollars. “I ain’t never going to pay it down,” he said. “Never, ever. I’m going to be paying it down until I die.”

Rummaging in his bedroom closet, he produced a cardboard box, which he upended onto his bed. A blizzard of documents spilled out: tickets and warnings and second warnings and court summons. I picked one up at random. It dated back to 2005. “Now you’re getting the idea,” Lindsey said.

Nearly every one of Lindsey’s court fees related, in one way or another, to his vehicle: expired registration fees, expired driver’s licenses. He couldn’t pay for the right paperwork or pay down his fines, but he couldn’t stop driving either, because driving was how he got to the auto body shop where he picked up the odd shift. Hitchhiking scared him, and he didn’t want to bother his friends more than he had to. “My pride gets in my way a lot,” Lindsey told me. “They’re not embarrassed by you wanting their help, but you are.”

We returned to the living room. Lindsey propped open the door. It wasn’t yet bug season; a fragrant breeze blew through the room. “Maybe they should investigate why they end up picking on the same damn people all the time,” he said. “Why is it us? Tell me that: Why is it us?”

In early December 2017, the S.P.L.C. and the MacArthur Justice Center filed their lawsuit against Corinth. That same month, the city ordered the jail emptied of all inmates incarcerated for nonpayment of fines. “There was no explanation,” says Brian Howell, one of the lawsuit’s plaintiffs, who was then incarcerated, sitting out $1,250 in fines and court costs for three unpaid traffic tickets. “It was just, ‘All right, get up and go.’ ”

Howell is 29, with watery blue eyes and freckled cheeks. Years ago, he was struck by a drunken driver while riding his motorcycle; he lost one leg and suffered extensive nerve and spinal damage. It is hard for him to walk, let alone play with his three children, without the aid of crutches. But the guards at the jail wouldn’t lend him a pair. Nor would they give him a ride home. The best they would offer was a lift across the street, to the gas station. From there, Howell began scooting on his buttocks along the side of the road, using his hands to haul himself forward. Soon his forearms were sore, his fingertips bloody. A police cruiser pulled up alongside him. “The guy looks over, and he just busts out laughing,” Howell recalled last spring. Howell is extremely soft-spoken, and when he told me what the cop said to him, I was certain I’d misheard. He repeated it more loudly: “He said, ‘Hell, I thought you was a damn dog.’ ”

Later that day, as a rare early-spring snowstorm settled over Alcorn County, I drove across town to the modest home that serves as the offices and personal residence of Judge John C. Ross. The roads were empty, with all local schools and most local businesses shut, and as I pulled into Ross’s driveway, my rental car noisily skidded; by the time I’d shifted into park, the judge was at the door, a hand raised in greeting.

“Come in, come in,” he said, without asking what I wanted. When I told him I was a reporter, he smiled broadly. “Well, you’ll have to stay at least until you’re all warmed up.”

He led me down a hallway, past a framed drawing of the first Battle of Corinth — he found it in an old edition of Harper’s Weekly, he explained — and into the sun-washed living room that doubles as his office. On the shelves around us were history books and leather-bound novels by Hemingway. “I was an English major in college,” Ross said. He guided me to a chair. “Sit, sit, sit. Let’s talk.”

Ross was not the only target of the lawsuit — the city of Corinth was named, too — and he had received specific instructions from attorneys not to directly discuss it. Still, there were things the judge felt he could say: Both entities, he said, had consented to put a temporary hold on the policy of jailing indigent defendants, and incarceration in many cases would be replaced with payment plans or community-service opportunities. “I intend to abide by that settlement,” he said.

He spoke of his time at Ole Miss, his matriculation into the university’s law school and his decades in private practice. He talked about those decades in a way that made clear he regarded his more recent stint as a Municipal Court judge as something other than the crowning achievement of his legal career. But he had accepted it out of a sense of duty to the place he grew up. “Outside of school and an early job, I’ve never lived anywhere else but Corinth,” he said. “I love the people, and I love the place. And I don’t think I’ll ever leave.” He sometimes worked as an administrator for the cemetery across the street, and in retirement, that’s where he planned to spend some of his days.

Ross was sitting with his back to a large picture window, and behind him, through the glass, wet snow was falling on the oak tree in his backyard. As politely as he had shown me in, he showed me out again — he and his friends had plans to visit New Orleans that weekend, and there was packing to be done. As I shook Ross’s hand, I was reminded of the taxonomy of municipal judges that Sam Brooke of the S.P.L.C. had laid out for me. “I’d split them into camps,” Brooke said. “The first are the ones that respect the law. The second are the vindictive ones, who see every defendant as a bad person in need of punishment. But the biggest group are judges who are part of the retail industry of processing a whole lot of people. They’re just doing what the judges before them did.”

In July, a U.S. district judge finalized the temporary policy Corinth and the S.P.L.C. had agreed to regarding indigent defendants. “Nothing in this says poor people don’t have to obey the law or pay their fines,” Cliff Johnson of the MacArthur Justice Center told The Associated Press at the time. “They just get additional time to pay their fines and don’t have to go to jail because they’re poor.”

In June, Ross announced his retirement; this fall, he was replaced on the municipal bench by Rebecca Phipps, a judge who worked for 40 years as an attorney in Corinth, and who was briefed on the terms of the settlement before accepting the job. After lobbying by the S.P.L.C. and the A.C.L.U., both houses of the State Legislature unanimously passed a bill prohibiting any resident from being jailed for a failure to pay either court costs or fines. The bill went into effect in July of last year.