Assignments

Homework Assignments

Over the course of the semester, you will write three short (several pages) papers that will allow you to engage more deeply with the class readings, and to apply them to current events or historical examples. The first assignment will be distributed during Part I of the class and is due two weeks later, and the second and third assignments will be distributed during Part II, each with at least a week and a half to work on them.

Each paper will be worth 15% of the class grade.

For more information, click on the links below.

Assignment 1

Assignment 2

Assignment 3

Final Presentation

Near the end of the semester, you will do independent research on a criminal justice change proposal currently being considered somewhere in the United States. You will then give a presentation to the class describing the details of the proposal and the various actors involved in putting it forward, the goals of the proposal, and your assessment of whether the proposal is likely to achieve its goals (using the theories and empirical findings we have read in class, as well as independent research as needed).

The presentation will be worth 25% of the class grade.

For more information, click on the link below.

Final Presentation

In class, we talked about how the “US criminal justice system” is actually made up of many different systems spread across various geographies and levels of government. For this first class assignment, you’ll pick one place and learn a bit more about what incarceration and the legal system look like there. You will search out the answers to a series of questions about that place, hopefully learning more about it and how it compares to the US as a whole. You will write up these answers, as well as your reflections on what you’ve learned, in an informal paper of 3–5 pages in length.

This assignment is due during week 5.

Stylistic guidance:

The “paper” doesn’t need to be particularly well-structured: feel free to write it as a series of one-paragraph responses to the questions below, a little more like a worksheet than a standard paper. But it should be written in full sentences, not in bullet points, and it should be proofread. Also, please include references so that the instructor can tell where you got each piece of information. (The instructor is not worried about whether you use MLA or APA format or something else for references; just make sure they can look at the reference and understand where the information came from and how they could go look at it themself.) References can be included as footnotes or in a list at the end of each answer or of the full paper, but make sure that the instructor can tell which reference is the source of any given piece of information.

If you cannot find the answer to one of these questions after a half-hour of thorough searching, answer the question by explaining how you searched for the answer, and giving us any related information you found that comes close to the answer. It’s possible that there’s no data available to answer that question for your jurisdiction; part of the goal of this assignment is to have you learn about the limits of available data in this realm.

Here are the steps:

Choose a town, city, or county in the US. This could be your hometown, or a place you visited once, or someplace you’re just curious about. The rest of the assignment will focus on this place.
Now, do some internet sleuthing and try to answer the following questions about this place:
- What is the incarceration rate in this municipality, and how does it compare to the overall US rate? Is there any available information on incarceration rates by race?
- If someone were arrested in this municipality for driving while intoxicated (or whatever that charge is called in this place), where would they be held immediately after their arrest? If you were a friend or family member trying to bail them out, what would that process look like?
- If someone were facing a misdemeanor charge (say, shoplifting something worth $20), what court would handle their case? What if they were facing a felony charge (something like aggravated assault)?
- If someone were being detained pre-trial, or they were sentenced to jail time in their misdemeanor case, where would they be held? Is there any information available (either from local media investigations, or from government investigations) about the conditions in this facility? Can you find any information about the death rate among people held here?
- If someone were sentenced to prison time in a felony case, where might they be held? (For both this question and the previous one, there might be multiple places a person could end up. If that’s the case, tell us the agency that would hold the person in custody, and either tell us a little bit about the whole prison system or else just pick one prison to talk about.) Is there any information available (either from local media investigations, or from government investigations) about the conditions in this facility? Can you find any information about the death rate among people held here?
- Can you tell how much this jurisdiction spends on courts and incarceration in a year? How did you try to figure it out, and what did you find?
Finally, take a few sentences—not more than half a page—to reflect on what you learned during this assignment. Some possible prompts (you don’t need to answer all of these): What surprised you the most? What question was most difficult to answer? What are you still confused about?

Student Example

“Chicago’s Incarceration and Legal Systems” (PDF)

Note: This example appears courtesy of an MIT student and is anonymous by request.

The goal of this assignment is to have you dig into some of the available data about the criminal legal system(s) across the US. You will download an available dataset (from a city, county, or state government “open-data” website, from an organization like Measures for Justice, from a federal government website like the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), or from an academic site like ICPSR: Institute for Social Research). You will then use that dataset to make one descriptive plot and explain what it shows us.

This assignment is due during week 8.

The details:

The dataset you choose should pertain to some aspect of the criminal legal system: policing, courts, incarceration, etc. This might be a good opportunity to dig into some topics we haven’t covered much in class, like juvenile detention or mental health: your choice.
You should use the dataset of your choice to produce one plot that describes something about the world. It can be generated any way you like: Excel is fine, or you can use R or Stata or Python or MATLAB or whatever other language you might be familiar with. It can be a simple bar chart or pie chart, or it can be a map, or it can be a scatterplot showing the association between two variables, or any number of other things. You’re welcome to get fancy, but assignment grading will not reflect how technically-complicated the plot is.
You should submit a write-up about 2–3 pages in length that includes the following pieces:
- The plot you made, with clear labeling of any axes or symbols or anything else readers would need to interpret the plot
- A paragraph describing what we learn from the plot (not more than a few sentences: give us the key takeaways)
- A paragraph describing the dataset you used: where you got it, who made it, what it contains
- A paragraph describing how you produced the plot: what tools you used, what kinds of calculations you made based on the original dataset
- A paragraph considering the limits of the plot you made: What doesn’t it show? Are there concerns about the dataset you used? Is there a second plot you would have wanted to make if the assignment allowed for that?
- A paragraph discussing what you will take from this assignment: What did you learn? Was there anything that surprised you about this process? Do you have outstanding questions after doing this assignment?
As with the first class assignment, this write-up does not need to be structured like a formal essay with an intro and conclusion, and you’re welcome to use the above list of components as an outline. But it should be written in complete sentences, it should be proofread, and it should include enough information for the instructor to go look at any sources you cite.

Student Example

“Chicago Public Schools (CPS) Arrests on School Grounds” (PDF)

Note: This example appears courtesy of an MIT student and is anonymous by request.

The goal of this assignment is to have you start reading the academic literature you will draw on in your final project. In the final project, the instructor will ask you to choose a specific proposed change to the criminal legal system in a particular place (for example, “State A is considering a cannabis decriminalization bill” or “County B is debating the creation of a vocational-training program in jail” or “City C is considering a bill that would defund the police department”). You will describe the proposed change and some of its goals, and you will be asked to draw on empirical research to predict whether the change will yield the desired outcome: will it work as intended?

To get ready for that final assignment, in assignment 3 you will choose one academic article about the effects of the type of policy you are interested in, and you will read it and write an accessible review of it. The review should be 2–3 pages long, and it should tell us:

What is the paper’s research question?
How does the paper answer that question? What kind(s) of data do they use, and how they analyze it?
What conclusion do they reach?
What are the strengths and weaknesses of the paper? Are there limits to how broadly its findings should be applied?

This assignment is due during week 11.

The details:

Ideally, you should use an article that will be relevant to your final project topic. We will discuss the final project during week 9, so you should have enough information to choose a relevant article. If you’re uncertain about whether your proposed topic works, contact the instructor.
The academic article you choose should be published (not a working paper) in an academic journal: it should not be a newspaper article or a report put out by a think tank. Google Scholar can be a useful tool for finding relevant research on a given topic; if you’re unsure of where to begin looking for papers on your topic of interest, reach out to the instructor for some guidance.
This assignment should be written as a brief (not more than 3 pages) essay. It should be written in complete sentences, it should be proofread, and it should include enough information for readers to go look at any sources you cite.

Student Example

“Kentucky High Schools with SROs and Without: An Examination of Criminal Violation Rates” (PDF)

Note: This example appears courtesy of an MIT student and is anonymous by request.

For your final presentation, you will record an audio or video presentation 6–8 minutes long about a proposal to change something about the criminal legal system. It should be about a specific concrete proposal that is currently being seriously considered somewhere in the US, like “Harris County’s new bail reform plan” or “the proposed bill in Massachusetts that would allow people to vote while imprisoned,” rather than broad abstract proposals (so “abolition” won’t work, but “a proposal from abolitionist groups to close down a specific prison in their city” would).

Your presentation should answer the following questions:

What are the details of the proposal?
Who has put forward this proposal, and who else is supporting it?
What are the stated goals of the proposal’s proponents: what do they say the proposal will accomplish?
What concerns have opponents (if any) raised about this proposal?
Does social science (either from class readings, or outside research) offer us any predictions about whether this proposal is likely to accomplish its goals if it is enacted? (That is: will it work?)

You have a lot of stylistic freedom here. You can treat this as a standard class presentation, where you use slides and talk to your classmates and me in an academic setting. But you’re also welcome to treat it like a little podcast for a more general audience, or to picture yourself as a TV host of something like The Daily Show who’s doing a brief segment on the topic. You need to answer all the questions above (including what you think social science research has to say about the proposal), but you’re welcome to put your own spin on it.

Please choose your topic by week 11.

The presentation is due during week 14. Our class activity for the final week of class will consist of you watching some of the presentations and posting reactions to them on the discussion board.

Some guidance:

The presentation can take several forms. If you’d like to do a video recording of yourself talking, that works! You could also do a “screen share” in Zoom that will allow you to display a set of slides and to record yourself talking over them, so we have a visual of the slides even if you don’t have a camera on your laptop. Or, you could do an entirely audio recording: pretend it’s a mini-podcast!
Presentations should be no longer than 8 minutes (that is an absolute limit). Please practice your presentations to ensure you’re able to present your key points within that time frame.
Your presentations should be well-organized and engaging, so that the audience at home can easily follow along and learn from you.

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Mass Incarceration in the United States

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