This course will introduce, examine, and provide students the skills with which to analyze criminal court reform. This course will emphasize a conceptual approach rather than a statistical focus to studying the creation, implementation, and evaluation of criminal court reform. Topics may include pretrial detention and surveillance, public defense systems, debtor’s prison, plea bargaining, wrongful convictions, disproportionate sentencing, prosecutorial and/or judicial abuses of authority in the name of public safety, alternatives to incarceration, excessive punishment, death penalty and more.