Katie Kaufman Rogers

Description

This course examines the social construction of crime and society’s responses to it, with a focus on punishment as a method of social control. The course begins by historicizing settler-colonial origins of the U.S. criminal punishment system. Sociological approaches to power, deviance, and social control are introduced to contextualize this history. These frameworks are then applied to various components of the modern U.S. criminal punishment system, including criminalization, policing, courts, and incarceration (including immigrant detention). Resistance, reforms, abolition, and other alternatives to these systems are explored. Special attention is paid to how power operates through punishment and (re)produces inequalities at the intersections of race/ethnicity, citizen status, gender, sexuality, and social class.

Required Texts

N/A (all texts will be provided by the instructor)

Grading Policy

Weekly Quizzes                   10 pts (10%)

In-Class Activities                30 pts (30%)

Midterm Exam                      30 pts (30%)

Final Exam                            30 pts (30%)

Scores will not be rounded up or down

(e.g., an A- includes all scores 90.000 through 92.999)