Why are criminal laws made?
Why are they broken? How do we, and how
should we, react to the breaking of criminal
laws? These three questions are the stuff
of criminology. They also occupy a central
and controversial place in public and political
debates about the condition and future of
contemporary liberal democratic societies.
This course provides students with the chance
to study them in depth. Criminology offers
students an opportunity to study crime and the
ways in which it is dealt with by the criminal
justice and penal systems. It enables students
to explore the nature of crime and its control
by examining the issues at stake using the
resources of legal, penal, and social theory. It
also offers students the chance to think about
crime as a social phenomenon and to explore,
using criminological research and analysis,
how criminal justice and penal systems
operate in practice. This course focuses also
on the law and policy of incarceration, the
“back end” of the criminal justice system. The
central questions are: As a legal matter, what
obligation does the state have toward those
it incarcerates? And given legal limits, how
should we run the prisons?
Topics to be covered include:
The history of prisoners’ rights litigation;
- The scope of prisoners’ constitutional
rights; and
- The prison disciplinary process; conditions
of confinement; medical care; and
problems of prison rape and overcrowding.
Language of Instruction: English (legal terms,
however, are also given in Arabic and French).