Police, Prisons, and Repression in the United States

Catalog description

The course examines the emergence and significance of prisons, police, and repression in the United States from the Early Republic to the present. It explores shifts in the nature of punishment occasioned by the rise of capitalism in the West and the founding, by the Pennsylvania Quakers, of the world's first prison in 1790. We analyze the mass expansion of prisons and police during two turning points in American history: in the late 19th century during Reconstruction and the Second Industrial Revolution and then in the 1970s— in the decades immediately following the civil rights and black power movements, at a time of domestic and global economic restructuring. The course ends with an analysis of developments in the last fifty years in the US — the rise of hyper incarceration of poor, Black American and Latinx communities in deindustrializing cities and of migrants in the US-Mexico border. We explore the meaning of police militarization and its expansion in the context of the Cold War and the explosion of the carceral state as the country’s third largest employer in the twenty-first century.