Criminal Justice and Criminology Courses at University: Fall and Spring Terms, Schemes and Mind Maps of Criminology

Download Criminal Justice and Criminology Courses at University: Fall and Spring Terms and more Schemes and Mind Maps Criminology in PDF only on Docsity! Criminology (CRIM)           1 CRIMINOLOGY (CRIM) CRIM 100 Criminology This introductory course examines the multi-disciplinary science of law- making, law-breaking, and law-enforcing. It reviews theories and data predicting where, when, by whom and against whom crimes happen. It also addresses the prevention of different offense types by different kinds of offenders against different kinds of people. Police, courts, prisons, and other institutions are critically examined as both preventing and causing crime. This course meets the general distribution requirement. For BA Students: Society Sector Course usually offered in fall term Also Offered As: SOCI 233 Activity: Lecture 1.0 Course Unit CRIM 200 Criminal Justice This course examines how the criminal justice system responds to crime in society. The course reviews the historical development of criminal justice agencies in the United States and Europe and the available scientific evidence on the effect these agencies have on controlling crime. The course places an emphasis on the functional creation of criminal justice agencies and the discretionary role decision makers in these agencies have in deciding how to enforce criminal laws and whom to punish. Evidence on how society measures crime and the role that each major criminal justice agency plays in controlling crime is examined from the perspective of crime victims, police, prosecutors, jurors, judges, prison officials, probation officers and parole board members. Using the model of social policy evaluation, the course asks students to consider how the results of criminal justice could be more effectively delivered to reduce the social and economic costs of crime. For BA Students: Society Sector Course usually offered in spring term Also Offered As: SOCI 200 Activity: Lecture 1.0 Course Unit CRIM 240 Forensic Analysis This course discusses the need for stronger scientific foundations in the analysis of forensic evidence from a scientific and a policy perspective. Forensic evidence, such as fingerprints, firearms, and hair, has been analyzed for hundreds of years to inform crime investigations and prosecutions. However, recent advances, especially the use of DNA technology, have revealed that a faulty forensic analyses may have contributed to wrongful convictions. These advances have demonstrated the potential danger of information and testimony derived from imperfect analysis, which can result not just in wrongful convictions but also in errors of impunity. In this course, students learn about the history of forensics, as well as about the recent advances that aim to improve current practices. It is an interdisciplinary course, but it focuses mostly on the statistical and scientific aspects of testing in forensics. Students discuss recent solutions that quantify the uncertainty, limitations, and errors associated with human factors, pattern evidence, and digital evidence. No prior statistical or forensic knowledge is expected. The course will be useful for students who wish to become forensic practitioners, law enforcement officers, lawyers, judges, researchers, or simply informed citizens. Taught by: Cuellar Course usually offered in fall term Activity: Seminar 1.0 Course Unit CRIM 250 Statistics for the Social Sciences I Statistical techniques and quantitative reasoning are essential tools for properly examing questions in the social sciences. This course introduces students to the concepts of probability, estimation, confidence intervals, and how to use the statistical concepts and methods to answer social science questions. The course will require the use of R, a free, open source statistical analysis program. This course has been approved for the quantitative data analysis requirement (QDA). Taught by: Ridgeway Course usually offered in fall term Activity: Lecture 1.0 Course Unit CRIM 251 Statistics for the Social Sciences II In this course, students learn to conduct quantitative data analyses for social sciences, with an emphasis on identifying causal relationships in data. Many social science analyses aim to answer causal questions: Do longer prison sentences reduce crime? Do tougher gun laws reduce homicides and suicides? Can summer jobs help keep youth safe? Students will learn about research designs and data analysis methods to answer these kinds of questions, and especially to learn to implement them in practice. The goal of this class is to help students conduct their own analyses, and to become critical readers of statistical analyses, both in social science publications and in public discourse. The focus will be on what to compute and how to interpret the results. The emphasis is on the intelligent use of statistics. We will be using R, an open-source programming language. Course usually offered in spring term Prerequisite: CRIM 250 Activity: Lecture 1.0 Course Unit CRIM 260 Crime and Human Development One of the central research problems in criminology is the relationship between human development and the likelihood of committing crime. This course will examine the tools for measuring the onset of crime, its persistence, intermittency, and desistence. These tools include the study of birth cohorts of everyone born in a certain time and place, life course studies of juvenile delinquents and non-delinquents, trajectory analysis of people studied from pre-school through middle age, and interviews with 70 year old former delinquents who reflect on how their life-course affected the crimes they committed. This course will also examine the research findings that have been produced using these tools. Students will be asked to consider what these findings imply for major theories of crime causation as well as policies for crime prevention. Course usually offered in spring term Activity: Lecture 1.0 Course Unit 2021-22 Catalog | Generated 04/26/22 2        Criminology (CRIM) CRIM 270 Biopsychosocial Criminology Is there a "natural-born killer"? Why don't psychopaths have a conscience? And is it morally wrong for us to punish those who are biologically-wired for a life of crime? This interdisciplinary biosocial course argues that answers to these inscrutable questions can be found in the fledging field of "neurocriminology". This new sub-discipline brings together the social, clinical, and neurosciences to help us better understand, predict, and prevent future crime. We will explore the biosocial bases to crime and violence, analyze controversial neuroethical, legal and philosophical issues surrounding neurocriminology, and take a field trip to prison. This interdisciplinary course presents perspectives from the fields of psychology, neuroscience, criminology, sociology, law, business, public health, psychiatry, anthropology, neuroimaging, neuroendocrinology, forensics, nutrition, and pediatrics. It is suitable for those without a background in biology or criminology. It is particularly relevant for majors in Criminology, Psychology, Nursing, and Biological Basis of Behavior. Course usually offered in fall term Activity: Lecture 1.0 Course Unit CRIM 280 Neighborhood Dynamics of Crime Crime varies in time, space and populations as it reflects ecological structures and the routine social interactions that occur in daily life. Concentrations of crime can be found among locations, with antisocial activities like assaults and theft occurring at higher rates because of the demographic make-up of people (e.g. adolescents) or conflicts (e.g. competing gangs), for reasons examined by ecological criminology. Variation in socio-demographic structures (age, education ratios, and the concentration of poverty) and the physical environment (housing segregation, density of bars, street lighting) predicts variations between neighborhoods in the level of crime and disorder. Both ethnographic and quantitative research methods are used to explore the connections between the social and physical environment of areas and antisocial behavior. Course usually offered in spring term Also Offered As: URBS 280 Activity: Seminar 1.0 Course Unit CRIM 290 Wrongful Convictions This course explores wrongful convictions from an interdisciplinary perspective. Using research from the disciplines of law, criminology, psychology and sociology, this course explores how legal errors occur and how they might be prevented in the future. Connections to quality control research and practice in other industries will also be examined. No prerequisites are required. Taught by: Loeffler Activity: Seminar 1.0 Course Unit CRIM 300 Law and Criminal Justice This course explores constitutional criminal procedure or the law of the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments to the United States Constitution. Topics included the laws and rules associated with search and seizure, arrest, interrogation, the exclusionary rule, and deprivation of counsel. Social science evidence that supports or raises questions about legal doctrine will be examined. No prerequisites are required. One-term course offered either term Activity: Lecture 1.0 Course Unit CRIM 315 American Death Penalty in Theory and Practice Over the past forty years, in response to controversy over the American death penalty, the Supreme Court has created a framework of rules designed to make the death penalty conform to current societal standards. In this course, we will identify the critical issues identified by the courts (and the critics) in light of the practical realities of capital litigation, and we will ask whether the efforts to address these issues have been successful. The class will use specific case examples to identify the critical points in a death penalty case- for example, the decision to designate a prosecution as "capital", the performance of defense counsel, the penalty decision, and the method of execution. These critical stages will provide a platform for discussing critical issues like the proper limits of discretion; bias; cruelty; and the decision to disqualify certain groups of people from capital punishment (the mentally disabled, minors). Students will be assigned readings from differnt kinds of sources. Cases from the Supreme Court will identify key issues and the efforts to address them under the law. More general death penalty history will provide some context. We will also read pieces by advocates (pro and con). Finally, we will focus on a few specific prosecutions and discuss how abstract theories work in a particular case. Taught by: Dolgenos Course usually offered in fall term Activity: Lecture 1.0 Course Unit CRIM 402 Criminal Justice Data Analytics This course covers the tools and techniques to acquire, organize, link and visualize complex data in order to answer questions about crime and the criminal justice system. The course is organized around key questions about police shootings, victimization rates, identifying crime hotspots, calculating the cost of crime, and finding out what happens to crime when it rains. On the way to answer these questions, the course will cover topics including data sources, basic programming techniques, SQL, regular expressions, webscraping, and working with geographic data. The course will use R, an open-source, object oriented scripting language with a large set of available add-on packages. Course usually offered in fall term Also Offered As: CRIM 602, SOCI 605 Activity: Lecture 1.0 Course Unit CRIM 410 Research Seminar in Experiments in Crime and Justice This seminar focuses on examining data from experiments in criminology including: randomized controlled trials of criminal justice policies, "natural" experiments in crime, and other quasi-experimental studies. A series of experiments conducted by Penn scholars and elsewhere will be examined. This seminar also guides criminology majors in writing a research proposal for their thesis. Students will learn about how to formulate a research question, develop a review of the literature, and how to apply necessary empirical methods. The final paper for this course will be a research proposal that can serve as the basis for the student's senior thesis and to satisfy the senior capstone requirement. Readings will come from the disciplines of criminology, sociology, psychology, economics, and urban planning. Prerequisite: Any statistics or research methods course leading to familiarity with Excel, SPSS, R, Stata, SAS, Matlab, or NumPy. Course usually offered in fall term Activity: Seminar 1.0 Course Unit 2021-22 Catalog | Generated 04/26/22