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Contact with criminal justice has become a primary way that many Americans see and experience government, particularly those from race-class subjugated communities. Yet, our field has been slow to appreciate the development of the carceral state or to consider its manifold impacts for citizenship. In this graduate seminar, we will survey key debates around punishment, state violence, and surveillance, with a particular focus on research that takes institutional development, history, and racial orders seriously. Why did the carceral state expand in “fits and starts” and with what consequence for state-building? We explore its (racialized and gendered) relationship to other key systems: foster care, social provision, labor relations and the labor market, and immigration enforcement. A core preoccupation of this course will be to understand the ways in which the criminal justice system “makes race” and how debates about crime and punishment were often debates about black inclusion and equality. How does exposure to criminal justice interventions shape political learning, democratic habits, and racial lifeworlds? In addition to policy, political discourse, and racial politics, we will employ works from a range of fields – history, sociology, law, and criminology – and a range of methods (ethnography, historical analysis, quantitative and qualitative). Required books include: Khalil Muhammad’s Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America, Elizabeth Hinton’s From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime, David Oshinsky’s Worse than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice, Bruce Western’s Punishment and Inequality in America, and Michael Fortner’s Black Silent Majority: The Rockefeller Drug Laws and the Politics of Punishment.