This course is designed to engage students in conversations about particular perspectives on the history of a selected nation, region, people, culture, institution, or historical phenomenon as specified by the respective instructor. By taking this course, students will come to understand, and develop an appreciation for, some combination of: the origins and evolution of the people, cultures, and/or political, economic, and/or social institutions of a particular region(s) of the world. They may also explore how human encounters shaped individual and collective identities and the complex political, economic, and social orders of the region/nation/communities under study. Instructors and subject will vary.

This upper division lecture course explores the making of the modern American criminal justice system and the social movements that shaped and were shaped by its colossal, life-altering powers. In the first half of the course, we’ll examine the three distinct spaces in which the material and ideological foundations of our own criminal justice system were laid: the 19th-century prison, the antebellum city, and the slave plantation. From there, we’ll hopscotch through late 19th and early-20th century, identifying key moments and movements that shaped, challenged, and transformed the institutions, politics, and culture of modern criminal justice. Turning in the last few weeks of the semester to the Post-Industrial Era (1970s to 2000s), we’ll examine the retreat from the decarceration policies of the 1960s and early 1970s, the policy decisions that led to mass incarceration, “zero tolerance” policing, the renewed war on drugs—and the beginnings of a backlash against what one social scientist has called “the unforgiving state.”

Repeat Rules

Requirements class fulfills