SOCA 345 - Race, Crime and Justice

Credits: 3
This course involves an indepth, comprehensive look at the relationship between race and crime in the United States. In disentangling the complex relationship between race and crime, this course examines both racialized ideological constructions and perceptions of crime, as well as institutional policies and practices, including seemingly raceneutral ones, that contribute to racially disparate outcomes both within and outside of the criminal justice system. Analysis of racialized perceptions and constructions of crime focuses not only on how such perceptions and constructions shape criminal justice practices and processes such as deployment, stops, arrests, detention, charges, convictions, sentencing, and incarceration, but also how they affect where people live and send their children to school. In investigating criminal justice outcomes, this course takes a critical look at a number of takenforgranted assumptions in both conventional and scholarly explanations of race and crime. For instance, rather than assuming that there is a neat conceptual distinction between extralegal variables such as race, ethnicity, class, and age, and legal variables such as the seriousness of offense and prior record, this course looks at how race shapes these extralegal variables. Similarly, rather than assuming that racial stereotypes regarding criminality affect law enforcement practices in the same way across spaces and communities, this course looks at how a variety of community level variables result in different practices regardless of whatever preexisting racial stereotypes harbored by law enforcement officers.