Safe and Sound: The Intersection of Criminal Justice and Public Health

Catalog description

This course will consider the overlapping responsibilities and epistemologies of criminal justice and public health. Both fields concerned with the promotion of population welfare, the public health and criminal justice systems nevertheless confront the same social problems from different ethical perspectives, research methodologies, and knowledge bases. Each may further mobilize different institutional actors driven by divergent political agendas. While we will discuss the productive collaboration between public health and public safety agencies, we will also consider ongoing ownership struggles over certain issues, behaviors, and even populations. Given its practical relevance to many ongoing social issues and controversies of general importance, this course is motivated by a commitment to community-engaged scholarship, and thus will include topics, readings, assignments, speakers, and field trips of local and state importance. At the same time, specific topics will be framed in terms of their national and international importance, and students will be encouraged to link micro-level problems to macro-level processes.