Crime and Drugs in Modern America

Undergraduate credit

This course explores the various government wars on crime and drugs in the United States during the twentieth century, from alcohol prohibition through the crack cocaine and opioid "epidemics," from anti-vice crusades in the Progressive Era through the recent rise of mass incarceration under what critics label the American prison-industrial complex. The U.S. currently incarcerates around 2.3 million people, a higher percentage than any other nation in the world; counting probation and parole, more than 7 million Americans live under the supervision of the criminal justice system. At least 24 million Americans violate drug prohibition laws each month, primarily by smoking marijuana or the illicit use of pharmaceuticals; of the half million people imprisoned for nonviolent drug offenses, two-thirds are African American or Latino. This course will examine the deep historical roots of this contemporary landscape, especially the fuzzy and shifting boundaries between legality and illegality and the ways in which race, class, gender, and urban/suburban space have shaped policing practices, criminal justice enforcement, and media representations of criminality. Topics range from Mafia syndicates and Mexican cartels to the FBI and Big Pharma, from "stop and frisk" policing to the "just say no" campaign against teenage pot smoking, from immigration controls to the criminalization of political dissent, from crusades against juvenile delinquency to panics over kidnappers and sex offenders, from Attica and the prisoners' rights movement to racial controversies such as the Rockefeller Drug Laws, Central Park Five, and Michael Brown shooting in Ferguson.