Crime, Law, & Justice Studies

The U.S. has 2.3 million people in prison with glaring racial and class disparities. Why is this? Is there something distinctive about American culture and/or politics that produces these outcomes? Are we simply a more crime-prone people or a more punitive people who impose exceptionally harsh sanctions? This class will explore changing ideas of crime and punishment in the U.S. through philosophical, historical, religious and social scientific perspectives. Students will also look at the U.S in a comparative context, seeking to understand how different democratic political systems confront problems of crime and punishment. The class looks specifically at issues such as mental health in prison, the death penalty and restorative justice.

This course explores the relationship between African Americans and American law, especially but not exclusively American constitutional law. The first part of the course examines important antebellum cases such as Scott v. Sanford (Dred Scott).The second part of the course traces two conflicting trajectories of legal decisions that emerged as the federal courts sought to determine whether and how the fourteenth amendment altered race relations in America. The final part of the course begins with the landmark Brown decision and then examines two important domains of American law: race, law, and American educational practices (e.g. desegregation, busing, affirmative action, school assignment policies) and race, law, and the workplace (e.g. employment discrimination, affirmative action).

This course provides students with tools of ethical analysis so that they can think critically about pressing contemporary moral issues through the lens of justice. The course focuses on ethical methods from world Christianity and western philosophy. The course introduces both ethical theories and justice theories, and examines multicultural perspectives of the long-standing religious, theological, and philosophical understanding of justice. It analyzes how social justice concepts have been applied in different cultural contexts, including nonwestern communities. Students examine different models of justice and their implications for contemporary moral issues (e.g. racism, healthcare, social welfare, capital punishment, human rights, immigration, refugees, property rights, and the environment). The class includes interactive lectures on justice theories and students actively participate in discussions on selected case studies. Course readings may include excerpts from Aristotle, Aquinas, Mill, Locke, Calvin, Kant, Rawls, Sandel, Nussbaum, Singer, Cone, Williams, Hauerwas, and Ahn.

Detention is one of the most extreme forms of state control. This class explores the theoretical justifications for state detention, the effectiveness of this policy tool, the politics that lead to its use and acceptance, and the impacts of detention, both on the individual and various communities. Looking at the variation across three policy areas, criminal justice, the war on terror, and immigration, highlights what forces are at work on all three and what pulls the practices of detention in different directions, providing leverage on questions of justice, the balance of power, and the role of identity in public policy formation.

The field of criminology covers two main areas: (1) analysis of law-breaking and (2) investigation of the ways in which laws are made and enforced by the criminal justice system. The first seeks to answer the question, Why do people break (or follow) the law? The second asks, How is (criminal) law made and enforced? These issues are examined historically and cross-nationally but there is particular attention given to contemporary conditions in the United States, a country with a high rate of offending and probably the highest rate of incarceration in the world. In addition to investigating the variation in offending and victimization, the course examines the extent to which the U.S. criminal justice system is biased against certain classes and groups.

Why do people commit crimes and what role does forensic science play in determining who is culpable? Using a historical approach, this course examines the development of forensic science and criminology. It focuses on the history of forensic medicine and psychology, fingerprinting, toxicology, blood typing, DNA evidence as well as the role of expert witnesses in homicide investigations. It also includes a discussion of the legal issues surrounding what constitutes admissible evidence and how that has changed over time.