Sociological Perspectives on the Criminal Justice System
Spring 2025
How did the United States come to have the world’s largest prison population? This course examines the sociological factors behind the American punitive turn -- the shift toward tough-on-crime policies and mass incarceration. We will uncover how this transformation emerged from historical struggles among diverse groups, including politicians, economic elites, criminal justice workers, and social movements, each with overlapping and competing interests. We’ll also explore how mass incarceration has shaped the lives of different communities, paying special attention to its impacts on women, racialized groups, and immigrants. Students will gain a deeper understanding of how sociologists analyze the roots and consequences of America’s carceral state.
Criminal Procedure in American Society
Spring 2025
How do social forces shape criminal procedural rules? How do legal actors and criminalized people experience this process? We will explore these questions by examining the intersections between law and economy, politics, imperialism, culture, media, gender, and racialization. Course materials include empirical research, judicial decisions, documentaries, news stories, and more.
Sociology of Punishment
In this course, we will mobilize macro and meso-level sociological theories to examine criminal punishment, focusing on the economic, political, and social roots of mass incarceration and criminalization. We will examine the differences, strengths, and weaknesses of these theories and how they complement each other. We will study classical and contemporary texts and use them to analyze concrete topics in our present society by looking at the economy, culture, crime, media, and class, gender and racial inequalities. We will pay particular attention to historical continuities and changes in punishment practices and discourses.
Criminal Law in American Society
In this course, we will mobilize sociolegal theories to examine criminal law, focusing on how capitalism, imperialism, gendering, and racialization shape the criminal punishment system in the United States. The course is structured into three parts. Part 1 introduces key theoretical frameworks that will be used to analyze the empirical readings in the subsequent sections. Part 2 includes chapters from three books that explore the roles of the executive, legislature, and judiciary in shaping the criminal justice system for both the powerful and the marginalized in the United States. Part 3 examines the globalization of American criminal law, including the exportation of U.S. approaches to criminalization and penal responses and the consequences of this international influence.
