Blog 1: Welcome
Welcome to The Frustrated Criminologist!
In the world of academic criminology, countless journal articles and books have been published, data are collected, grant reports are made available, many websites share information. It’s a mess, though, isn’t it? If you are a grad student or a journalist, or just a person who really wants to know what social scientists think about a crime or justice issue, it is pretty difficult to sift through the mountain of information and pull out the good stuff.
Scarier is the fact that politicians are often in the same position. If we are lucky, and this year’s representative is a responsible and smart person with a good staff he or she might actually try to find the best scholarship to inform new legislation, rather than relying on the politics of it all. Can we not agree that our government, including law enforcement, courts, and prisons, among other agencies, has an obligation to seek out research before it acts?
This website is devoted to two things. First, it will be a showcase for good information. By good information, we mean information based on sound scholarship, data, or the ideas of great minds, valued because those minds integrated a body of knowledge and came to some conclusions. Most of what we will post here will come from individuals who have a Ph.D in criminology or criminal justice, or related fields or will bring to the table significant legal experience and knowledge. Sometimes, we will include the writings of journalists who have approached their topics as a social scientist would. Our guidepost is to include only the kind of information that a professor would consider using in class. The kind of information we would like to see in a graduate paper. The kind of material we might even cite in our own published work.
Second, this will be a venue where criminologists can vent their frustrations about the issues of the day. As in this blog post, we can speak our minds here, without citing dozens of sources, without parsing our words, and without submission to the diktata of anonymous peer reviewers. Grad students: you should not adopt the writing style you see in these blog posts! We speak our minds here, but we will steer you toward good sources, people, and organizations for information that you can rely on, and scholarly writing that you can emulate.
