SOCIOL 1271: Crime and Justice in a Changing Society

Semester: Spring

Offered: 2024

This course examines the changing landscape of crime and justice in America over the last half-century, a time of profound transformation. Among other social changes, the U.S. saw a dramatic rise in violence in the 1960s that lasted several decades; a rise in mass incarceration starting in the mid-1970s that also persisted for decades; an unexpected crime decline in the 1990s followed by a relative calm (“uneasy peace”) for about 20 years; a policing crisis heightened by George Floyd’s murder in 2020; historic rises in gun violence during the pandemic era; and recent unexpected declines in racial disparities in incarceration combined with increasing disparities by social class. We will explore these important changes, giving special attention to competing explanations of changes in crime and its control, the life-course consequences of growing up in different eras of social change, racial and class inequalities, the perils of prediction in times of change, and strategies to mitigate inequalities in both crime and criminal legal processing.