Your Education Ends Here
Criminal justice students
enter liberal arts programs and study many of the problems in the legal field. They learn about the anthropological,
psychological, and sociological functions that drive human behaviors, the law,
and the policy implications that have been crafted or should be developed to
maintain order in contemporary society.
Problems about the legal system are discussed, presented in educational
formats, and given to students so that they are able to implement critical
thinking skills that are necessary to resolve the many issues and, in turn,
deliver better approaches to criminal justice in the United States and the entire
world. Moreover, many of these students
become enlightened about the realities of the criminal justice system and
earnestly strive to make whatever impact they can to produce positive results
for humanity via the administration of justice.
This positive activism is short-lived and many of these intellectual
learnings and postulations end when the students enter the profession of law
enforcement because of organizational cultures and obedience to superior
coworkers and external influences (Garrett, 2015; Hough, Jackson, Bradford,
Myhill, & Quinton, 2010; Myhill & Bradford, 2013; Robinson, 2016). This is terrible and it posits notions about
the discouraging realities that all scholars dread while presenting their
lesson plans in the colleges and universities in the United States and
elsewhere. More specifically, the lack of
transferability of the critical education that many criminal justice students
get occurs because of indoctrination activities that are not in line with sincere
applications of criminal justice and policies associated with the system
(DeKeseredy,
2013; DeKeseredy & Schwartz, 2013).
Police departments, law offices, jails/prisons, and community
corrections training, in many cases, includes telling recent hires that they
are required to obey commands and internal policies and not utilize critical
thinking skills that allow for better distributions of justice. The “know your role” philosophy and processes
that allow for a fluid transition in many legal organizations tends to be the
culprit for the disengagement from critical scholarship and thinking in other words.
Delving deeper into this
idea, as well as to use examples in the core components of the criminal justice
system in contemporary cultures, the end of the critical and objective
scholarship and thinking happens shortly after the point of hire for new police
officers, courtroom personnel, and corrections practitioners (Howes, 2016;
Jacobson & Chancer, 2010; Madfis & Cohen, 2016). Beginning with police departments, many new
recruits are expected to undergo academy training on tactical procedures, learn
the intricacies of the specific organization, deal with hazing-like conditions
for the first few years on the job and, most importantly, expected to be
obedient to common orders and instructions that are bestowed upon them by
senior ranking law enforcers (Cordner, 2017; Dempsey & Forst, 2008;
Schmalleger, 2008). Case in point, the
application of what was learned as a result of said scholarship and thinking is
thrown to the wayside because of the aforementioned internal cultures that
exist in many police departments. As
aforementioned, this concept also applies to prosecutors, judges, public
defenders, and individuals who work in correctional facilities and community
supervision (Garrett, 2015; Hough, Jackson, Bradford, Myhill, & Quinton,
2010; Myhill & Bradford, 2013; Robinson, 2016). Using prosecutors as an example, Kroepsch (2016) discusses the
recent surge of wrongful conviction committees in state prosecutor offices and
other prosecutor-based ethics developments and, in turn, depicts how the
allocation of adequate resources for the internal groups are not sufficient in
many jurisdictions (pp. 1096-1098).
Additionally, Kroepsch (2016) mentions that one of the reasons that the
proper resources are not wholeheartedly delivered for the integrity divisions
in prosecutors’ offices is because the oversight committees can lead to a demonstration
of prosecutors being incorrect in their professionalism which, in turn, is a
self-induced marketing system about poorly dispensed justice by professionals
who claim to be enforcing the law correctly every time they engage in their
professional activities (pp. 1098-1099).
Pyle (2002) makes similar claims in a dryer fashion and toward all of the courtroom people, and simply states
the injustices occur when attorneys fail to present evidence, refuse to make
statements that may bring up scrutiny about legal practices, and even discusses
how conflicts of interests are ignored because of the consequences that may
arise if they are presented to a court or coworker (pp. 55-59). Both authors’ discussions are surely an example of how critical scholarship and thinking is not fully approved of or supported by others in the legal field and how the educational endeavors for criminal justice students are mostly disregarded.
Daily practices in jails
and prisons are the most responsible devices in the criminal justice system for
destroying the critical scholarship and thinking of recently graduated criminal justice students. The mundane activities of these processes
surely do not allow for any of the knowledge that has been learned to come to
light in a beneficial fashion and criminal justice students enter this specific
field and simply become an individual who is responsible for mostly simple
tasks – such as counting, pushing buttons, routine paperwork, and pulling
levers (Carlson, & Garrett, 1999; Schmalleger, 2008). Community corrections is not excluded. This profession has maintained the same
agenda and, at times, is influenced by external parties to cause problems in
society, cater to desired population rates for jails and prisons, practice
biased applications of justice for police departments and courts, and even
target individuals to ensure occupational retention (Carlson, & Garrett,
1999; Mei, Iannacchione, Stohr, Hemmens, Hudson, &
Collins, 2017; Schmalleger, 2008). Because
of this, all of the research and policy driven education about positive
reductions in crime and recidivism, again, get thrown away. Recently hired individuals – criminal justice
students, that is – are preoccupied with learning the expected norms of their
employer and offer very little plausible insight about new methods to deter and
rehabilitate criminal offenders. Simply
put, the education that they work so hard to receive becomes a utility that
makes them appear fit for duty – and that is about it.
Overall, the students who
enter the principle mechanisms of the criminal justice system tolerate the obedience
of the commands from the people who have hired them and been employed by the
organization for many years. Critical
scholarship is, again, ended shortly after the professional desires are
acquired in most cases, and the previous students either acclimate themselves
to the internal culture that they have entered or are told to go away. Intellectual analyses are forbidden for
recent hires and, mostly, for all of the procedures that they will encounter
while employed in any of the three parts of the criminal justice system. Social harms manifest because of these
intolerances of applying the learned critical scholarship and thinking and, in
turn, tend to cause biased administrations of justice and other dilemmas that
could be rectified via the use of the critical education and thinking that was
dispensed by the scholars in the classrooms at colleges and universities.
References:
Carlson, P. M., & Garrett, J. S. (1999).
Prison and jail
administration: Practice and theory.
Gaithersburg,
MD: Aspen Publishers, Inc.
Cordner, G.
(2017). Police culture: Individual and organizational differences in
police officer
perspectives. Policing,
40(1), 11-25.
DeKeseredy, W. S. (2013). Welcome to the dark side:
Some thoughts on the challenges of being
an early progressive
scholar. The Criminologist, 38, 44-45.
DeKeseredy, W. S., & Schwartz, M. D. (2013). Confronting progressive retreatism and
minimalism: The role of a
new left realist approach. Critical Criminology, 21(3),
273-286.
Dempsey, J. S., & Forst, L. S. (2008).
An introduction to policing (4th
ed.). Belmont, CA:
Thomson
Higher Education.
Garrett, P. M.
(2015). Confronting neoliberal
penality: Placing prison reform and critical
criminology at the core
of social work's social justice agenda. Journal of Social Work,
16(1),
83-103.
Hough, M., Jackson, J., Bradford, B., Myhill, A.,
Quinton, P. (2010). Procedural justice, trust,
and institutional
legitimacy. Policing: A Journal of Policy and Practice, 4(3),
203-210.
Howes, L. M.
(2016). Critical thinking in
criminology: Critical reflections on learning and
teaching. Teaching
in Higher Education, 22(8), 897-901.
Jacobson, M., & Chancer, L. (2010).
From left realism to mass incarceration: The need for
pragmatic vision in
criminal justice policy. Crime, Law and Social Change, 54(2),
187-196.
Kroepsch, D.
(2016). Prosecutorial best
practices committees and conviction integrity units:
How internal programs are
fulfilling the prosecutor's duty to serve justice. Georgetown
Journal
of Legal Ethics, 29(4), 1095-1110.
Madfis, E., & Cohen, J. (2016).
Critical criminologies of the present and future: Left realism,
left idealism, and what's
left in between. Social Justice, 43(4), 1-21.
Mei, X., Iannacchione, B., Stohr, M. K., Hemmens, C.,
Hudson, M., & Collins, P. A. (2017).
Confirmatory
analysis of an organizational culture instrument for corrections. The
Prison Journal, 97(2),
247-269.
Myhill, A., & Bradford, B. (2013).
Overcoming cop culture?
Organizational justice and police
officers’
attitudes toward the public. Policing: An International Journal of Police
Strategies and Management, 36(2),
338-356.
Pyle, R. C.
(2002). Foundations of law: Cases,
commentary & ethics (3rd ed.). Albany, NY:
West Legal
Studies.
Robinson, W. I.
(2016). Global capitalism and the
restructuring of education: The transnational
capitalist class' quest
to suppress critical thinking. Social Justice, 43(3), 1-24.
Schmalleger, F.
(2008). Criminal justice: A brief
introduction (7th ed.).
Upper Saddle River,
NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall.
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