GLASA volunteer opportunity

You may recall that former SHS student who visited in January to talk about adaptive sports.  She sent this request for volunteers:

GLASA has a volunteer opportunity coming up Saturday, April 1 that will be a great opportunity for your students!  We have a limited number of spots available so please tell them to sign up quickly.

On Saturday, April 1, we have a Power Soccer League day where we need volunteers to assist with various tasks throughout the tournament at Libertyville Sports Complex.  Volunteers will be needed to assist with setting-up, fielding balls, keeping score, selling raffle baskets, selling 50-50 tickets and cleaning up.  Any time slot signed up for will have direct contact with athletes.  The time slots are as follows:  7:00am - 11:00am, 9:00am - 11:00am, 11:00am - 3:00pm, 3:00pm - 6:00pm.  Volunteers can sign up for one slot or the entire day! 

Please visit www.SignUpGenius.com/go/9040A44AAA62BAB9-glasa1 to sign up.  Contact Micaela Fedyniak, Volunteer Coordinator, at volunteer@glasa.org or 847-283-0908 with any questions.

Post 6: Deviance

For this post, explain the concept of deviance and how it is relative.  You may also explain how deviance labels people and creates a stigma as well as how it is connected to social class. Some sources we looked at include Saints and Roughnecks, Courtroom 302, 21 Chump Street (podcast about undercover drug sting), and 30 days in Jail.  Remember to create a unique example from your own life.  One option is for you to experience being deviant by doing an act of positive deviance. 

Courtroom 302 Inhuman until proven guilty

As you enter, please answer the following questions about Courtroom 302 on the last page of the reading:

1.  Describe the prisoners and their offenses.

2.  What is something that seems injust/unfair in the story?

3.  What do you think the author’s thesis is?  Why did he write this?

4.  In what ways does money play into the problem?

5.  How does this article relate to the Saints and Roughnecks and the drug exercise we did in class?  OR How are these prisoners affected by stigma?

Courtroom 302 is a book about a year-in-the-life of the Cook County Courthouse which is the largest single site county courthouse or jail in the United States.
After reading the excerpt from Courtroom 302 by Steve Bogira, think about how the reading ties together the Saints and Roughnecks and the relativity of deviant drugs and the 30 Days in Prison video. All of the prisoners in the Courtrom 302 reading were still defendants - they were not convicted of any crime! Yet, their treatment would seem to indicate that not only were they guilty, they were deserving of inhumane treatment. The prisoners are an example of the roughnecks in today's society. They are mostly poor and minorities who have been labelled by the system as no-good troublemakers. Secondly, think about how many of the prisoners were there for drug-related offenses. The reading said that 37 of the 43 felonies were drug-related. The labelling of drugs as a deviant criminal problem instead of a medical problem has severely impacted our criminal justice system. And in a system that favors those with money every step of the way, we see a disproportionate number of poor drug users filling up the system. In the end, I think Bogira would not blame the guards or the lawyers or the judges, but I think he would say that the system is broken. Only responsible citizens can change this structure by voting and activism to make the system fair again. In fairness to the system, over the last few years, there has been some developments that both highlight the structural failures but also provide hope that things can change. A Chicago cop was convicted of torturing defendants who were being questioned by police. Also, a class-action lawsuit was settled in favor of thousands of defendants who went through the Cook County Courthouse and faced the awful conditions that Bogira wrote about.

jUStice

The United States has one percent of its adult population locked up behind bars. One out of four prisoners IN THE WORLD is behind bars in the US. Over 50 percent of those incarcerated in a federal prison is convicted of a crime related to drugs. Here is a visual representation of the prison population. Approximately 16 percent of those incarcerated in America suffer from a mental illness. Here is an article from the International Herald detailing the shocking size of the US penal population. We have not always been this incarcerated. This link shows what offenses Americans are being incarcerated for; note how few are actually violent offenders.   Are these statistics surprising? How does this affect our society? How should we begin working to change this dynamic, or is the system fine the way it is?  Do you see how the relativity of deviance affects this? As attitudes change, laws change, and that affects who is incarcerated and how society deals with it.

There was a drastic surge in imprisonment that began during the 1980s when drugs went from being a medical problem to a criminal problem. 

See this story from the NYTimes by Audra Burch about Rob Sullivan.  It that highlights how agents of socialization play a role in the life of many who are imprisoned as well as the effects of drugs and addiction on the prison system and how the private troubles of those who are incarcerated are also public issues.



Here is a link to the prison in the episode of 30 Days in Prison. Why aren't more prisons providing the assistance to inmates to turn their life around? Wouldn't it benefit all of society and all of us if inmates received help to adjust to life on the outside of prison?