Criminal Justice: A Brief Introduction

Frank Schmalleger, Ph.D., is director of the Justice Research Association, a private consulting firm and think tank focusing on issues of crime and justice.  The Justice Research Association (JRA) serves the needs of the nation's civil and criminal justice planners and administrators through workshops, conferences, and grant-writing and program evaluation support.  JRA also sponsors the Criminal Justice Distance Learing Consortium (CJDLC), which resides on the Web at http://www.cjdlc.org.

    Dr. Schmalleger holds degrees from the University of Norte Dame and The Ohio State University, having entered both a master's (1970) and a doctorate in Sociology (1974) with a special emphasis in criminology from The Ohio State University.  From 1976 to 1994 he taught criminal justice courses at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke.  For the last 16 of those years, he chaired the university's Department of Sociology, Social Work, and Criminal Justice.  In 2001 he was named Professor Emeritus at the university.

    As an adjunct professor with Webster University in St. Louis, Missouri, Schmalleger helped develop the university's graduate program in security administration and loss prevention.  He taught courses in that curriculum for more than a decade.  Schmalleger has also taught in the online graduate program of the New School for Social Research, helping to build the world's first electronic classrooms in support of distance learning through computer telecommunications.  An avid Web surfer, Schmalleger is the creator of a number of award-winning World Wide Web sites, including one that supports this textbook (http://www.cjbrief.com).

    Schmalleger is also founding editor of the journal Criminal Justice Studies.  He has served as editor for the Prentice Hall series Criminal Justice in the Twenty-First Century.

    Schmalleger's philosophy of both teaching and writing can be summed up in these words: "In order to communicate knowledge, we must first catch, then hold, a person's interest - be it student, colleague, or policymaker.  Our writing, our speaking, and our teaching must be relevant to the problems facing people today, and they must in some way help solve those problems."