Social Determinants of Crime - UC

About This Certificate

This certificate provides students with a focused, interdisciplinary foundation examining how race, class, gender, and other social categories impact crime and justice in the United States.

To complete the certificate, students take two required courses—CJ 3370 Gender-Based ViolenceandSOC 3430 Social Deviance—along with one elective selected from ANTH 3200 Perspectives on Race orSOC 4410 Race and Crime, totaling nine credit hours. This certificate will be benificial for those students looking at employment as a victim advocate, social worker, and in rehabilitation, probation and parole and other areas in the field of criminal justice.

What You Will Learn

Students earning this certificate will:

1. learn how violent victimization intersects with gender and other broader systems of inequality;
2. analyze how deviance, both as behaviors and as populations, is socially defined, regulated, and controlled within American society; and
3. examine how the meaning and significance of race and ethnicity has been shaped by historical, political, and social forces, and how those categorizations may affect criminal justice in the United States.

Through this combination of perspectives, students will develop a nuanced and critical understanding of how gender, class, race, and other social identities shape lived experiences and social outcomes in criminal justice.