Policing, Incarceration, Abolition

Even as crimes rate continue to decline, policing and incarceration have been on the rise in the US over the past few decades. This course will analyze the history and practice of racially targeted policing and criminalization, with interdisciplinary critical perspectives on?policing and imprisonment, as well as proposals for reform and abolition. It will highlight the role of grassroots social movements in exposing the systems of criminalization that disproportionately impact their communities, and in developing alternatives to incarceration. It will expose the racist and capitalist reasons behind the fact that this “land of the free” has the world’s largest Prison Industrial Complex, and the largest prison population, both numerically, and in terms of percentage of the population behind bars.