Part I
The Association that I chose was The Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences (ACJS). The Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences (ACJS) was founded in 1963 to foster professionalism in the criminal justice system by advancing the quality of education and research programs in the field. The academy seeks to enrich education and research programs in institutions of higher learning, criminal justice agencies, and agencies in related fields by improving cooperation and communication, by serving as a clearinghouse for the collection and dissemination of information produced by the programs, and by promoting the highest ethical and personal standards in criminal justice research and education. The academy also presents numerous awards for outstanding contributions by individuals in the field. The members of the academy are individual teachers, administrators, researchers, students, and practitioners.
ACJS is comprised of members from a variety of diversified backgrounds including:
• Scholars who are international in scope and multidisciplinary in orientation,
• Professionals from all sectors of the criminal justice system, and
• Students seeking to explore the criminal justice field as future scholars or practitioners.
The ACJS has eleven different sections that individuals can join. A few of them that caught my eye were, the Corrections Section that encourages research and theory development relating to community and institutional corrections, the Juvenile Justice Section that promotes communication between academics and practitioners as well as research and theory in the area and the Victimology Section that focuses on crime victimization, interpersonal violence, child maltreatment, and trauma and victim services.
After doing my research, I find that this organization has a lot of benefits for individuals and is also very rewarding. There are annual meeting that are held, awards given, and training in all different areas. It is a very interesting program for someone in the Criminal Justice field. The members seem to really enjoy the program and it seems it would be very useful for individuals. Obviously, it is a very large association with 2800 members. Personally, I do not think I would join the Association only because it seems very time consuming, and very expensive. It also comes to me to be very confusing. I explored the whole website and even the facebook page for the association. As a student, if I were to join I would join the Correction section or the Victimology section. If I were in the field with a steady career in the Criminal justice field, I might feel differently about joining. I most likely wouldn’t join because I was already in my career path that I chose.
Part II
For my inquiry, I chose to interview a good friend of mine that is a Correctional officer that is currently located at the Buffalo Holding Center. I interviewed him via telephone. He chose this career randomly. He was un-employed and decided to take the civil service exam and passed and was called within 3 weeks for an interview. He has no criminal justice background, and never even thought of it before. Currently, there are only a couple