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Class number:
3306
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Title: Critical Criminology |
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Department: Sociology |
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Career: Undergraduate |
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Component: Seminar |
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Session: Regular |
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Instructor's Permission Required: No |
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Grading Basis: Regular |
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Units: 1.00 |
| Enrollment limited to 15 |
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Current enrollment: 12 |
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Available seats: 3 |
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Start date: Tuesday, September 8, 2026 |
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End date: Wednesday, December 23, 2026 |
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Mode of Instruction: In Person |
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Schedule: MW: 10:00AM-11:15AM, HL - 123 |
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Instructor(s): Couloute, Lucius |
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Prerequisite(s): Prerequisite: C- or better in Sociology 101 |
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Distribution Requirement: Meets Social Sciences Requirement |
Course Description:
This course offers an advanced survey of criminology through a critical and interdisciplinary lens. We begin by examining how crime is defined and measured, highlighting the political and methodological stakes involved in producing official crime statistics. We then interrogate conventional explanations of criminal behavior including rational choice, deterrence, and control theories, while assessing their empirical limits and ideological functions. The course will then foreground critical, materialist, and other marginalized approaches that situate crime and punishment within broader social relations, state power, and political economy. Drawing on scholarship attentive to race, class, gender, and place, students will engage theorists who illuminate how criminalization is tied to inequality, exploitation, surveillance, and the management of marginalized populations. By the end of the semester, students will be equipped to critically evaluate dominant criminological ideas and to theorize crime and harm in relation to social structures rather than individual pathologies. |