INTRODUCTION TO CRIMINAL JUSTICE
FALL 2002
PURPOSES
Criminal justice is a lot of things. Most importantly, however, it is a liberal arts, social science discipline.
Liberal arts. Because it is a liberal arts discipline its purpose is to encourage all of us -- you, your fellow students, and me the instructor -- to think more deeply about, and reflect seriously on, a range of problems, institutions, and principles that are woven into the deepest core of our society.
The problems relevant to criminal justice sprawl as endlessly as runaway growth in Chester County. They include, to name just a few of the big ones: crime itself, where it comes from, how to stop it, how to respond to it when it does happen, and how to do all this in a way that is consistent with the way our society runs; understanding the impacts of crime on individual offenders, victims, communities, and the broader political landscape; drugs and alcohol and guns, especially their connections to crime; ways that the institutions making up the criminal justice "system" (CJS) can "go wrong" in any one of a million ways; and ways that these institutions making up the CJS affect us or others individually and societally, in economic, political, cultural, social, and psychological ways.
And there are the institutions themselves. In this class you want to learn about the individual components making up the CJS. Traditionally, the segments are described as: police, sentencing, courts, corrections (prison and jail), and probation and parole. For each segment we want to understand what its job is, how it goes about it, who is charged with what specific duties, and the constraints within which it operates. But we also need to consider an entirely separate "system" as well: the juvenile justice system. And, we can't forget about key parties that interact with the system such as those who do or do not report to the police, victims, and the communities to which offenders are returned.
And the foundation upon which all this rests are the principles governing the operation of various components of the CJS. How do we decide if a police officer can search someone's backpack or car trunk or home, or listen in on their conversations? How do we decide how much force an officer should use to subdue someone? Why is it important that everyone appearing before the law be "equal" and how does this idea connect to the right to an attorney? What principles do we rely upon to decide the appropriate punishment for a convicted felon? Should the punishment we decide turn on whether the convicted felon is a CEO or a homeless person? How do we balance the potential future danger to a community if we release an imprisoned offender on parole versus the additional harm to the imprisoned offender, and the cost to society of keeping that person in prison? More broadly: what is the purpose of each portion of the CJS in our society? And for whom?
As we think hard about these matters we will be sharing opinions and listening to one another. Hopefully, we can do so in a productive manner. See the guidelines on classroom decorum .
Social Science . But criminal justice is also a social science. That means to help us answer questions we rely upon sound social science data. There are some things that we can quantify and study so as to learn more about them. Is one particular program more successful than another at reducing delinquency? Or drug use? If police encounter a domestic violence incident, will that violence be less likely to happen again in the future if the police arrest the assaulter? If we ban assault weapons, will the murder rate go down? If we have police crack down on drunk drivers, will we have fewer DUIs? If we supervise people on probation more closely, will they be more or less likely to violate their parole, and why?
We do not have time to get into the methods and statistical analyses behind different studies in this course. For those matters you need to take CJ 160 (methods) and CJ 161 (statistics). Although we cannot get into the details behind various studies in this course, I will probably assign you some important studies to read outside of the textbook, and I will be talking about particular studies in class. And we will be relying upon social science findings to help us think about these issues.
You might respond: aren't individual scientific studies useless because either a) they are "biased" or b) you can always find one study whose results contradict another study or c) you can make numbers say anything you want?
These are tough questions. The short answer is a) yes studies are limited but good quality studies can help us answer specific questions; b) yes, studies sometimes contradict one another but when you look at them as a group, usually the weight of the evidence swings one way or another and c) no; good quality studies follow prescribed guidelines about what data to get how to get it how to handle and analyze it and how to report it. For more details, wait for 160 and 161.
But it certainly IS true that there are some questions and that CANNOT be definitively answered with social science data either because the problem or question is too huge, or the ethical and societal constraints against doing the studies we need are so strong that we cannot do the studies in question, or the question is framed too broadly. Examples of some questions we will not be able to answer:
When questions like these arise, I will try and work with you to see if we can reframe them to make them more answerable, or think about the data we would need to really answer them.
You are all entitled to your opinions on big questions like these, and I look forward to our sharing them. Part of reflecting more deeply on the topic - the liberal arts part - is listening to one another. But opinions only get us so far, even when those opinions are grounded in personal experience. Those experiences are valid, and I do not seek to deny them. But I do hope this course will give you a more general picture, based both on data and principles and reasoning, that helps you put your personal experience in a broader context.