Activity
SEM
Title (text only)
RACE & CRIMINAL JUSTICE
Term session
0
Term
2015A
Subject area
AFRC
Section number only
401
Section ID
AFRC437401
Meeting times
T 0130PM-0430PM
Meeting location
VAN PELT LIBRARY 402
Instructors
GOTTSCHALK, MARIE
Description
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.
Course number only
437
Cross listings
AFRC638401
PSCI437401
PSCI638401
Use local description
No