Advanced Seminar: Race, Crime, and American Prisons

3 units

This course will explore the politics of race, crime, policing, criminal justice, and the American prison system. Specifically, the race component of the class will focus on the racial dichotomy of Black and White, and how that has manifest in crime and imprisonment. Students will read several important texts that engage these subjects and will become familiar with the prominent ideas in a growing historiography that addresses inequality in law enforcement. We will also examine a few historical theories that have shaped this scholarship in order to understand how historians have dealt with the problem of racial prejudice in crime and punishment. As a result, the class will begin with themes of criminalization along lines of gender and racial identity, and ultimately lead to a history of the American carceral state.