After several years of feeling like I needed to upend my seminar on Sentencing Law and Policy, I’ve decided that this summer is the time to do it, in anticipation of teaching a new version in the fall. But I’m hoping to get a little help filling in a few gaps for the books I want to assign.

Two things struck me while teaching the class this past fall. First, while I had always made it clear that the “law” part of “Sentencing Law & Policy” was pretty thin, it finally really hit me that it is basically non-existent. There is some law when it comes to sentencing, I guess, but I also realized that well over 99% of the time the answer to any question boiled down to “what the DA and defendant agree to during plea bargaining.” To the point that I felt like the course could really have just been named “Plea Bargaining.”

Second, I also realized that I wanted to restructure things to be far more explicit about how “sentencing” happens at every stage of the process, not just at the moment the judge bangs her gavel. Police punish, the process itself punishes, the formal sentence is obviously part of the punishment but so too is the place where that sentence is served (three years in Alabama is not the same thing as three years in Germany), etc., etc.

So I’ve decided I need to revamp the course (which meets for 3 hours at a time, once a week for 13 weeks). I’ll start with three basically-lecture classes providing a broad overview of how the criminal legal system operates, what the law (roughly) looks like, and so on. But for the remaining 10 weeks, I want students, in groups of two, to lead discussions on how specific parts of the sprawling criminal legal system mete out punishment, based off one or two books for each session. My goal is for the students to talk about how these institutions operate, how they punish, and why they do so.

Below are the topics that I am currently thinking of, as well as the books I have in mind, at least for most of them. But I’d love to get people’s thoughts on other books or articles to consider–or, in the cases where I don’t have anything yet, not just “other” sources but just … sources–as well as other topics that deserve specific attention.

Please feel free to email me any ideas or leave them in the comments.

Thanks so much!

1. Police:
2. Prosecutors: Locked In.
3. The process itself: Gonzalez van Cleve’s Crook County, Feeley’s The Process is the Punishment
4. Plea bargaining (an extension of the process, but think it deserves its own class): Hessick’s Punishment Without Trial
5. Misdemeanors: Kohler-Hausmann’s Misdemeanorland, Natapoff’s Punishment Without Crime
6. Prisons (the trends of mass incarceration): Locked In, but also at least one other
7. Prisons (how prison as institutions punish… or do something else):
8. Post-conviction collateral consequences: Harris’s A Pound of Flesh, but also at least one other (since Harris’s book is just about criminal legal debt)
9. The politics of punishment: Stuntz’s Collapse of American Criminal Justice, Goodman-Page-Phelp’s Breaking the Pendulum
10. What we know works better/alternative ways of thinking about the criminal legal system:

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