Criminal Justice: A Brief Introduction

The gold standard for criminal justice texts

Criminal Justice: A Brief Introduction, Eleventh Edition offers a contemporary, authoritative look at crime in America with a focus on police, courts, and corrections. To make information resonate with students, Schmalleger asks readers to consider the  balance between freedom and security issues and evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of the American justice system as it adapts to cultural, political, and societal changes. An interactive website along with author tweets (@schmalleger) extends chapter material and provides up-to-the minute information on this ever-evolving field. Its unifying theme, unmatched timeliness, and coverage of trends and technology make this text the standard by which all other brief texts are judged.

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Frank Schmalleger, Ph.D., is Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke. He holds degrees from the University of Notre Dame and The Ohio State University, having earned both a master's (1970) and a doctorate in sociology (1974) from The Ohio State University with a special emphasis in criminology. From 1976 to 1994, he taught criminology and 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. The university named him Distinguished Professor in 1991.

Schmalleger has taught in the online graduate program of the New School for Social Research, helping build the world's first electronic classrooms in support of distance learning through computer telecommunications. 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.  An avid Web user and website builder, Schmalleger is also the creator of a number of award-winning websites, including some that support this textbook.

Frank Schmalleger is the author of numerous articles and more than 40 books, including the widely used Criminal Justice Today (Pearson, 2015), Criminology Today (Pearson, 2015), and Criminal Law Today (Pearson, 2014).

Schmalleger is also founding editor of the journal Criminal Justice Studies. He has served as editor for the Pearson series Criminal Justice in the Twenty-First Century and as imprint adviser for Greenwood Publishing Group's criminal justice reference series. 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."