Introduction to Criminal Justice : Practice and Process

Kenneth J. Peak is emeritus professor and former chair of the Department of Criminal Justice, University of Nevada, Reno, where he was named “Teacher of the Year” by the university’s Honor Society. Following four years as a municipal police officer in Kansas, he subsequently held positions as a nine-county criminal justice planner for southeast Kansas; director of a four-state technical assistance institute for the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (based at Washburn University in Topeka); director of university police at Pittsburg State University (Kansas); acting director of public safety, University of Nevada, Reno; and assistant professor of criminal justice at Wichita State University. He has authored or coauthored 37 additional textbooks (relating to general policing, community policing, criminal justice administration, police supervision and management, and women in law enforcement), two historical books (on Kansas temperance and bootlegging), and more than 60 journal articles and invited book chapters. He is past chair of the Police Section of the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences and past president of the Western Association of Criminal Justice. He received two gubernatorial appointments to statewide criminal justice committees while residing in Kansas and holds a doctorate from the University of Kansas.

Pamela Everett, J.D. is an attorney, Assistant Teaching Professor of Criminal Justice at the University of Nevada, Reno, and the author of Little Shoes: The Sensational Depression-Era Murders That Became My Family’s Secret (2017), a New-York Times Book Review Summer 2017 Must Read, about an historic wrongful convictions case. 

She earned her undergraduate degree in Criminal Justice at the University of Nevada, Reno and her Juris Doctorate from the University of San Diego, where she wrote for the University of San Diego Law Review.  She was a contributing features and opinion columnist on legal and justice system issues for the Omaha World-Herald and the Wayne Stater from 2009-2014.  She was also a Contributing Author and Assistant Editor for SAGE Publications’ Encyclopedia of Criminal Justice (2013).  

She has served as a volunteer attorney for the California Innocence Project for the last decade, and among other topics, she teaches a popular course at the University of Nevada, Reno on Wrongful Convictions.  Her other teaching focuses on the mentally ill in the criminal justice system, the courts, and criminal law.