An Introduction to Criminal Justice Inquiry
Lesson Overview
For over a century, law-abiding American citizens have repeatedly made the statement that "something needs to be done about crime." To this end, law enforcement, corrections, and a multitude of other agencies and groups have attempted strategies aimed at preventing crime, punishing criminals, rehabilitating offenders, and ameliorating social problems. Some of these strategies (e.g., problem-focused policing, diversion of offenders) have been successful and show promise for the future; others (such as juvenile "bootcamps") were perhaps well-intentioned, but never met their stated goals after implementation.
So how do we know "what works" and "what doesn't?" The only means to effectively gather valid and reliable knowledge about criminal behavior and methods of justice is to utilize techniques of scientific inquiry. The history of criminal justice is littered with programs and initiatives that were put into place on the basis of educated guessing, without empirical backing. The purpose of this lesson, therefore, is to give you a basic picture of the characteristics of scientific inquiry and the purposes of criminal justice inquiry so that you can consider and devise a much more economical strategy, i.e. test new ideas on a smaller scale before investing huge sums of money and time on a program destined to fail.
Lesson Objectives
At the end of this lesson, you should be able to:
- Differentiate between lay and scientific inquiry;
- Differentiate between the two general foundations of knowledge;
- Recognize the most common errors in everyday observation;
- Outline the major purposes of empirical research projects.