Product Description

'This Course Companion in Criminal Justice by Ursula Smartt is to be applauded. It is an essential handbook for all students and practitioners who are studying the criminal justice system. The user-friendly framework provides students with practical support in how they can organise their approach to studying to maximise their knowledge and revision skills. I have no hesitation in commending this Companion as a valuable complementary text'

- Professor Allyson MacVean, John Grieve Centre for Policing & Community Safety, Buckinghamshire Chilterns University College

"Congratulations to Ursula Smartt and SAGE on a most welcome 'skills' text for Criminal Justice students... The book is concise, clear, well-organised and accessible - highly recommended." Stephen Parrott, Birkbeck, University of London

Criminal Justice by Ursula Smartt is part of an exciting new series from SAGE. It is designed to help students to make the most of their undergraduate or foundation course in Criminal Justice or Criminology. Developed as accessible reference tools, SAGE Course Companions offer an introduction to the subject and encourage students to extend their understanding of key concepts, issues and debates.

This book provides a basic grounding in criminal justice, alongside pointers to further reading and advice on study skills. It can be used as an overview of the subject and referred to throughout the degree for tips and revision guidance.

Smartt's Criminal Justice is designed to complement, rather than replace, existing textbooks for the course, and will provide:

- Helpful summaries of the course curriculum to aid exam revision and essay planning

- Key summaries of the approach taken by the main textbooks on the course

- Guidance on the essential study skills required to pass the course

- Help with developing critical thinking

- Route-maps to aid the development of wider learning above and beyond the textbook

- Pointers to success in course exams and written assessment exercises

- A tutor's-eye view of what course examiners are looking for

- An insider's view of what key course concepts are really all about

SAGE Course Companions are much more than revision guides for undergraduate. They are an essential tool to success in undergraduate courses, enriching the learning experience and developing students' understanding.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #205707 in Books
• Published on: 2006-03-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 232 pages

Review
This Course Companion in Criminal Justice by Ursula Smartt is to be applauded. It is an essential handbook for all students and practitioners who are studying the criminal justice system. The user-friendly framework provides students with practical support in how they can organise their approach to studying to maximise their knowledge and revision skills. I have no hesitation in commending this Companion as a valuable complementary text.

Professor Allyson MacVean, John Grieve Centre for Policing & Community Safety, Buckinghamshire Chilterns University College

"Congratulations to Ursula Smartt and SAGE on a most welcome 'skills' text for Criminal Justice students... The book is concise, clear, well-organised and accessible - highly recommended." Stephen Parrott, Birkbeck, University of London

From the Author
Book Description
This text provides a course companion for law, criminal justice and criminology students and lecturers who seek a user-friendly teaching and learning guide to the most up-to-date issues in English Criminal Justice and the Criminal Process. The book will be of wide interest to national and international students in that it introduces the English criminal justice system to the readership. The style of the book is easily accessible and ‘user-friendly’ with some key features. The book is a self- study guide and supplements set texts. Each chapter of the book suggests additional research and reading in the ‘Taking it Further’ sections for those students who wish to improve their performance and to achieve excellent grades. Course Companion: Criminal Justice helps students to structure and organise their thoughts, and enables the reader to get the most from his or her studies. This book provides students and teachers of Criminal Justice and Criminology with an easy to navigate and extremely user-friendly study and revision guide to the commonly taught Criminal Justice and Criminology curriculums. The Course Companion: Criminal Justice presents the student with ways of thinking and writing that examiners will be looking for when they start to grade and examine students’ work and assessed essays. This book should be used as a supplement to traditional set-texts and textbook, and supplements lectures and seminar notes.
Criminal Justice is useful at any level of study (including postgraduate studies), also covering professional examinations (such as police, prison or probation service interviews or promotion exams). Each substantial chapter of the book covers core topics of a typical Criminal Justice curriculum as well as common Running Themes. These are:
· Human Rights
· Inequality and crime
· Fear of Crime
· Victims of crime (Victimology)
· Race and crime
· Gender and crime
· Punishment
· Globalisation
· Criminalisation
· Crime and the Media
Additional study features include: Key Thinkers in Criminal Justice i.e. some of the most learned academics in the field or most influential theorists which enhance your critical essay writing. ‘Tips’ and ‘Common Pitfalls’- features which show the student how to handle information in exams and how to best revise for a specific exam or assessed essay. ‘Taking it Further’ assist those students who wish to advance their knowledge and study in the field. The Appendices provide a useful bibliography, Internet sources for updates, a glossary of criminal justice and legal terms and a chronology of crime events, which provides the reader with some topical information about major crime events and famous criminals.

About the Author
Ursula Smartt specialises in Media Law and Criminal Law, as well as all aspects of Criminology. Her book is based on her practical teaching at Thames Valley University, London, and features a very useful study skills section (e.g. how to make the best of lectures and how to chill out before exams). She has done more than a decade of prison research all over the world, specialising in prisoner labour and the industrial side of the prison. Her book Grendon Tales (2001, Waterside Press) is based on two years’ of her one-to-one interviews with some of Britain’s most dangerous criminals, Ursula’s book focuses on the prisoners’ life stories and why they elected to undergo psycho-therapy in this Oxfordshire high security jail. She has given papers and undertaken research in the USA, Canada, Australia and a large number of European countries. Ursula has studied prisons as far afield as the Turks and Caicos Islands, Tihar Jail in New Delhi and visited St. Quentin’s in San Francisco Bay, where she looked at music and art work by prisoners on death row. Ursula is a Visiting Professor at the Max Planck Institute in Comparative Criminal International Law in Freiburg, Germany. She is a Magistrate in the West London.

Customer Reviews

From the author
This study text provides a course companion for law, criminal justice and criminology students and lecturers who seek a user-friendly teaching and learning compendium in addition to standard textbooks in the field. The book serves as an ideal exam revision guide. Additionally, it has been used by magistrates and clerks in the field as a quick reference guide to court procedure.

The style of the book user-friendly with bullet points and key features. Each chapter suggests additional research and reading material. There is a helpful exam revision section which helps students structure and organise their thoughts with suggested exam answers.

Running Themes in the book are:
* Human Rights
* Inequality and crime
* Fear of Crime
* Victims of crime (Victimology)
* Race and crime
* Gender and crime
* Punishment
* Globalisation
* Criminalisation
* Crime and the Media

The Appendices provide a useful bibliography, Internet sources for updates, a glossary of criminal justice and legal terms and a chronology of crime events, which provides the reader with some topical information about major crime events and famous criminals.