Professor Sexton is a leading academic in his respective fields of study. It's a unique opportunity to be able to learn from someone with so much contemporary knowledge of the advancements being made on a local and national level. The class is comprised of: reading three books, conducting an ethnographic research project, and a final based off of lecture content. I enjoyed the curriculum because it helped me to develop skills that are useful to a sociologist -- which not many other classes do. Additionally, Professor Sexton is a wonderful professor who is deeply committed to the success of his students, he responds to emails very quickly and is super approachable.

This professor is fine, but definetly overrated. I've taken two of his classes. He is a cool guy with direct experience with the prison system, but I found the lecture to sometimes feel disorganized. There is so much wasted potential in the class that I feel could have been amazing if structured differently. I found that I often did not learn anything useful or relevent attending lecture. The weekly assignments were creating 10 questions and answers on 1/3 of a book (3 books per quarter). That assignment was kind of odd, but the TAs graded it extremely harshly. If you went over a page they would take away points. If you did not reference a page number for every question, they would take away points. These were the most time consuming homework assignments of all of my classes this quarter. I am a really slow reader, and we have to read a whole lot in this class - about 50-100 pages a week. The books he assigned I found to be hard to get through and not that interesting. He also wanted us to interview and attend meetings at a local church to ask about their relationship to the prison. Most students struggled to find someone to talk to, and this assignment was a little too ambitious to give to students just looking for major credits. That assignment felt like dissertation research for a masters degree. Every class requires attendance for credit - which is great to get points just for showing up. Although, if you are sick or miss class under any circumstance, you will lose points for not attending lecture, even if you message the professor beforehand. He will mention that there is opportunity for extra credit if you miss lecture. I took his Sociology of Crime class the prior quarter, and he used a lot of the same slides from that class. It felt like it repeated a lot of the same ideas from that class. I am disappointed considering all of the incredible reviews for this professor. I think people like how casual and nonchalant he is, which makes it feel less intimidating. But, this class is not a walk in the park. You have to attend every class and do a ton of work every week. There is a final paper and a final exam which is online at home which makes up about half of your grade combined. There are no sections for this class, so the TAs are only there to grade your work - which they did harshly to the whole class. I personally did not really enjoy this class and its assignments.