Courses for Fall 2018

	Title	Instructor	Time	Description	Fulfills	Registration Notes
CRIM 100-401	CRIMINOLOGY	MACDONALD, JOHN	MW 0200PM-0330PM	This introductory course examines the multi-disciplinary science of law-making, law-breaking, and law-enforcing. It reviews theories and data predicting where, when, by whom and against whom crimes happen. It also addresses the prevention of different offense types by different kinds of offenders against different kinds of people. Police, courts, prisons, and other institutions are critically examined as both preventing and causing crime. This course meets the general distribution requirement.	Society sector (all classes)	SOCIETY SECTOR
CRIM 240-301	FORENSIC ANALYSIS		TR 0900AM-1030AM
CRIM 250-001	STATISTICS FOR THE SOCIAL SCIENCES I	RIDGEWAY, GREGORY	TR 0130PM-0300PM	Statistical techniques and quantitative reasoning are essential tools for properly examing questions in the social sciences. This course introduces students to the concepts of probability, estimation, confidence intervals, and how to use the statistical concepts and methods to answer social science questions. The course will require the use of R, a free, open source statistical analysis program. This course has been approved for the quantitative data analysis requirement (QDA).		COLLEGE QUANTITATIVE DATA ANALYSIS REQ.; QUANTITATIVE DATA ANALYSIS COURSE
CRIM 270-001	BIOPSYCHOSOCIAL CRIM	RAINE, ADRIAN	TR 1030AM-1200PM	Is there a "natural-born killer"? Why don't psychopaths have a conscience? And is it morally wrong for us to punish those who are biologically-wired for a life of crime? This interdisciplinary biosocial course argues that answers to these inscrutable questions can be found in the fledging field of "neurocriminology". This new sub-discipline brings together the social, clinical, and neurosciences to help us better understand, predict, and prevent future crime. We will explore the biosocial bases to crime and violence, analyze controversial neuroethical, legal and philosophical issues surrounding neurocriminology, and take a field trip to prison. This interdisciplinary course presents perspectives from the fields of psychology, neuroscience, criminology, sociology, law, business, public health, psychiatry, anthropology, neuroimaging, neuroendocrinology, forensics, nutrition, and pediatrics. It is suitable for those without a background in biology or criminology. It is particularly relevant for majors in Criminology, Psychology, Nursing, and Biological Basis of Behavior.
CRIM 315-001	AM DEATH PEN. THRY & PRA	DOLGENOS, THOMAS	TR 0300PM-0430PM	Over the past forty years, in response to controversy over the American death penalty, the Supreme Court has created a framework of rules designed to make the death penalty conform to current societal standards. In this course, we will identify the critical issues identified by the courts (and the critics) in light of the practical realities of capital litigation, and we will ask whether the efforts to address these issues have been successful. The class will use specific case examples to identify the critical points in a death penalty case- for example, the decision to designate a prosecution as "capital", the performance of defense counsel, the penalty decision, and the method of execution. These critical stages will provide a platform for discussing critical issues like the proper limits of discretion; bias; cruelty; and the decision to disqualify certain groups of people from capital punishment (the mentally disabled, minors). Students will be assigned readings from differnt kinds of sources. Cases from the Supreme Court will identify key issues and the efforts to address them under the law. More general death penalty history will provide some context. We will also read pieces by advocates (pro and con). Finally, we will focus on a few specific prosecutions and discuss how abstract theories work in a particular case.
CRIM 402-401	CRIM JUSTICE ANALYTICS	RIDGEWAY, GREGORY	TR 1200PM-0130PM	This course covers the tools and techniques to acquire, organize, link and visualize complex data in order to answer questions about crime and the criminal justice system. The course is organized around key questions about police shootings, victimization rates, identifying crime hotspots, calculating the cost of crime, and finding out what happens to crime when it rains. On the way to answer these questions, the course will cover topics including data sources, basic programming techniques, SQL, regular expressions, webscraping, and working with geographic data. The course will use R, an open-source, object oriented scripting language with a large set of available add-on packages.
CRIM 410-401	RESEARCH SEMINAR IN EXPERIMENTS IN CRIME AND JUSTICE	OUSS, AURELIE	W 0200PM-0500PM	This seminar focuses on examining data from experiments in criminology including: randomized controlled trials of criminal justice policies, "natural" experiments in crime, and other quasi-experimental studies. A series of experiments conducted by Penn scholars and elsewhere will be examined. This seminar also guides criminology majors in writing a research proposal for their thesis. Students will learn about how to formulate a research question, develop a review of the literature, and how to apply necessary empirical methods. The final paper for this course will be a research proposal that can serve as the basis for the student's senior thesis and to satisfy the senior capstone requirement. Readings will come from the disciplines of criminology, sociology, psychology, economics, and urban planning.
CRIM 535-001	INTRODUCTION TO QUANTITATIVE METHODS FOR POLICY ANALYSIS	CHALFIN, AARON	R 0130PM-0430PM	This course provides an introduction to applied statistical techniques in the social sciences and is tailored, in particular, to students pursuing the master of science degree in the Depsartment of Criminology. It is taught as a basic course in statistics and presumes minimal mathematical or statistical background. We'll begin with a brief introduction to the research process. We'll then cover the computation, interpretation and understanding of basic descriptive statistics, distribution, hypothesis testing, measures of association and finally regression analysis. Depending on how much time we have, we will cover several more advanced topics in regression analysis at the end of the semester.		SECTION ACTIVITY CO-REQUISITE REQUIRED; UNDERGRADUATES NEED PERMISSION
CRIM 535-101	LABORATORY	WU, YUHAO	F 1000AM-1100AM	This course provides an introduction to applied statistical techniques in the social sciences and is tailored, in particular, to students pursuing the master of science degree in the Depsartment of Criminology. It is taught as a basic course in statistics and presumes minimal mathematical or statistical background. We'll begin with a brief introduction to the research process. We'll then cover the computation, interpretation and understanding of basic descriptive statistics, distribution, hypothesis testing, measures of association and finally regression analysis. Depending on how much time we have, we will cover several more advanced topics in regression analysis at the end of the semester.		SECTION ACTIVITY CO-REQUISITE REQUIRED; UNDERGRADUATES NEED PERMISSION
CRIM 600-301	PRO-SEM IN CRIMINOLOGY	MACDONALD, JOHN	W 0900AM-1200PM	This course provides an overview of the leading criminological theories of crime. The central focus is on the major theories of crime developed over the past century from the disciplines of economics, psychology, and sociology. The course will focus on the application of social science research as a way to evaluate theories of crime. Special attention is devoted to the issues of measurement of crime and what is known from the available empirical data. In addition, the course will focus on how these theoretical perspectives relate to public policy responses to crime.		UNDERGRADUATES NEED PERMISSION
CRIM 602-401	CRIM JUSTICE ANALYTICS	RIDGEWAY, GREGORY	TR 1200PM-0130PM	This course covers the tools and techniques to acquire, organize, link and visualize complex data in order to answer questions about crime and the criminal justice system. The course is organized around key questions about police shootings, victimization rates, identifying crime hotspots, calculating the cost of crime, and finding out what happens to crime when it rains. On the way to answer these questions, the course will cover topics including data sources, basic programming techniques, SQL, regular expressions, webscraping, and working with geographic data. The course will use R, an open-source, object oriented scripting language with a large set of available add-on packages.		UNDERGRADUATES NEED PERMISSION
CRIM 604-301	CRIMINOLOGY IN PRACTICE	RIDGEWAY, GREGORY	T 0400PM-0600PM	In this capstone course, students will meet weekly with guests who work on or close to the front line of the criminal justice system. Past guests have included police chiefs, forensic scientists, lobbyists for gun rights and lobbyist for gun control, formerly incarcerated individuals, crime analysts, directors of sentencing commissions, prosecutors and defenders, politicians, and researchers at research organizations working closely with criminal justice agencies. Guests share their career paths, the roles of their organizations in the justice system, and key justice system challenges. Students interact with all guest speakers.		MAJORS ONLY; NON-MAJORS NEED PERMISSION FROM DEPARTMENT; UNDERGRADUATES NEED PERMISSION
CRIM 610-401	RESEARCH SEMINAR IN EXPERIMENTS IN CRIME AND JUSTICE	OUSS, AURELIE	W 0200PM-0500PM	This seminar focuses on examining data from experiments in criminology including: randomized controlled trials of criminal justice policies, "natural" experiments in crime, and other quasi-experimental studies. A series of experiments conducted by Penn scholars and elsewhere will be examined. This seminar also guides criminology majors in writing a research proposal for their thesis. Students will learn about how to formulate a research question, develop a review of the literature, and how to apply necessary empirical methods. The final paper for this course will be a research proposal that can serve as the basis for the student's senior thesis and to satisfy the senior capstone requirement. Readings will come from the disciplines of criminology, sociology, psychology, economics, and urban planning.
CRIM 634-001	EVIDENCE-BASED CRIM PREV	OUSS, AURELIE	T 0900AM-1200PM	This course considers the use of evidence to identify effective crime prevention policies. The course will teach students to think critically about what constitutes convincing evidence, use benefit-cost analysis in comparing policy alternatives, and write effective policy memos that can translate research into practice. We will develop these skills by studying the effects of different policy approaches to crime prevention including incarceration, policing, gun control, drug regulation, and place-based interventions, as well as education, social programs, and labor market policies. Emphasis will be on the methodological challenges to identifying "what works" and the empirical methods to overcome those challenges.
CRIM 634-002	EVIDENCE-BASED CRIM PREV		CANCELED	This course considers the use of evidence to identify effective crime prevention policies. The course will teach students to think critically about what constitutes convincing evidence, use benefit-cost analysis in comparing policy alternatives, and write effective policy memos that can translate research into practice. We will develop these skills by studying the effects of different policy approaches to crime prevention including incarceration, policing, gun control, drug regulation, and place-based interventions, as well as education, social programs, and labor market policies. Emphasis will be on the methodological challenges to identifying "what works" and the empirical methods to overcome those challenges.

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