CMC 325 - Incarceration and Inequality

As of 2013, U.S. jails and prisons held 2.2 million people-the same as work for Wal-Mart worldwide. The U.S. incarcerates more people than any other country. Class, race, nationality, and sex profoundly affect a person’s interactions with official “justice” systems, influencing who gets stopped, patted down, searched, arrested, and/or charged; who receives what kind of legal representation (if any); who is prosecuted, pressured to plead guilty, and/or convicted; who does time and how much. This course examines ways privilege and inequality manifest in, for example, the War on Drugs; the militarization of policing; prison privatization; solitary confinement; the death penalty; and extrajudicial imprisonment, torture, and killing.