The United States’ incarceration rate is not only the highest it has ever been in our country’s history, but it’s also the highest of any country in the world. More than two million American men and women live behind bars. This interdiscipinary course will serve as a critical engagement with prisons and punishment in American culture. We will examine the historical roots of the American prison and explore major theoretical approaches to punishment as a foundation for inquiry into incarceration and carceral spaces in the post Civil Rights era. In an effort to understand and interrogate the practices and processes associated with mass imprisonment and their impact on American society, we will analyze a variety of texts including prison ethnographies, prison writing, legislation, legal decisions, television shows, films, photography, and music. Through this analysis, we will foreground issues of race, ethnicity, citizenship, class, gender, and sexuality in the modern prison, question the notion of prison as spectacle, and develop a discourse around the purposes of and potential alternatives to one of America’s oldest and strongest institutions.
Requirements
15% Engaged Class Participation
15% Book Review
15% Critical Response to Community Engagement
15% Final Research Paper Proposal/Bibliography
10% Presentation of Final Research Paper
30% Final Research Paper
Possible Texts
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison
Lorna Rhodes, Total Confinement: Madness and Reason in the Maximum Security Prison
Angela Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete?
Michelle Brown, The Culture of Punishment: Prison, Society and Spectacle
Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
Course Reader
Flag(s): Writing, Cultural Diversity
