Criminal Justice Reform

​All-Gender Course; Fall semester or Full-year course
COURSE DESCRIPTION
The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world. This course examines how the prison industrial complex evolved and how the legacy of slavery and overt and masked racism impact arrests, indictments, and sentencing. We explore why people are wrongly condemned and evaluate the effectiveness of the process for exoneration. We also ask about the training received by law enforcement officers, prison wardens, juries, and judges. The course culminates with a project on how our system can be reformed to reduce crime and improve justice. By the end of this course, students will have a framework for understanding the socio-economics and politics of the United States penal system. 
WHAT STUDENTS SAY

Criminal Justice Reform is a new course for 20/21 school year at One Schoolhouse. To read what students have said about other One Schoolhouse courses, visit our What Students Say webpage!

WHAT STUDENTS DO
Learning is an active process at One Schoolhouse. Students design, create and apply. And, they engage with classmates and connect with their teachers through discussions, video conferences, and projects. Specifically, in this class students will:
  • Set goals that drive their learning. Students reflect regularly on their growth, and meet on video chat with their online teacher to review progress towards their goals.
  • Have choice in how they learn new content and practice new skills. Students are given agency to determine the best ways for them to learn.
  • Apply what they are learning to the real world. Learning is meaningful and connects to concepts outside the classroom.
  • Practice constructive engagement in a diverse and changing world. Students interact with classmates from across the country and around the world.
  • Gain academic maturity. Online learning takes greater discipline and independence than a traditional face-to-face classroom. Teachers support students to build this skill.
WHAT HAPPENS IN THE SECOND SEMESTER?
Students wishing to pursue a criminal justice project may enroll in the course for the full year. For students continuing into Semester II, the course shifts into personalized, project-based work, where students engage in deep, sustained inquiry; authentic and iterative research; critical analysis; and rigorous reflection, revision, and assessment as they journey through a self-designed, long-term activism, design, or research project on the topic of their choosing. Guided by a One Schoolhouse teacher, students pursue individual study/self-assessment or collaborative seminar/peer-review. Pathway options from which students choose include:
  • Spring Activism Seminar: In this seminar, students identify a need and create a plan to effect economic, environmental, political, or social change in a target community.  Utilizing a social science approach to research and evaluation, students are guided through the process of planning the deployment of a novel idea and identifying markers of success.  Students may create a strategic plan for a club or non-profit or design an artistic product in this seminar. 
  • Spring Design Seminar:  In this seminar, students design a technological solution to a real-world problem.  Through the engineering design process/scientific method, students gather and analyze data to determine the effectiveness of their model or the accuracy of their hypothesis.  Students may prototype and produce a public product in this seminar. 
  • Spring Research Seminar:  In this seminar, students answer a theoretical or ethical question.  Utilizing the social science/humanities tools for source evaluation, students collect, critique, and evaluate artifacts or primary source documents to explore their thesis.  Students may create a written or multimedia product in this seminar. 

Upon completion of their inquiry-driven project, students will have gained academic maturity and expanded their ability to engage in a diverse and changing world. They will be able to draw and defend conclusions from theoretical underpinnings, contextual background, and mathematical analysis or source evaluation. Finally, they will have created and tested something useful of their own design or will be able to defend a position based on their own research.​
SIGNATURE ACTIVITIES
Examples of signature activities and projects for this course are:
  • Students will begin by creating their own definition of justice, and throughout the course, this definition will grow and change as they learn more about the realities of the criminal justice system in the United States.
  • Students will be able to choose from several different media to express their thoughts about the different parts of the criminal justice system we investigate, whether they write a poem or a story, create a video, etc.
  • In the final project for the course, students will design a better criminal justice system that is connected to their own definition of justice.
COURSE APPROVAL
This course is approved by the NCAA. 

​One Schoolhouse is fully accredited with the Middle States Association of Colleges and Schools and the Western Association of Schools and Colleges through December 1, 2025; we are an approved online publisher for the University of California. 
Naadia Owens​
she/her/hers
Humanities Teacher
BA Northwestern University
MAT National Louis University