Prerequisites: None

Exam Type: No Exam

As America reckons with the injustices of mass incarceration, this course examines the narratives that shape how we understand criminal law. Using the concept of the carceral lens, we’ll explore how visual media doesn’t just reflect reality—it constructs it, shaping what counts as truth, justice, crime, or harm, and who is seen as worthy of punishment or protection. Our main focus will be documentary film, which often carries the weight of truth, but is always shaped by perspective and power. We’ll also look at police body camera footage, bystander videos, filmed confessions, and serialized television, media that claim to document but often obscure as much as they reveal. We’ll ask what it means to tell someone else’s story, what responsibilities that entails, and how the stakes change when stories are told within institutions like courts, newsrooms, or the documentary film world, each with its own language of authority. At its core, this course invites us to think critically about how stories of punishment are built, whose experiences they draw from, what is risked or surrendered in the telling, and what might also be imagined or reclaimed.

Additional time reserved for viewing films.