Criminal Justice in Todays Society: Literature Review
Introduction
In modern-day society, the criminal justice system has to address new scenarios and challenges, among them terrorism, growth in multicultural societies, increased migration, disruptions in demographics and age?composition, advancements in technology, and the effects of globalization. In todays community, criminal justice has to change with the change like crime. As society continues to change, it is obvious that criminal justice will have to change to remain effective and relevant (Ritter, 2006). The criminal justice system, and in particular laws, usually remains unchanged long after the customs that support it have fallen into disuse. Social change brings into existence new concepts of what is permissible or otherwise, but laws are often challenging to change and adapt to new concepts (The United Nations, 1979). This paper, therefore, is a literature review on the place of criminal justice in todays society, to situate the available literature on this topic on the general pool of information on the subject.
Source Findings analysis
The search for materials was done using the New Jersey State Library database resources. This database was used primarily because it is highly resourceful, with numerous academic and professional databases with professional and peer-reviewed materials. Various databases that were useful for this paper and accessible through the New Jersey State Library are the Academic Search Complete database, Ancestry Library Edition Database, and Arts & Humanities Database. The search on the New Jersey Database electronic portal was done using several keywords; The evolution of the criminal justice system, Criminal Justice in the 21st century, Modern criminal justice, and Adapting laws to modern-day social concepts. However, the Ancestry Library Edition Database was eliminated because it didnt produce any materials relevant to the topic. Also, two keywords, Modern criminal justice system and Adapting laws to modern-day social concepts, were eliminated for not yielding relevant materials. To ensure that the information sources are highly relevant, and inclusion-exclusion criterion was used.
The sources selected for inclusion in the project had to meet the requirements set in the inclusion criteria (Tompson & Belur, 2016). First, the sources selected had to be published work. Published work is available for peer review. Thus, it meets the high-quality requirement. Second, selected sources had to have been published within the last ten years. Third, they had to be in the English language and the research down in the USA, in the UK, or Australia. Once the sources to be included in the study were selected, they were then evaluated for appropriateness to the research objective. The assessment started with an evaluation of the title of the sources. Duplicate or irrelevant titles were eliminated. Next, the sources were evaluated at the abstract level. An abstract provided a snapshot of the paper, and thus, sources deemed irrelevant as per the abstract were dropped. Lastly, the evaluation was done at the full-text level. This involved evaluation of the entire paper to determine its relevancy to the research objective of the current capstone project. To ensure that the variety of sources selected were appropriate for the scope of the current capstone project, the evaluation project was done by two persons, the Principal Investigator...
…technology, use of
technology for supervision and prevention of
recidivism, e.g., use of electronic monitoring wearable devices, electronic forensics and DNA analysis technology to solve a
crime that was previously unsolvable of lead to wrong conviction (Epperson & Pettus-Davis, 2017; LeClerc & Savona, 2016). It is also expected that, as technology continues to advance, so with the use of technology in the entire criminal justice system continue to broaden in todays and tomorrows society.
Curiosity (Sources and Evidence)
It was interesting to learn how the criminal justice system has been shaped to factor in concepts that are important in the day to day lifestyle, i.e., the involvement of the people, the use of technology, and the need to ensure that the programs selected are appropriate for the intended purpose. The community based policing concept is important as it borrows on the democratic idea of governance, using technology to improve the effectiveness of criminal justice processes, and evidence?based concepts to ensure only working initiatives are implemented.
Conclusion
Criminal justice today has coincided with a changing society, changing crime and security landscape, and the development of new threats and challenges. As a result, criminal justice today has been forced to change to reflect emerging needs. This literature review indicated that todays criminal justice is faced with many issues among which the primary one, as in the context of this paper are; the need to ensure criminal justice is rehabilitative and not just punitive, that there is racial equity in the enforcement of the judgment, that practices used are evidence-based and ensure that technology is maximally and effectively…
