Critical Social Epidemiology of Mass Cri

This course focuses on the public health implications of mass criminalization and mass incarceration in the United States, from a critical social epidemiologic perspective. The course will provide students with foundations in theory and evidence for the ways in which the carceral state produces social inequalities in health. It will also address key substantive and methodological challenges in the epidemiologic study of these issues. The course will be guided by a critical sociology of mass criminalization and incarceration and analyses of structural racism and political economy.

Substantive topics include the components of, and policies that govern, each system within the criminal legal system; the myriad health implications of individual- and community-level exposure to the criminal legal system; and conflicting perspectives on prevailing approaches to public safety, policing, and punishment. Students will be able to describe public health problems the criminal legal system creates, exacerbates, or perpetuates, and explain why certain populations are unjustly affected. Students will be able to identify methodological problems in research on mass criminalization and incarceration, e.g., structural confounding, time-varying confounding, social causation vs. social selection, selection bias, measurement issues, appropriate levels of analysis, spatial dependence, ethical issues. They will be able to interpret, synthesize, and critique theoretical scholarship and empirical research on mass criminalization and incarceration and evaluate the strength of evidence on given topics. Students will be assessed based on participation in class discussion, short outlines/mind maps synthesizing weekly readings, group presentations, and a final individual paper.