RELPOL 2430-01
The Politics of Religion, Crime, and Punishment
Fall 2026, T/Th 10:00–11:20AM
Where do our conceptions of criminality come from? What does “good punishment” look like today? This class explores the religious and political forces animating the expansive influence of the contemporary American prison.
Bulletin
This course examines the American prison as a significant site of political and religious formation. Through an engagement with literature in American religious history, legal and carceral studies, ethnographic accounts of prison life, and firsthand narratives of incarceration, we will examine the complex entanglement of religious and political philosophies that made the prison what it is today, while exploring how these entanglements continue to move us and shape us as members of a carceral society. Together, we will consider the questions: Where do our dominant understandings of criminality come from? And is there any such thing as “good punishment”?