Crime, Punishment, and Social Control (235-0-1)

Instructors

Abby Barefoot
847/467-0259
Abigail Barefoot is an Assistant Professor of Instruction at the Center for Legal Studies. Prof. Barefoot’s research explores questions of justice, safety, and accountability through the lens of prison abolition and critical carceral studies Abigail’s current book project Beyond Carceral Responses: Transformative Justice, Prison Abolition, and the Movement to End Sexual Violence examines transformative justice practices for sexual violence. Using an ethnographic approach, Abigail unpacks the tensions, contradictions, and possibilities of practicing transformative justice as experienced by survivors, facilitators, and people who cause harm. Her other teaching and research interests include LGBTQ Studies, American social movements, and mass incarceration.

Meeting Info

Annenberg Hall G32: Mon, Wed 11:00AM - 12:20PM

Overview of class

This course offers a sociological introduction to the topics of crime, punishment, and social control with a focus on the United States. In this course, we will examine various perspectives on crime and social control with particular attention to how society defines criminality, how axes of social difference—such as race, class, gender, and sexuality—intersect with issues of punishment and social control, how we as a society decide how to deal with crime, what effects those decisions have, and how punishment and social control techniques have changed over time. Structured by those broad concerns, we will explore topics including policing, courts and the judicial process, prisons and mass incarceration, and surveillance.

Learning Objectives

• Demonstrate knowledge and understanding of social science theories related to the study of crime and punishment with particular attention to sociolegal theoretical approaches.
• Apply an intersectional approach to topics surrounding the larger ecosystem of the criminal justice system with a particular emphasis on how crime/social control impacts people differently based upon their racial, class, and gender identities.
• Engage with scholarship describing contemporary structures, processes, and practices that shape justice and injustice; agency and subjection as it relates to crime, punishment and social control.
• Develop the ability to critique theories, claims, and policies in the social and behavioral sciences through careful evaluation of an argument's major assertions, assumptions, evidential basis, and explanatory utility.
• Reflect upon the way in which theories and research from the social and behavioral sciences help elucidate the factors that led to the development and sustaining of mass incarceration as well as potential solutions.
• Craft text-based and verbal analyses of assigned course media—and extend this analysis to individually selected case studies and contexts.

Evaluation Method

Three in-person exams and a short presentation with an accompanying paper.

Class Materials (Required)

•Introduction to Criminal Justice: A Sociological Perspective, edited by Charis E. Kubrin and Thomas D. Stucky. Stanford University Press, 2013.
An e-book or physical copy is fine.

Class Attributes

Social and Behavioral Science Foundational Discipl
U.S. Perspectives on Power, Justice, and Equity
Social & Behavioral Sciences Distro Area