I absolutely loved this class. Hands down the best class I've taken in my three years at UCLA. Dr. Shapiro is incredibly knowledgeable, engaging, and humble. He wants to teach us as much as possible about exactly what we're interested in. The class was co-taught by Dr. Shapiro and a recently released previously incarcerated person. They combined their academic and lived experiences to teach us about prisons in the US as effectively as possible. There are a lot of readings for the first half of the class and you need to annotate them using Perusall which can be annoying, but the readings chosen were usually really good. I wished the class went a little deeper into each topic because we usually only spent one class on each huge issue with prisons (e.g. toxic environment or healthcare in prisons). The second half of the class is experiential and everyone got to choose a project to work on. Initially we were going to work with community organizers in LA, but we pivoted (per students' requests and professor facilitation) to conducting different research projects at UCLA. The projects were incredibly valuable to me and I learned a lot about conducting research/collecting archives. The grading is super easy. Dr. Shapiro wants you to show that you learned and were engaged in the class, but really doesn't want to make you stress about a grade so everything is super chill.