History of Criminal Justice

Catalog description

This seminar will deal with the history of criminal justice in the United States, since the colonial period. The emphasis will not be on doctrines of criminal law, or (for the most part) on reported case law; but rather on the relationship between the working criminal justice system and American society. Indeed, throughout our history, there has been a huge gulf between the formal law and the way the system actually operated. At all points, the criminal justice system has responded to social, economic, political and cultural factors; and it is these that the course will focus on. The students will read a number of original sources that bear on the relationship between law and society, including sources on the rise of the penitentiary, the death penalty, the development of correctional methods, such as parole and indeterminate sentences; also race and gender relations and their influence on criminal justice. The course will also look at the rise and fall of laws controlling moral and sexual behavior. Students will be expected to write brief reflection papers (roughly two pages) before each of the sessions in which readings will be discussed. The reflection papers should not be mere summaries of the readings, rather, students will explain how the readings bore on the general theme or themes of the course; and the student's reaction to the writer's point of view. Each student will also be asked to develop a topic, carry out research, and write a paper on one or more aspects of the history of criminal justice. Papers can either be synthetic (a review of the literature on some aspect of the history of criminal justice) or embody original research, using such material as court files, older treatises, and newspaper and periodical literature. After the term begins, students accepted into the course can transfer, with consent of the instructor, from section (01) into section…