CDC213 | Data and Criminal Justice

The Data and Criminal Justice Lab has been designed as skills focused clinical course that will let students to work with large criminal justice related datasets, and guide them through a group research project involving collection, analysis, communication of data.

The course will also engender a basic understanding of empirical research methods (mainly, quantitative and mixed), and concepts such a sampling, regression, distribution, and teach students to use tools in MS Excel, Google Spreadsheets and R Studio for research.

The course builds on and furthers the students’ understanding of critical criminal law and the criminal justice system, including general principles such as rationale of criminalisation, deterrence and punishment and the Indian Penal Code, 1860; the Code of Criminal Procedure, 1973; and special criminal law legislations. It is intended to particularly develop an understanding of how these laws and principles are operationalized by the law enforcement in contrast with how they appear in black letter.

This will be done with the help of published research in the area of critical criminal justice, primarily from India and the USA, that illustrate the importance of data in understanding criminal law and theory, and the criminal justice system. The course primarily follows the methodology of experiential learning i.e. learning by doing and collaborative problem solving.

The first 8 sessions (16 hours) of the course will familiarise the students with the basics of quantitative research, analytics software, and criminal justice datasets. This will also include short in-class exercises. In the following 10 sessions (20 hours), the students will be guided in their own group data research projects, with weekly brainstorming and problem solving meetings, with the faculty and the entire class. The final 2 sessions (4 hours) of the Course will involve class presentation of the groups’ research outputs.