HY110 Encountering the Past: Prison: The Long History of the Colorado State Penitentiary at Cañon City

This course opens the historian's toolkit and familiarizes students with its contents: close reading of texts, discovery of documents and artifacts, analytical frameworks, development of evidence-based arguments.  Our common study will  deploy these tools on a topic of troubling contemporary significance and profound historical depth. 

Many prisons are clustered in Canon City and Florence, close to Colorado Springs--examples of the facilities in which today the United States leads the world in incarcerating a higher proportion of its people than any nation in the world.  Why?  What is the background of this phenomenon?  What are and have been the realities of prison life, and how have theories of human nature and the state become agents in its development? 

In this course, Colorado College students will craft a collective response to these questions by framing a collaborative history of incarceration in southern Colorado at the other CC, Canon City.  By defining their own perspective on the past, course participants will develop skills in research and writing useful in upper-level history courses and across the liberal arts curriculum.

The schedule of readings and discussions--and the list of print and linked electronic readings for this course--are available as "files" on this webpage.  Hard-copy readings are available from the Colorado College Bookstore or in various formats from internet booksellers.  

The instructor is available at cneel@coloradocollege.edu or 719-389-6527, and holds office hours 8-9am MWF.

COURSE REQUIREMENTS

Special requirements for this course

This block is unusual among History Department offerings in that it addresses material culture (prisons on the ground in Colorado) and source materials (archives on site) outside of Colorado Springs. Although “Encountering the Past: Prison” has a substantial reading list of primary sources and theoretical perspectives in incarceration studies, its central goal will be to build a collaborative account of the prison complex at Cañon City from the ground up. Students who find themselves unable to travel (transportation provided in College vehicles) on multiple occasions during the block will wish to choose another course.

Individual work

Each student in this class will write two 3-5 page critical précis (summaries with evaluation/review) of major common readings. S/he will be required to commit by the third day of class to a choice of one critical study (Alexander New Jim Crow, Foucault Discipline and Punish, and Sykes Society of Captives) AND one major primary source (Wilde Ballad of Reading Gaol, O’Hare In Prison, or the bundle of reading in Sheffler ed. Wall Tappings) as the topic of these two short critiques. Early choice of small-paper topics will allow both students and instructor time to plan for writing and assessment of these assignments.

Each student will be expected to prepare readings carefully in advance of the day on which they are listed as discussion topics on the course schedule, and to participate actively in conversation about them.

Although the bulk of the class’s work will be a collaborative project, this book-length study will be crafted from individual contributions (research papers eventually melded into a synoptic interpretation of the history of incarceration in Cañon City). Each individual 10-page contribution will be evaluated by the instructor before it is incorporated in the overall presentation/illustrated ccooperative study.

Common project

By the final week of the course, students have brought together their individual archival research and background reading into a group presentation to be offered on the Fremont (Cañon City) campus of Pueblo Community College to an audience of faculty, students, and corrections personnel. This public presentation will review the research goals, sources, and interpretive framework chosen by the class for its representation of the long history of the regional incarceration, as well as communicate that fresh interpretation based on manuscripts, typescripts, publications, artifacts, sites and images of the Territorial Prison of the nineteenth century and its modern succession.

Assessment

Student performance will be evaluated in all aspects:

• 30% individual writing and discussion participation (10% for each critical précis and 10% on oral response to common readings)
• 30% research productivity (articulation of an interesting and important research objective and production of a paper responding to that question)
• 20% contribution to final presentation at PCC-Fremont
• 20% participation in editing individual papers into a collaborative new history and construction of a useful overall interpretive context

THIS COURSE'S DAILY SCHEDULE AND LIST OF READINGS, AS WELL AS OTHER RELATED MATERIALS, ARE AVAILABLE AS FILES ON THIS CANVAS SITE.