Marissa Torelli
This workshop is in direct relation to what I researched in my research paper. With that being said, through collaboration with Dr. O'Brien, we created a few activities and discussion questions based on what I learned through my research. Some of the activities included a true or false worksheet based on mass incarceration and a group exercise where all of the workshop participants were asked to arrange themselves in a timeline of events that contributed or led up to mass incarceration in the United States. This is not necessarily a more personal take on my research paper, but rather a mini lesson plan used to educate those who may or may not know too much about this issue in the context of social justice. The goal of the workshop was to not only teach a rudimentary lesson on what mass incarceration, but to demonstrate how mass incarceration was an indirect result of the abolition of slavery, the convict lease system, and the war on drugs and how the system negatively affects millions of people who are disproportionately poor people of color.
Social Justice Day Workshop
Above: The first activity of the workshop was a true or false questionnaire to test the students and teachers' knowledge of mass incarceration.
Below: The group of students in the second session of the day are attempting to accurately complete the challenge of arranging themselves in chronological order without my help.
The PDF here leads to the complete version of the true or false questionnaire that I created for my workshop.
As an adjunct, or second product, for my capstone project, I decided that I would create and facilitate a workshop for Social Justice Day on April 11th, 2018. My workshop was open for the entire community where there were discussions and activities based on the topics discussed in my paper including: statistics on how the U.S. prison system disproportionately affects minorities, definitions to key terms such as "convict leasing system" and "super predator," and how the War on Drugs plays a large role in why mass incarceration is a large social issue for the United States.
