Criminal Law, Deviance, and Society

3.0 credits · Undergraduate

Who gets to define crime and deviance, and what are the consequences of those definitions? This question guides our semester together. In this course, we will examine crime and deviance as social phenomena shaped by law, institutions, and systems of power. Rather than treating crime as a fixed or objective category, we explore how definitions of crime and deviance are constructed, contested, and enforced through political and legal processes that reflect the interests of powerful actors and institutions, and unequally applied across social groups. Drawing on sociological theories and empirical research, we spend the semester interrogating how crime and deviance are defined and by whom, who is most likely to be labeled deviant or criminal, and whose harms go unaddressed and unpunished. The course is organized into three units. In Unit I, we establish the theoretical and empirical foundations of the course, exploring how the U.S. legal system defines and measures crime and deviance, and how framing shapes public understanding of criminalized behaviors over time including mental illness, homelessness, substance use, and sexuality. In Unit II, we examine how race, gender, and class shape vulnerability to victimization and societal responses to harm, centering the question of whose safety is prioritized and whose harms addressed. In Unit III, we turn to harm committed by powerful institutions and elite actors that rarely receive criminal treatment or punishment, including state-sanctioned violence and corporate actions like workplace deaths, environmental destruction, and fraud.