Education & Criminal Justice
I was at the American Association for Crimonology conference the latter part of last week. I cannot say most of the research there grabbed my attention, but the experience was very thought-provoking.
I see parallels as well as massive disconnects between Education and Criminology. Education and Crime both involve institutionalized protocols of behavior. Education, at least ostensibly, should expand opportunity, at least an ideal model of it; whereas action against criminals amounts to limiting their opportunity. I notice that even in this paragraph, I have to keep changing my terminology about criminology & crime, because the object of this field amounts not to committing crime, but….what? That is a critical question that I’m not sure all criminologists would answer in the same way, though to be fair, educators would not all have the same answers about the mission of education.
Another disconnect is the impact that the academic field can have over real-world practice in the field. In Education, a School of Education educates future teachers, thus having a fair amount of influence of the forming of minds of those headed into the classroom. It is also feasible that academic researchers can be involved in policy making (though with No Child Left Behind, one has to wonder). However the practitioner level of Criminology is what? A prison guard, police officer, parole officer? Do all of these jobs *require* completion of a criminal justice degree?
These questions are maybe not fair; after all, I only have been indoctrinated into criminal justice for 3 days. But while I was a poster session, and evaluating a research poster, suddenly the inherent bias in the research design hit me over the head like I was hit by a 2′x4′. The whole study was designed with the intent to gather information to guide defense attorneys in how to present evidence to avoid a death penalty sentencing. I do not disagree with the bias, but it made me stop and wonder if I looked at education research with an outsider’s eye, how much bias would I find seeping through. How much blatantly technologically deterministic (viewing expanding technology as an inevitability) research would I see? How often would the researcher’s views of the world be glaringly obvious to me as I looked at their research?
In fact, I do not see a huge problem with data, qualitative or quantitative, being used to answer a biased question. But I guess I expect if that is the case a developed and blatant argument for why it has been done this way.
When the poster’s research bias struck me, I ran off to test this on other presentations. Other presentations I looked at did not have such an activist nature to them that grabbed me in the same way.
Does activism belong in research? When one is an activist, do we have a responsibility to explain a deeper philosophical rationale for why we believe as we do? I feel like only qualitative researchers are asked to do this; but positivist researchers have as much, if not more responsibility to do this.
