Teaching about Policing or Teaching Policing: Dilemmas in Contemporary Critical Criminology Programs

• In Event: Poster Session 2

Abstract

Criminal justice professors have a clear mandate to teach about law enforcement tactics, perspectives, and professional trajectories. Criminologists, however, may conceptualize our discipline as research and analysis of criminal legal systems, institutions, philosophies, and practices. Both students and university administration may not recognize the distinction. Professors can face challenges around the disjuncture between student/administrator criminal justice expectations and professors’ criminological frameworks. In the contemporary period, teaching around issues of law enforcement also creates complex dilemmas related to social identities, personal experiences, and the culture wars, as some students embrace abolitionist perspectives while others perceive a need for more intensive policing, harsher penalties, and expansion of the carceral state. This poster highlights comparisons of criminology curricula with criminal justice curricula, discusses strategies for accurate marketing of criminology programs recognizing distinctions between criminology and criminal justice approaches, and gives examples of classroom dilemmas and approaches to teaching about law enforcement in a highly politicized historical moment.

Authors

• Michelle Marie VanNatta, Dominican University

• Clinton Nichols, Dominican University