Breaking the Carnival Mirror: A Classroom Exercise to Reassess Criminality

Abstract

The reflexive paper assignment presented here calls on students to reflect on their own family and/or personal experiences in order to answer the question, "From where does the greatest harm arise?" In The Rich Get Richer and the Poor Get Prison: Ideology, Class and Criminal Justice, Reiman and Leighton (2010) make the case that the criminal justice...

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Details

Subject Area(s):

Deviant Behavior/Social Disorganization

Resource Type(s):

Assignment

Class Level(s):

College 300

Class Size(s):

Medium

Usage Notes

Students were given several days to write a small paper, two to three pages in length, assessing harm that has come to their family or person. Following Reiman and Leighton we expect to hear stories of persons harmed by pollution, the workplace, poverty (however unlikely among a population of college students), and the medical industry. An important...

Learning Goals and Assessments

Learning Goal(s):

1. Students will come to appreciate the harm caused by institutions not normally thought to be deviant.
2. Students will begin to question the widely held assumption that great harm in society is caused by the "typical criminal," a young, urban, black, male.

Goal Assessment(s):

1. Written papers will be used to assess this goal.
2. Written papers and classroom discussion can be used to assess this goal.