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." 
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Checked-by: Richard Lake