Criminal Justice

Brings together more than 3,600 definitions from the many disciplines that compose the field of criminal justice—including US and English common law, penology, psychology, law enforcement, political science, and business administration. This work also features summaries of nearly 1,000 key US Supreme Court rulings affecting criminal justice.

Contains findings from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) of the offenses—known to law enforcement—released annually from its Uniform Crime Reporting Program. In this intricately detailed source, legal and law enforcement professionals, researchers, and those who are just curious will find violent and property crime statistics for the nation as well as for regions, states, counties, cities, towns, and even college and university campuses.

This text focuses on operational theory and practice for negotiators by following a crisis intervention model for crisis negotiations. Its intent is to provide some depth and breadth of understanding for instructors, students, and line negotiators seeking excellence in the professional role of hostage crisis negotiator.

For the past 40 years, the majority of law enforcement personnel could depend on regular salary increases, better health care, and pension benefits while reaping the advantages of belonging to an organization that was learning how to gain and use political power. However, these peaceful and untroubled days are over. Police unions, despite their best efforts at the bargaining table, now find themselves preparing their members for layoffs, pay and benefit cuts, and more restrictive working conditions. Leaders are trying to fight back against the well-financed, organized efforts to weaken the public sector unions, eliminate collective bargaining rights, end defined benefit pensions, and privatize the job. Police unions must change the way they do business if they want to survive. This book identifies how to mount an effective political campaign, the complexities of confrontations, and the reasons police union leaders fail.

This book provides an overview of current analyses and developments pertaining to the law enforcement and crime. Chapter 1 analyzes individual elements of the polygraph examination in pre-employment cases in law enforcement agencies. Chapter 2 studies the use of insects as evidence and as a forensic indicator in law enforcement technology. Chapter 3 explores a public health approach to preventing child fatalities. Chapter 4 discusses the prospects of the use of prison informers. Chapter 5 studies the homicide rates in the U.S. and their correlation with other publicly available data applying this nonstandard visualization technique; and a comparison of homicide rates in the U.S. to that of different Latin American countries is shown. The last chapter is an attempt to show that violence in American popular culture can be justified, and may even serve the story.

Police and Law Enforcement examines many aspects of policing in society, including their common duties, legal regulations on those duties, problematic policing practices, and alternatives to traditional policing. Topics in this volume include such hotly debated topics as accountability, arrest practices, bounty hunters, entrapment, Miranda warnings, police privatization, profiling, vigilantes, and zero-tolerance policing.