Sociology 2111: Worksheet--"Making Sense of the Sixties: In a Dark Time"

1. What was the basis for the optimism surrounding Lyndon Johnson's "Great Society" and "War on Poverty" programs?

2. How was the Vietnam War justified to the American people? What were the discrepancies between the official government pronouncements on the war and the war as it was presented on the television news shows?

3. How did the civil rights movement change as its focus moved from the legally segregated South to the urban ghettos in large cities outside the South?

4. What were the events of 1968 leading the narrator to conclude that in 1968, "it all fell apart."

Sociology 2111: Group Project--"In a Dark Time"

1. We have seen how Kai Erikson defined "crime waves," seeing them as reflection of a crisis in what Durkheim would have called the collective conscience. Analyze the events of 1968 in terms of a crisis of the collective conscience.

2. In the fall of 1968, Republican Richard Nixon was elected president by a narrow margin over Democrat Hubert Humphrey and minority party candidate George Wallace, running on a segregationist platform. The central theme of Nixon's campaign was "Law and Order," and it was during the Nixon years that the Vietnam War finally ended in defeat and the War on Crime and the War on Drugs were launched. What made getting tough on crime such a popular political theme in the last thirty years of the 20th century in the United States? Why has it remained popular even in the early 2000s, when crime rates are near their lowest level in thirty+ years?

3. At the present time, more than two million Americans are incarcerated (the largest number of any country in the world); more than half of all federal prisoners are in prison for drug-related crimes and almost a quarter of all state prisoners. What's more, black Americans have been very disproportionately affected by the war on drugs, and now constitute more than half of our prison populations (despite being only about 13% of the total population). At present rates, 28% of black men can expect to spend time behind bars. The United States is also one of the only advanced industrial democracies to use capital punishment, and again, the impact falls disproportionately on minorities.

What has the War on Crime contributed to the functioning of American society? Imagine that you are a citizen of England or Sweden or France. How would you evaluate these patterns in terms of human rights?

4. Do you see any signs of basic change in America's war on crime? I am particularly interested in any emerging trends associated with the current economic troubles. What would it take to change the "collective conscience" in relation to crime and criminals?