Internship Guide to Criminal Justice AND Criminology: Building Professionalism through Theory AND Practice

In Internship Guide to Criminal Justice and Criminology, Lopez, Abney, and Jaramillo have penned an essential text for those interested in obtaining praxis in criminal justice careers: merging years of ""theory"" into the development of an ongoing career of practice in the field. They focus on the critical skills needed for the fine art of moving from theory to practice (praxis) in a field at times overbur- dened by the first, and underrepresented by the latter. In this latest text, designed to guide both faculty and students in developing a meaningful and practical system for deciding how to go about moving from the theory of the classroom to the prac- tice of the critical skill sets in the criminal justice field, Lopez, Abney, and Jaramillo draw upon real-world experience in the justice system and in guiding graduates from university success to real- world success in their chosen justice fields. The most critical sections of their Internship Guide are the 10 highly useful and well-thought out ""Self-Reflection"" assignments, designed to guide carefully the internship participant (and in no small degree the internship coordinators at both the university and the professional end of the internship process) in connecting the multiple and often conflicting ""needs"" and ""solutions"" of the internship process into a coherent and manageable ""whole"" producing graduates well prepared for the chal- lenges that await them as practitioners. As a practitioner and a former educator, I have found that the missing link for most new grad- uates frequently is an inability to apply thoughtfully the often conflicting requirements of theory (taught reliably well in our colleges and universities) with the practice needed in the field, that is, a practical application of theory. In my experience as a chief executive of a criminal justice-related con- sulting organization, many university criminal justice programs fail in this one critical area: problem solving. Most real-life criminal justice problem-solving ventures require the self-same reflection out- lined in Internship Guide. Lopez, Abney, and Jaramillo offer the field a unique and exciting solution to the frequently con- fronted dual problems of graduates who lack the practical skills necessary in the field, and, perhaps worse, graduates who make career choices that eventually turn out to be the wrong choice (due to a lack of supervised introductions to the true ""life in the field""). Were more students introduced to the process of ""self-Reflection"" evidenced in Internship Guide, it would be a benefit to both the field and the thousands of new graduates produced annually by America's criminal justice and criminology programs.