Gened 060 - Sec 001 -

Spring 2007
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Purpose, What You Will Learn, What You Will Not Learn

Purpose The instructor(s) hopes that by the end of the course you will know more about the connections between justice agencies and the fundamental fabric of society; how these have changed but also remained the same over the last eighty years and the ways they are likely to remain the same in the future; how this has played out in the Philadelphia region since your great-grandfather’s or great-grandmother’s time; and how social scientists collect and evaluate evidence related to these themes, and use that evidence to test ideas.

What you will learn: skills. You will become acquainted with three basic forms of data used in social science: maps, words, and numbers. You will understand how these data can be used to describe situations, trends, institutions, and locations. As you learn about these data you will strengthen your ability to make informed (i.e., data-based) judgments about the topics at hand, and, in addition, you will develop a deeper understanding of Temple’s urban setting, and the surrounding region.  Looking even further abroad, you will learn about how many of the developments described here were and are typical of broader developments in the national political arena.

You also will be working with these data. You will learn how data can be used to test ideas about why things are (or were) the way they are (or were). This is called the scientific method. It comes in two basic flavors: hypothesis testing, and grounded theorizing. You will learn about both. In short, you will become better at evaluating, analyzing and interpreting data, and seeing how those data link to broader theories and broader questions.

Perhaps most importantly, you will learn that data “are” something, because data means more than one datum. A single piece of data is a datum, and is singular. If you have more than one datum, you have data. You will learn to never, ever say “data is.”

What you will learn: content. This course looks at the intersection of U.S. society, and how justice agencies do their work. To learn more about this intersection, you will learn about six specific topics, each of which illustrate different features of this intersection. The six topics are:

·        “constructing” clients of the juvenile justice system, or delinquents

·        Finding illegal substances and punishing those involved

·        Police treatment of citizens

·        The representativeness of sitting juries

·        Prisoners, and views about and rights of prisoners and ex-prisoners

·        The connections between doing justice, political will, and the rise of the law and order agenda

     For each of these issues explored, you will learn about it using multiple data sources. For all of these issues, you will be reading at least some primary source materials. These reading materials, either journal articles or excerpts from books, were written by scholars working on this issue. You also will be seeing maps, and additional materials such as archival records, census data, or survey data.

In short, you will be seeing the “raw materials” social scientists work with, and the results of their having examined those materials.

There are some things this course is not.
This is not a course on urban crime in the early 20th Century. For that take History 0279 Historical Roots of Urban Crime (highly recommended).

This course is not about the geographic, social, demographic, economic, cultural structure of cities or urban regions. For that take History 278 (Development of the Modern American City) or Geography and Urban Studies C055 (Urban Society).

This course is not a detailed history of Philadelphia. For that, take History 0167 (History of Philadelphia).

This course is not an introduction to the criminal justice. For that, take Criminal Justice 0050 (Introduction to Criminal Justice).

This course is not about national politics and how those matters connect with law and order and criminal justice. For that take Political Science 0126 (American Public Opinion).

This course is not about the structure of American (or other) societies. For that, take Introduction to Sociology.