NCJ Number
230375
Date Published
2010
Length
9 pages
Annotation
This chapter considers how the "new criminal justice" - with its emphasis on local communities, partnerships, and action research - can influence teaching and learning in the field and how it might provide opportunities to rethink and redesign the tools used to provide access to the relevant body of knowledge.
Abstract
This chapter argues that the "new criminal justice" involves a more complex portraits of criminal justice than is typically portrayed. It is an enterprise in which local communities stress their own values and priorities, in which organizations pool their resources, and in which changing knowledge and information can inform practice. The result is a complex repertoire of approaches to criminal justice that can vary significantly over time and place. This encourages criminal justice students to consider theories that might explain how differences emerge and their diverse impacts. The "new criminal justice" encourages students to locate justice as a core concept and to consider how communities define and pursue just outcomes and how successful they are in that pursuit. Under this perspective, an emphasis on crime reduction means that students are also encouraged to link the understanding of the causes of crime with societal responses to crime, as well as to appreciate how all aspects of criminal justice can benefit from the application of criminological theory. Given the features of the "new criminal justice," this chapter recommends using problem-based learning, which refers to a range of teaching approaches that engage students in learning through their participation in addressing a research problem. For introductory criminal justice, such a problem might be an issue as broad as "gun violence" or "police use of force," or "probation effectiveness."