Criminal Justice Theory

This second edition continues to lead the emergence of criminal justice science from the shadows of other disciplinary domains. The clear specification of the criminal justice intellectual domain coupled with examples of scientific criminal justice studies provide students with cogent illustrations of criminal justice science. Maguire and Duffee delivered a vehicle that provides my students a platform from which to more succinctly imagine a criminal justice science.

-Robert Langworthy, Criminal Justice, University of Central Florida

All too often we look at the criminal justice system by what it produces or how it functions without considering the question of "why." The second edition of Criminal Justice Theory helps address this question by providing a critical scholarly discussion of the need for and the importance of developing and understanding the theoretical lynchpins of the criminal justice system. Ed Maguire and David Duffee have pulled together an outstanding collection of articles that help students and scholars alike traverse the structures, practices and processes that help form the criminal justice system.

-Ed Latessa, Professor and Director, Criminal Justice, University of Cincinnati

Criminal Justice Theory marks the coming of age of an independent discipline called criminal justice. Criminal justice does not study crime and thus cannot be mistaken for criminology; it is not the vocational subject described in undergraduate textbooks. As the editors lay out in clear prose with discriminating insight, criminal justice is the study of official response to behaviors that government and various agents of social control deem criminal. In other words, criminologists explain crime and criminal behavior, but criminal justice scholars are committed to explain, theorize, and predict the behavior of criminal justice in all its dimensions and multiplicity. This fine text, thoroughly revised and greatly improved in the new edition, is an indispensable resource for anyone teaching a course in criminal justice in the 21st century.

-Salahuddin Ayub, Criminal Justice, Philosophy, and Political Science, Chicago State University