Terminology is CRITICAL in any profession. When one does not have a factually and technically correct command of those terms that are common to the field in which one makes a living, it is embarrassing and causes those with whom you interact to question your credibility.
We will start out easily though. Obviously the use of computers in CJ is about the advancement of technology in the field that studies crime, criminals, victims, and the laws that govern.
Consider what technological advancement (besides computers) have been MOST impactful (or influential) in the following components of Criminal Justice. These may not have a singular correct answer, but there are certainly answers that cannot easily be defended.
Now for these items below, you could make a fairly compelling case with logic and some facts. BUT in subsequent units, that standard will rise. More on that later.
EXAMPLE: As I suspect none of you are criminologists, let me address the last item her by way of example. The example below is about educating myself about the premise, and then gathering and synthesizing the information into a brief and concise explanation of what my choice was, why I chose it, and what factual support is available to justify the position I took about the importance of maps in the analysis of crime. This is an OK response, but a better one would give detail about what the specific findings were: truancy, prostitution, theft, drug use, illegal gambling, were all studied individually and contributed to a singular, overarching finding, that . . . well read below.
One contribution, that was not a computer, made by technology towards the understanding of human behavior was the original GIS—spatial relations and crime analysis done with pins and maps; the cartographic school of criminology.
Maps have been around perhaps since the beginning of the human ability to draw, as maps or geographical likeness have been found for over three thousand years (Campbell, 1993). They had a critical function for travel and especially navigation for exploration. They were used in a specific manner to better understand crime first in France around 1830, then spreading throughout urban centers of Europe (Phillips,1972).
The event under study would have a pin placed in the map, for each event. This allowed criminologists of the time to see that crime was not spread evenly or randomly throughout a city. The initial findings suggested that property crimes in particular, but also violent crime, tended to concentrate in areas of high population density. These findings didn’t really lead to any ”eureka” conclusions until the work of Shaw & McKay(1942) and many others (Thomas & Znaniecki, 1918; Anderson,1923; Park & Burgess, 1925; Lottler, 1938) from what became known as the “Chicago School”. These were scholars from the university of Chicago who collectively created a body of work that supported the idea that deviance and criminal activity in specific, was much less about the individuals and much more about the “place”. This was Social ecology or what is not referred to as environmental criminology.
The ability to see specific crimes in relationship to the location of the city, allowed these scientists to discover a paradigm shifting fact: places can be criminogenic. Prior to this the main focus was on biology of the individual (responding to previous scientific breakthroughs large as a result of Darwin’s publication) and for a brief time psychology (responding to interesting but not scientifically defensible work by Freud). The Biological, Psychological and Ecological explanations (collectively know as positivism) supplanted the previous paradigm that claimed the criminal behavior was about individual choice. While choice theories were not backed by science, only metaphysical logic, the new Positivist school of thought dominated explanations for the next century as significant developments occurred in science and scientific instrumentation. That original instrument that gave rise to the new view, was the map.
•Policing
•Corrections court administration
•Juvenile justice
•Crime analysis
•The understanding of human behavior that we call crime (Criminology)
