My Syllabi (and brief course descriptions)

My grad course on penal change (SOC 638 American Punishment). This course is a tour of the punishment and society literature, focusing on the topic of penal change. It also explores various theories of historical change that might help us resolve some of the puzzles, controversies, and debates in the field. I sometimes think of this course as historical sociology meets punishment studies, but more interdisciplinary. The syllabus can be found here.
My classic social theory meets punishment studies à la David Garland UG class (SOC 232 Introduction to the Sociology of Punishment). This course uses Garland’s Punishment and Modern Society to tour classic sociological theories and apply them to punishment and penal change, while also assessing the theories successes and limitations. The tentative syllabus can be found here.
My introductory criminology/criminological theory UG class (SOC 333 Criminology). This course presents criminological theory historically, looking at how theories about what causes crime change over time. I tell my students: This class is not about what causes crime, deviance, or delinquency. This class is about what people think causes crime, deviance, and delinquency and where these ideas come from. We will review the standard theories about the causes of crime, the way in which crime is socially constructed and the many power relationships that contribute to this social construction. Finally, bringing these themes to the next level, we will study criminology as a knowledge production process (and what that even means). Since I’ve now changed this class to be fully online, with the readings linked in the course website, I can only post the brief schedule. But here’s an earlier version with author-year citations and links (although the links only work on UH campuses or through UH proxy servers).
My organizational theory meets criminology and criminal justice UG class (SOC 337 Criminal Justice Organizations). This course introduces students to the study of major criminal justice organizations—police, courts, and prisons—through the lens of organizational theory. The organizational lens emphasizes the importance of on-the-ground, front-line actors like cops, attorneys, and prison guards in shaping actual decisions about how to carry out justice. The organizational lens demonstrates the effect of the organizational structure, the limited resources, and the need for legitimacy on organization-level decisions about policy and practice. Finally, the organizational lens examines the interactions, mutual influence, and competition between government, interest group, and criminal justice organizations that help initiate and sustain field-wide change. The first half of the course examines field-level or macro developments, especially trends in penal policies and technological innovation. The second half of the course examines what happens inside the organization and why. Each half presents aspects of organizational theory derived from sociologists examining other types of organizations before we delve into criminal justice examples and apply these theories. The central thesis of the course argues that prisons, police departments, and courts are organizations, and, consequently, to understand these places, we must recognize their organizational characteristics and tendencies: understanding these agencies as organizations is necessary for understanding their behavior. A sample schedule can be found here. I’ve taught different versions of this course over time, so if it’s useful to see how the course has evolved (mostly focused on covering more material in more detail and necessarily cutting out other interesting material), some earlier examples are my 2015 version (from FSU) and my 2017 version (from Toronto).
My (newer) UG law and society course syllabus (SOC 332 Sociology of Law). While thinking about how to convert my regular law and society class to the online world, I decided to completely start fresh. My new syllabus contains articles from Law and Society Review (later versions will include LSI and other journals, but for now, there were already just so many to choose from in LSR alone) from the last four years. I reviewed each issue and came up with six topics that seem to be recurring themes and also map onto recognizable social problems: policing and racism, immigration and xenophobia, gender inequality, the environment and climate change, recognizing people with disabilities, and mass incarceration. (This not an exhaustive list, nor is it the set of the most common topics in LSR, although I’d say policing and immigration were certainly among the most popular topics–but there were many more law-focused articles, e.g., on lawyers, matters of jurisprudence, etc.) The class starts with the recognition that the world is kind of a mess right now and the law is at the center of that mess—bad law, ignored law, misbehaving lawmakers and law enforcers, etc. Can the field of law and society help us make sense of this mess or maybe even help us get out of this mess? I honestly don’t know the answer to that question, but we’re going to try. But to answer that question, we need to first figure out what is law and society. The field has expanded so extensively in recent years, which is a wonderful thing, but it doesn’t necessarily map onto the old canon. So this class tries to inductively figure out what law and society means today, based on what gets published in its flagship journal (an imperfect process, for sure, but one interesting window into the field). The reading list can be found here. My earlier law and society syllabus, which was more intentionally crafted around classic and newer important works, can be found here.
My prison sociology UG classes. I’ve been wanting to teach a class on prison sociology, prison ethnography, or resistance more generally for a while, so I have multiple versions of these syllabi, but I finally get to teach a version of this class in SOC 431 Advanced Criminology and Delinquency. I’m still working on finalizing my syllabus for the fall. Here is an older draft of that class. Additionally, I have two syllabi for reading groups (both reading lists need to be updated as they are several years out of date, but that’s how it goes). Here is the reading list for recent prison ethnographies (keep in mind the relevant literature has virtually doubled since I put this together in 2015) and here is a reading list for a reading group of resistance in the prison context.
My punishment and society UG classes (SOC 432 Punishment & Society). I’ve taught different versions of this class since 2011. Here is the first version, complete with the study guide and final test essay prompt. Here is a very early version from 2014. Since I’ve converted this to a fully online and asynchronous course with a lot more small readings, I do not have a complete reading list (it’s all embedded in the course website), but you can find the topics here.
My prison history UG course (SOC 438 Prisons). I like to teach classes taking a tour of prison history in the US (one day I hope to do a course touring prison history around the world). I’ve created the UG version of this course specifically for the online asynchronous environment. The syllabus can be found here. I’ve previously taught a version of this course at the graduate level, the syllabus for which can be found here.
Note: I’ve tried to strip out all or most of the course and university policies from these syllabi so it’s just the content of the course. (The actual syllabi are necessarily much longer and bureaucratic….)