Treatment of Drug Offenders in the Criminal Justice System

I. Assignment Goals: • Increase your familiarity with resources in the Criss Library at UNO. • Identify and distinguish between empirical (research) articles and popular news articles on correctional topics to understand the contrasting types of information available on a topic. • Perform basic searches in general criminal justice databases to locate research articles on a corrections topic. • Identify and synthesize important ideas from articles. Give proper credit when using information from other sources in your paper. II. The Research Choose a criminal justice topic related to corrections that interests you. You are required to seek out one empirical journal article (see explanation below) and one popular news article related to this topic. The two types of sources must be on the SAME TOPIC that you have selected. What is an empirical journal article? • Empirical journal articles test a hypothesis or research question about a topic such as “What is the impact of attending drug treatment while incarcerated on offender recidivism?” An empirical article will contain numerous headings including Method, Participants, Procedure, and Results. The article also may contain tables and statistics that present the study’s results. Experts, often academics in a university environment, write these empirical articles on topics they study based on facts that they discover through research. Other experts in the criminal justice field review these articles before they are published (this process is called peer reviewing), which lends credibility to the information contained in the article. Articles are typically 12-16 pages but sometimes longer. • A journal may also contain non-empirical articles that are essays on a topic that present an expert’s opinion on a topic or review previous literature on a topic but are not tests of a hypothesis. These types of journal articles are called review articles. They don’t have the headings mentioned above within the article. These are not appropriate for the assignment. What is a popular article? • Popular articles can be found in magazines such as the Atlantic, Time, newspapers, books, and general information on the Internet. These types of articles are written by journalists and typically are not peer reviewed before they are published. Frequently these articles are less fact based and more opinion based. While they may contain some statistics such as percentages, the opinions are not the result of a study. How do I locate an empirical journal article? • You will need to utilize the UNO Criss Library to locate an empirical article. They are not typically available online with the exception of scholar.google.com (but then it helps to know an author name such as “Gaylene Armstrong”). CRCJ 2210 Assignment 1 • From the UNO Criss Library home page, select the “Databases tab,” then “Database A to Z”. Although there are many databases that would work, I suggest using “Criminal Justice Abstracts with Full-Text” for this assignment. Under the “Limit your results” box, select full text and scholarly (peer reviewed) journals. You may also want to select a relatively recent time period (e.g., last 5 years). Finally, enter a search term related to your interest in corrections (e.g., solitary confinement). • Once you find an article that seems interesting to you for this assignment, you can move on to the next step. How do I locate a popular article? • Now that you have located your empirical article, you need to find a popular article on the same topic. Remember, this is not a research article so you will need to utilize a different source. You may find a news story, magazine article etc. by simply using a search engine such as google. Alternatively, you might use a Criss Library search engine such as “Academic Search Complete” using the steps noted earlier. • As you conduct your search for a popular article, you will have to critically assess whether the article you find is appropriate – it is not appropriate to use a second research article. If you have any questions about the sources that you plan to use for the next step, please email me (a scanned copy or a link to the source will be helpful). III. Synthesis and Writing After carefully reading the two articles, write a summary of the topic based on your understanding of the two articles. The point of the written portion of this assignment is to reiterate the important ideas on the topic. Your summary should result in a 1 ½ to 2-page paper (single spaced, full pages from top to bottom of the page, 12 point Times New Roman font). Make certain that your name and student number are included as a header in the paper. Some of the questions that you could answer in your paper are: • Why is this an important topic in criminal justice? • What are popular opinions about this topic according to your popular article? • What are some of the facts that researchers have discovered about this topic according to your empirical article? • What is specifically tested in the empirical article? • What population did the authors study? What were the findings? • What types of questions are important to ask about this topic in the future? Attached a scanned of the first page of each article that you use for this assignment. IV. Citation and Attribution Use citations for the authors when you are writing about facts that they present in their articles. If you are using ideas from the author including their words or similar words be sure to quote them directly using quotations and page number references. Reference the articles in American Psychological Association (APA) style at the end of the paper on an additional page. You should use APA format for the paper including a title page.