Seemingly everyone in the soc blogosphere has posted on the Pew study on incarceration and the accompanying New York Times article about it — if you’ve not seen it elsewhere, the upshot is that the incarceration rate has gotten so high that about 1 in 100 are currently in prison (for discussion, see scatterplot, grad mommy, general blog of crime, controlling authority, and, I’m sure, others. uggen also points out that the 1 in 100 figure is an undercount).
So others have covered this pretty well — if you’re interested in the NYT article or the Pew research study, follow the links above and you’ll find them. There are some great sources for explaining the rise in incarceration, its troublingly weak relationship to the crime rate, and its consequences for labor markets, families, communities, civic engagement, racial inequality, education, etc, etc, as well. See especially Bruce Western’s Punishment and Inequality, Devah Pager’s Marked, David Garland’s The Culture of Control, Todd Clear’s Imprisoning Communities, and Marc Mauer’s Race to Incarcerate, among many, many others.
Like any good left-leaning sociologist, the incarceration rate (and its implications) are appalling to me (and, really, do you have to be left-leaning to be disturbed?). I’ll not pile on with more of that…what really interests me is how best to convey the implications of that rate to undergraduate students. Anonymity is going out the window here,* but I wrote my dissertation on incarceration and am currently teaching a class on imprisonment and reentry so this is something I spend a fair amount of time thinking about…
So, here’s what I’m doing:
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Dispense with the crime rate issue relatively quickly. On the first day of class, I told the students that the class wasn’t really about crime or victims of crime. I was being [somewhat] facetious but, honestly, it’s amazing that you can talk about incarceration for weeks on end without talking much about crime. I spend a few days on the relationship between incarceration and crime rates, the contribution of ex-prisoners to the current crime rate, etc, but not a lot in the beginning. What has worked really well is to simply begin with the assumption that incarceration reduces the overall crime rate. We can argue about how much it does this or how — but that what the course is really about is whether or not incarceration is the most efficient way to reduce crime. This frame has been really successful — it nicely gets me past ideology/politics and pressures students to be good evaluators of evidence. We get to ideology, politics, and crime victims at the end of the course, when we’re all well-versed in the evaluative frame.
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Make the issue about more than the 1/100 numbers, disturbing as they are. The numbers above notwithstanding, why does incarceration have such large effects even though only about 1% of the population is imprisoned? Garland argues that mass incarceration is defined by 1) a rate of incarceration that is markedly above historical (within-country over time) or comparative (across-countries at a given point in time) norms, and, 2) results in the systematic incarceration of whole groups.** I use this frame heavily in my course and return to it often, especially as it relates to racial disparities in incarceration.
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Design the course around the premise that inmates and non-inmates are NOT fundamentally different. The course is designed, at every stage, to dispel students of an us vs. them mentality. Every example I use in class uses the experiences of my students as a reference point (I use in-class surveys, clickers, and on-line surveys to do this). This has been REALLY successful.
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Related to the point above, argue forcefully that to study imprisonment in the United States today is to study race and racial inequality. Enough said, I hope.
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Dispense with ideology quickly, honestly, and often. I’m not one to hide what I think — that said, I consistently get students who say that I am not ideological as an instructor and that they feel comfortable expressing their opinions. I have mixed feelings about this — on the one hand, I think that’s great. On the other, I really want to challenge their long-held stereotypes (across the political spectrum) so I’d like them to be a bit more uncomfortable. Nevertheless, the point I try to make often (and humorously) is that if you’re looking for a cynic, find a criminologist. Politicians of all stripes are equally disingenuous [and hopeful?] when it comes to crime policy.
Apologies for the long post but I’d be most interested in how others teach on this topic. I have mixed feelings on the points I raise above and I’m teaching a grad seminar on this soon, so your collective thoughts on the way that I am doing it would be much appreciated.
*Ahh, but that ship has already sailed. It’s amazing how many emails I get to my real-name account that begin with “New Soc Prof.” These are from people who didn’t even bother to ask if it was me. Apparently my writing style is recognizable — it may have also been the Hooters post. What self-respecting sociologist would take their daughter to Hooters? Oh right, it’s gotta be .
**Western also uses this frame heavily in his book, which my students are reading for the course. Not using a textbook has been a successful experiment so far.
This isn’t what you asked for, but I think your idea of using the students in the course as reference/comparison points is interesting. Would you mind sharing an example of how you do that?
I use the Microcase Explorit programs (Wadsworth pub. I think) and show a scatterplot of states: imprisonment rates by crime rates. Some states with similar crime rates have very different imprisonment rates. Then I ask students which of those states they’d rather live in. Even better would be to ask which they’d rather be born in, given a random lottery as to who your parents would be and where in that state’s social structure you’d be.
Every example I use in class uses the experiences of my students as a reference point (I use in-class surveys, clickers, and on-line surveys to do this).
Clickers?
Isaac: In some classrooms, students have little clickers and you can do real-time surveys that are linked in to questions you come up with before class… Students buy the clickers and can return them at the end of class. I just started using them — it takes a lot of prep time but the students like it a lot. A lot of people use them in class to make sure students are ‘getting it.’ We also have an online survey system here — students get participation points for the course for completing them but their responses are anonymous.
Jay: I’ve used Explorit but not recently and not in that way — that’s a great class exercise, thanks!
Ktel: A couple examples that have worked well..
1. Do the standard survey of criminal activity of the students (anonymously of course). Then add up the collective time we would have served in prison if all of us had been caught, arrested, and sentenced to the minimum as adults. For my class (with very typical behavior during adolescence), our prison time would have added up to 80 years. Suffice to say, the students were shocked. You, of course, say this is unrealistic but it’s a nice way to talk about 1) the differences between who does crime and who gets punished and 2) the problems associated with minimum mandatory or three strikes sentencing practices.
2. Life course frame: I do a survey of students on the transition to adulthood and timing (age at first crime, arrest, high school grad, started college, marriage, parenthood). This works especially well if you have some ‘off-timers’ in the course. Then, I use my life as an example — start with the privilege exercise (that made its way through the blogs a few months ago), then I talk about my age at first arrest (13), started college at 15, married at 21, baby at 28, etc (you could embellish this if you’re less of a screw-up than me). I then compare the students results, my life, and use the inmate survey to compare trajectories over the life course across me, them, and inmates. It shows 1) variability in the life course, 2) how one off-time occurrence needn’t mess everything up for most people (but that if it results in imprisonment, it may) 3) how multiple disadvantages tend to combine and 4) the great extent to which being born to privilege mitigates all of the above. It’s also great for a discussion of the multiple consequences of removing people to prison during the pivotal 18-24 age range.
3. Do a survey of student cheating behavior (again, anonymously) — ask them if they’ve done it, why they did it, etc. You then compare their rationalizations to theories about why people commit crime, emphasizing the similarity between their explanations for cheating and theoretical explanations for crime. You could also use it as a way to think about reentry — how can we change the circumstances of former inmates so they they are less likely to commit crime.