Criminal Justice System Term Papers Samples For Students

Discretion is the basic right to act in relation to one’s own judgment. This is an essential aspect of criminal justice. Within the criminal justice system, those who have any form of authority, including police officers, court officials, and probation officers, are given a level of discretion in order to utilize their ability to process those who have broken the law. Beginning with the police, who are given the discretion to make arrests, an individual is then given to the discretion of the court system, and the scrutiny of judge and public attorney. After this, a person might ...

United States and China

I. Legal System
The United States criminal legal system is based on the British Common Law system. Common law refers to those laws that are created and imposed by judges in the absence of specific a specific code or applicable statute defining the law (LaFave, 2000). Accordingly, during the early years of the nation when a judge was faced with a criminal activity that was not covered by a statute, he would use precedent, or refer to the decisions of similar cases, for guidance. Absent statute and precedent, the judge would simple use his best legal, professional and personal judgment to make ...

Midterm Question

Max Weber’s model of bureaucracy has had a profound impact on the literature of contemporary public administration, as well as the justice system. In essence, bureaucracy refers to the power held by offices and refers to the rule conducted through an office or desk such as the compilation and dispatch documents. Various fields such as sociology and public administration borrow largely from bureaucracy. According to Weber, bureaucracy is both generic and scientific system capable of working in both private and public sectors. Weber defines bureaucracy as the means of moving community action through rationally organized social action (Weber, 1946). ...

Significance of parole and probation in criminal justice in the United States

I will start by defining the key terms in this question-parole, probation, and criminal justice systems. The criminal justice system is defined as the set of organizations and methods established by the administrations to perform and fulfill special goal- imposing penalties on those who breach laws and at the same time controlling crime. It is important to note that the United States is not made up of a single criminal justice system, but it is made up of many similar personage systems. The famous question that continue to revolve in our minds on how the criminal justice system works in ...

Abstract

The submission introduces the topic it intends to cover by defining what a crime scene is and the importance of crime scenes in the criminal justice system. It then outlines the categories of crime scenes then gives the types of crime scenes under each category while briefly describing how each type of crime scene is and stating some of the aspects to appreciate under each type of crime scene. The submission then goes to discuss the law relating to admissibility of illegally collected materials and in doing that the locus classicus in the subject matter and other cases are subsequently ...

Probation and parole are alternative sentences to incarceration, which offer convicted offenders the opportunity to remain in the community, but operate under supervision (Hanser 12). Whereas probation takes place before and often instead of imprisonment, parole usually occurs as an early prison release. The convicted offender is required to comply with probation and parole conditions. The offenders are subjected to warrantless searches without any reasonable cause.
In the United States, over 2,000 agencies administer probation on offenders who commit felonies as well as misdemeanors. Adult probation as well as parole are established in executive branches of state government ...

(Course/Major)

Swanson (1) avers that the uses of drones have both positive and negative uses for the use of drones in both commercial as well as law enforcement applications. However, Swanson is stating that with the absence of any actions by authorities, on the state and the Federal levels, to enact any policies or legislation to regulate any of the flights conducted by these “unmanned aerial vehicles” in America’s skies as these operators see fit. Federal authorities allowed more than 30,000 drone flights; police departments, for their part, have used drones to a low altitude of 400 feet, ...

Introduction

Capital punishment is one of the longest raging debates regarding punishment of criminals in the criminal justice system. Capital punishment, commonly referred to as the death penalty, is a method of retribution against capital crimes by killing the perpetrator (Mandery, 2011). The death penalty has received severe criticism in recent years from civil rights groups, activists and pro-life campaigners. The main aim of this paper is to consider a variety of methods used to execute criminals, their history, their effectiveness and peripheral matters regarding this issue.
The death penalty is one of the oldest recognizable forms of punishment for capital ...

Introduction

In the discipline of forensics, the field of ballistics is the “study of motion, dynamics, angular movement, and projectile units (bullets, missiles, and bombs). In the context of a criminal investigation, there are a host of possible applications to aid in the facilitation of a criminal conduct. Bullets that are discharged at a crime scene will be inspected in an attempt to discover pieces of evidence and information. Among the pieces of information that police hope to recover from the bullet are the possible type of gun used in the crime, whether the gun was used in a previous crime, and other information that ...

There have been several theories that seek to explain several issues about criminal activities and offenders. These theories explain the reasons behind criminal activities and the drives that make people to commit these crimes. In the criminal justice system, these theories are important since the crime management personnel use them to understand the reasons behind criminal activities as well as means to control these criminal activities. Felson and Clarke are also important contributors to criminal theoretical perspectives. They are responsible for the Crime opportunity theory, which has a subsection referred to as routine activity theory. The crime opportunity theory seeks ...

There are a number of theories applied in sociology that help determine the social aspect of human beings in terms of their experiences. These theories include: conflict theory, feminist theory, sociological theory just to mention but a few. These theories define the interaction of social groups and helps evaluate their experiences in terms of race, gender, ethnicity and social class. These issues can be observed through various sociological perspectives such as functionalism, conflict theory and symbolic interactions (Leger, 2003). Therefore, the focus of the paper is assessing two ethnic communities in the United States in terms of race, gender and social ...

Introduction

Criminality is one of the most complicated concepts in the study of social sciences. Understanding criminal behavior is an uphill task considering that gurus in the field of criminology have yet to reach a consensus on whether or not criminality is a rational conduct. Currently, most criminologists argue that criminals are rational human beings and, considering that, the criminals are usually sober minded people, criminal conduct is a rational conduct since the people committing the offense are sane and know what they want. Apparently, the aims of most criminals have been connected to human wants, usually physical wants. What people have yet ...

Psychology

Psychology
In terms of content and outlooks, psychology is a very diverse discipline. Although psychology is a scientific discipline, it has philosophical roots. The fact that the American Psychological Association (APA) has 54 divisions is proof of the diverse nature of psychology. Each of these divisions addresses a different outlook of psychology (Plante, 2010). It is because of this unparalleled diversity that psychologists are able to expand in areas of assessment, diagnosis, and explanation. Due to its diverse nature, psychology encompasses various areas and subfields. Today, psychology can be applied and is valued in numerous fields. It has been successfully applied ...

Introduction

In the past, policing in the criminal justice system was highly different from the trend that has been there in the recent years. The police departments were concerned with upgrading the personnel through training, streamlining the organization and using highly modern equipment. However the police started to face higher pressures in the 1960’s due to the increased crime rates and civil rights demonstrations. Scholars began to call for a reassessment of the policing model in the country. It was perceived there is an imbalance in policing as the staff was overly concerned with the internal operations of the departments ...

Racial Profiling

Racial profiling is the process by which the authorities will create a profile of a likely suspect based on his or hers ethnic background and race. This idea is based on the belief, stereotype and, in some cases, statistics that certain minority groups are more likely to participate in unlawful behaviour (Laney, 2006, p1). The controversy which surrounds this is based in the discussion of whether anyone should be legally pursued on the basis of their ethnicity and race. The narrower end of the wedge here is a definition which sees police officers stopping people for questioning based on their race but ...