SOC 357LEC—Race, Crime, & Criminal Justice

This course will explore the importance of race in the US criminal justice system. After reviewing European colonization and the development of ”race” as a classification system, the course will pay particular attention to structural/institutional inequalities that have unjustly impacted specific racial groups. This includes (but is not limited to): the Indigenous American experience from European colonialism to current Native mass incarceration; the Black American experience from slavery to Mass Incarceration; the Latine/a/o experience from the conquest of Mexico to contemporary U.S. deportation and immigrant incarceration policies; and the Asian American experience from the Chinese Exclusion Act to recent AAPI hate crimes. The final section of the course will then ask students to develop specific solutions and innovations that attempt to overcome these racial injustices in the criminal justice system.