AFRC437 - RACE & CRIMINAL JUSTICE

This seminar analyzes the connection between race, crime, punishment, and politics in the United States. The primary focus is on the role of race in explaining why the country's prision population exploded since the early 1970s and why the United States today has the highest incarceration rate in the world. Topics to be covered include: the early history of race in the development of the criminal justice system, including an examination of lynchings and the convict-leasing system; the relationship between the crime rate, patterns of offending and arrests, and the incarceration rate; public opinion and "law-and-order" politics; U.S. penal policies compared with other industrialized countries; capital punishment; the growth of the prision-industrial complex; the "war on drugs"; the courts, prisioners' rights, and political prisoners; felon disenfranchisement, elections, and democracy; and the future of penal reform. The class will take field trips to a maximum-security jail in Philadelphia and to a state prision in the Philadelphia suburbs. This seminar is intended for both advanced undergraduates and graduate students.