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. Students will read a number of 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 number of 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.