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Race, ethnicity and crime
This free course, Race, ethnicity and crime, briefly examines the relationships between race and ethnicity, and crime, criminalisation and criminal justice. It considers the relationship between crime and cultural difference; the notion of 'criminalisation' and how its processes affect individuals and their opportunities; and the lived consequences of racialisation. Specifically, you will examine the ways in which these criminalisations which lead to the over-policing, over-incarceration and under-protection of particular populations lie at the heart of critical criminological arguments.
Course learning outcomes
After studying this course, you should be able to:
- explain why the concept of criminalisation is valuable for understanding race–crime debates
- describe the problem of disproportionality in relation to the criminal justice system
- provide examples of some of the ways in which critical criminology has conceptually approached and researched ‘race’ and ethnicity.
First Published: 22/04/2013
Updated: 10/05/2019
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A very interesting and informative course (particularlly given that it was free!), however it was very short and perhaps missed out on some of the more crucial elements entrenched in race and crime, such as the general problems of mass supervision, mass probation and net-widening policies. Furthermore, whilst the course does touch on Reagan's war on drugs policy, this is brief and under-explained and as a result of this I feel the module fails to offer context to modern phenomenon of race and crime.