Generally, the questions that criminal justice professionals and criminologists ask can be divided into two broad areas of inquiry, one focused on legal systems, the other focused on justice organizations. Within these two broad areas are big-issue questions about crime, law enforcement, society, ethics, and social justice:
What is deviance, and what is crime?
What are the causes of crime?
What is the difference between the law on the books and the law in action?
What is effective policing?
What are the theories and laws related to discretionary decision making for practitioners in the field?
What policing, corrections, and court system policies and practices work to reduce crime and its social effects?
While most of your courses will take up these broad questions in one way or another, each course will have its own focusing questions.
A course on policing in the United States, for example, will focus on the role of police in protecting the public against crime and disorder, influences on the decisions police make, the moral and ethical issues they confront, what good policing looks like, and the trends, innovations, and reforms that affect the policing profession.
In a corrections course, the focus will be on postsentencing and postrelease issues, with questions about jail and prison management, probation and parole, and compliance with supervision and treatment follow-up requirements.