The US Criminal Justice System: A Reference Handbook

Gr 9 Up–The authors attempt to provide a handbook that includes a brief history of criminal justice in the United States, explanations of related institutions, biographies of famous American criminologists, and diverse other related tidbits. The approach to this broad topic is scattershot in both the specific subjects it addresses—prisons, the rights of those arrested and of victims, court structure and personnel—and in its narrative style. The latter ranges from dry and academic with unnecessary redundancies to both unsourced and sourced-but-dated data to a trio of individually authored essays perhaps intended to bring perspectival variety to the volume. Students are better off using evaluated online sources focused on the specifics they want to research, whether police training, crime statistics, documents relevant to the practice and theory of criminal justice concerns, or the societal dynamics that inform the delivery and miscarriage of handling criminal justice matters.