Source: New York Times (NY) Contact: http://www.nytimes.com/ Copyright: 1998 The New York Times Company Author: Fox Butterfield Pubdate: Saturday, 5 Dec 1998 A NEWCOMER IN THE LIBERAL ARTS: CRIMINAL JUSTICE NEWARK, N.J. -- At first glance, Bernice Jones is not your typical college student. At 33, she is a little old, and she arrived for her criminal-justice class at Rutgers University straight from work at the Essex County Prosecutors Office, neatly dressed in a navy blue suit, blue pumps and matching handbag. There is also what she delicately calls "my family background in the criminal-justice system." Her two brothers served time in prison for drug convictions (one of them has since died), and the father of her 2-year-old daughter is serving a 10- to 15-year sentence for armed robbery. But both her job and her family situation make Ms. Jones representative of the multitude of students flocking to criminal-justice courses, making criminal justice the fastest-growing major in the United States, according to the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences, a professional organization. From an obscure discipline scorned by most academics, with only two small doctoral programs as recently as 1970, criminal justice has exploded to 350,000 undergraduate majors at colleges and universities, said Freda Adler, a professor of criminal justice at Rutgers and a former president of the American Society of Criminology. In part, the appeal of criminal justice is a result of the huge growth in crime since the 1960s, the prison-building boom and the fascination with criminals. These factors have combined to create a major new job market for police officers and prison guards. For some students, like Ms. Jones, criminal justice also offers a way to understand the lives of those around them better. But at another level, the flood of new courses and students is a reflection of the intellectual success of criminal justice. Ten to 20 years ago academic criminologists and law-enforcement authorities thought the police could do little to fight crime, but now many new ideas have proved successful in reducing the country's high crime rate. Among these seminal theories was the suggestion by James Q. Wilson of the University of California at Los Angeles and George Kelling of Rutgers University that the police concentrate on "fixing broken windows," meaning that they could avert more serious crimes like murder by arresting people for petty crimes like vandalism. At the same time, Herman Goldstein of the University of Wisconsin pioneered the concept of community policing, which means that police officers, instead of sitting in their patrol cars waiting for a 911 call after a crime has occurred, get involved in their communities, thereby preventing crime. Some of the ideas have come directly from the police themselves. Foremost among these is the management strategy introduced by William Bratton when he was police commissioner of New York City in the '90s, in which he insisted on the rapid collection of crime statistics and then held his local police commanders responsible for crime control in their areas. Like community policing, this got his officers more involved in their neighborhoods. On a different track, Gerald Patterson, a psychologist at the Oregon Social Learning Center in Eugene, demonstrated that early intervention with troubled children, particularly getting their parents to do a better job of monitoring and supervising their behavior, could prevent delinquency. And John Braithwaite at the Australian National University in Canberra has introduced a less punitive alternative to jail and prison by bringing criminals together with their victims to mediate a resolution, an idea being rapidly copied in cities around the United States. The popularity of criminal justice on campus has cut deeply into traditional fields like sociology and psychology. And it has emerged as a "cash cow" for college administrators, said Donna Hale, a professor of criminal justice at Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania and past president of the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences. At Shippensburg, criminal justice has become the second-largest major, after education, with 409 undergraduates in a total enrollment of 6,700. "We could easily be the largest, if the administration gave us the resources, because there are so many students transferring here for criminal justice and there are so many students on the waiting list," Ms. Hale said. One of the factors that set criminal justice apart from some traditional fields is the makeup of the student body. At both urban, inner-city schools like Rutgers, where many of the students are black or Hispanic, and rural universities like Shippensburg, where most of the students are white, the majority of those majoring in criminal justice are from working-class backgrounds and are the first members of their families to go to college. The appeal is jobs as police officers, prison guards, probation officers, private security company employees or FBI agents. "I'm interested in the private prison field," said Michael Bonavota, a 22-year-old senior who took Ms. Adler's class. "It's a growth field with good job opportunities. As long as there are criminals, there will be prisons and jobs." Ms. Hale and other specialists in criminal justice are quick to admit that their field has also benefited from movies, television and widely covered trials like that of O.J. Simpson. "The largest single impact on criminal-justice enrollment in the past 10 years was "Silence of the Lambs,"' said Timothy Flanagan, dean of the College of Criminal Justice at Sam Houston State University in Texas. Rebecca Thaxton, a student who was also in Ms. Adler's criminal-justice class at Rutgers, is an administrator for an investment bank by day but wants to become a profiler for the FBI. Her inspiration comes from watching the NBC show "Profiler," which is about a beautiful, blond FBI agent who solves gruesome murders through psychological analysis of demented killers' minds. "When I'm teaching," Ms. Hale recounted, "I ask students why they take the class and what they want to be. It used to be they wanted to be police officers or state troopers. Now they all want to be FBI profilers. They see it on TV; it's very glamorized." Criminal justice as a subject dates back to the 1890s when the University of Chicago's famous School of Sociology began studying deviance in society. But it remained the poor stepchild of criminology until the late 1960s when President Lyndon B. Johnson's Commission on Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice recommended that police officers be college graduates to cope with the explosion of violent crime in the nation. In 1968, as a result of the commission's findings, Congress created the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, which spent $7 billion, much of it going to new departments of criminal justice at colleges and universities to improve education for the police, Ms. Adler recalled. As part of this surge, Ms. Adler helped create a School of Criminal Justice at Rutgers in 1974. While the border between criminology and criminal justice is sometimes hard to define, Lawrence Sherman, chairman of the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Maryland, describes criminal justice as "applied criminology, that portion of criminology that specializes in studying the police, the courts and prisons." The broader, older field of criminology is more focused on the study of what causes crime and criminal behavior, issues like poverty, the family, neighborhoods, gangs and, increasingly, biology. Criminal justice is still looked down on by some academicians and is still not taught at some prestigious schools like those in the Ivy League. But Sherman says it has "really become a liberal art," explaining that "it combines sociology, psychology, history, economics, politics and statistics" and uses the scientific method. With all the interest in crime, criminal-justice studies have taken on a gold-rush feel. At Franklin Pierce College in New Hampshire, the administration long lobbied the faculty to create a criminal-justice major because it was one of the most frequently requested majors at college job fairs and looked like a way to attract applicants. "The administration presented a message that we had to respond to the market demand and offer a criminal-justice major," wrote Forbes Farmer, a professor at Franklin Pierce, in a bulletin for the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences. "Like other small liberal arts colleges, the administration was promoting strategies to survive the enrollment and financial crunch of the 1990s." In 1996, the faculty finally and reluctantly approved, Farmer said, a decision he said was greeted ecstatically by school officials. At Rutgers, Kimberly Robinson, a sophomore from Newark, is thinking about majoring in criminal justice. A major reason, she said, is that she "grew up around crime." Her brother is in prison, her three uncles are each serving life sentences and her father has been incarcerated four times. "At a personal level, I felt I just didn't understand the criminal-justice system," Ms. Robinson said. But now, she added, "I'm so interested in criminal justice, it's the only class where I stay awake." - --- Checked-by: Richard Lake