Category: Criminal Justice Essay Examples
See our collection of criminal justice essay examples. These examples are to help you understanding how to write essays on crime-related topics. Contemporary study of criminology and criminal justice is also increasingly interdisciplinary and thus features a broad variety of topics on the causes, effects, and responses to crime. Also, see our list of criminal justice essay topics to find the one that interests you.
For centuries, scholars have postulated on what citizenship means. Although a range of theories exist, notions of citizenship commonly convey an implication that some degree of moral mindfulness regarding our thoughts, actions, and behaviors toward people’s fellow human beings is necessary. Four key Western thinkers’ conceptualizations — those …
Historically, one of the most conflicted—indeed, contentious—issues facing criminal justice and mental health professionals is that of reducing ambiguity in civil commitment proceedings that restrict the freedom of individuals viewed as potentially violent, such as those with mental disorders, violent sex offenders, and juvenile delinquents. Center stage in …
Civil disobedience occurs when a person refuses to obey a law or policy he or she believes to be unjust. Integrity-based civil disobedience involves citizens engaging in protest toward a law or policy they feel is immoral. Justice-based civil disobedience involves the disobeying of laws to obtain a …
In much of the modern world, social class as a distinct system of stratification contains fluid boundaries, and determining an individual’s or family’s social rank requires a subjective approach. In societies without slavery, peasantry, or caste, the individual and family don’t have a clearly defined and concrete social …
Clemency has been controversial in recent years as it appears that prosecutors are making more recommendations to the court for the life without parole option for serious offenses and therefore more offenders are seeking to get the benefit of this extraordinary assistance. Clemency is a designation used for …
Closed-circuit television (CCTV) is the term given to describe a system of remotely located video cameras positioned across a particular space, such as a around a building or on city streets. These cameras are linked, as the name suggests, to a closed circuit as opposed to an open …
Codes of conduct and legal ethics rules are adopted by criminal justice actors and institutions such as police, attorneys and judges, and corrections professionals. International standards of criminal justice are outlined in the United Nations Criminal Justice Standards for law enforcement peacekeeping officers working overseas. Why Codes of …
Professional codes of conduct minimize value conflicts. The standards articulated in such documents are meant for all members of a profession to follow. John Kultgen noted that “every code must be treated as a hypothesis to be tested and adapted while following it.” Such an endeavor, thus, is …
Codes of conduct applicable to police have been designed and implemented in the United States and internationally. The overarching purpose of these codes is to lay the foundation for accountability and internal discipline within the law enforcement agency (LEA). The codes create ethical standards that supplement the laws …
Persons convicted of felony offenses are subject to both criminal penalties and civil penalties, referred to as “collateral consequences.” Collateral consequences have severe implications for convicts that impact them during incarceration and then upon release from prison back to the community. Legislation that subjects felons, convicts, and ex-convicts …
Collective efficacy is broadly defined as the extent to which community members believe they are able to intervene in community issues to maintain social control and solve community problems. The thinking behind the concept was born out of a discussion of the social disorganization theory. The actual concept …
Commonsense justice is best seen as reflecting the idea of “common” in the expression “common law.” In the 12th century in England, King Henry II instituted far-reaching reforms of the English legal system, one of which was to replace a system of justice in which local custom played …
Communitarianism is a social and political philosophy that holds that there ought to be communal definitions of the good, in opposition to the liberal precept that each person should define the good. In its authoritarian (East Asian) version it extols conformity and holds that the individual should find …
An understanding of community is fundamental to building relationships between criminal justice professionals and the people they serve. The duties of law enforcement involve monitoring and stopping various aspects of human behavior, and as such, police officers are intrinsically effected by the ethics of the communities within which …
Community policing (CP) initiatives can be broadly understood as a more or less coherent response to the ethical tension, inherent in a democratic society, of using an elite cadre of professionals (the police) to distribute the use of coercive force across the social body. Over the past 30 …
Restoration to competency through various means, including forcible medication of defendants or inmates with mental illness, is permitted throughout the legal process. In the 1990 case of Washington v. Harper, the U.S. Supreme Court decided that a mentally ill inmate could be forcibly medicated in the interest of …
Competence to stand trial is essential to due process, to fair trial, and at least in capital cases, to preventing cruel and unusual punishments under the Eighth Amendment. Competence, different from insanity, is a moving target that is at issue throughout the trial. Trying and sentencing incompetent defendants …
Compstat, alternatively styled COMPSTAT, ComStat, or CompStat, derives its name from computer statistics and refers to the policies, practices, systems, and organizational structures subsumed by a revolutionary police management paradigm first developed and implemented by the New York Police Department (NYPD) in 1994 during the administration of Police …
The issue of security or privacy is a concern as the revelations of computer technologies to pursue suspected criminals is widely used in the U.S. criminal justice system. Criminal justice actors, including police, attorneys, judges, and correctional professionals, employ technological tools such as electronic surveillance, facial recognition, thermal …
The Fifth Amendment states that, “no person . . . shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself.” Additionally, the U.S. Supreme Court case Miranda v. Arizona states that, among other things, warnings against self-incrimination must be read to suspects who are undergoing …
