Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology

Overview

For the majority of Criminal Justice and Criminology majors and minors, preparation revolves around entry into the workforce and occupations.  A smaller proportion of Criminal Justice and Criminology majors and minors aspire to graduate education or law school, which indicates that we need a curriculum that is of high quality  and efficient: focused on (a) basic conceptual and theoretical understandings, (b) methodological inquiry, (c) statistical/data analysis and (d) practical information.  Elective courses reflect mainstream, substantive areas that are relevant to the field, and are also typical of courses offered by many other CJC programs in the United States.  The courses are typical in that we model our offerings after the program structure recommended by the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences.

In 2006, the department faculty voted to pursue Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences (ACJS) certification. The department overhauled the old curriculum and implemented a new curriculum in 2007 aligned with the ACJS Certification Standards. The new curriculum added a research course (CJC 2020) and a victimology course (CJC 3130) to the required courses for the major. To assess student learning outcomes, the department adopted the Major Field Test (MFT) exam. All students taking the capstone course (Ethics CJC 4650) take the MFT.

Students have the opportunity to participate in internships from various criminal justice agencies throughout the Denver Metropolitan area including probation departments in various counties as well as municipalities.  Other agencies include Colorado Parole Department, public defender offices, police departments, sheriff offices, and other ancillary agencies in Colorado such as half-way houses, safe houses, rape awareness and assistance programs, district attorney offices.

ACJS Certification Standards

The department is actively seeking certification by ACJS. As such, the department adheres to the following ACJS standards:

  1. No more than 50% of required criminal justice courses at the baccalaureate level can come from an associate degree program. A baccalaureate major in criminal justice should require one-third of its semester hours in criminal justice and related cognates (ACJS Certification Standards B.10).
  2. No credit toward graduation is awarded for pre-collegiate level or remedial work designated to prepare the student for collegiate study (ACJS Certification Standards D.1)
  3. Only credit from institutions that are accredited by their regional higher education accrediting body is accepted for transfer into an undergraduate criminal justice program. No academic credit is awarded by the criminal justice program for life experience or for military, police academy, or other professional training (ACJS Certification Standards D.2).
  4. Two-year and four-year colleges and universities enter into articulation and joint admission agreements whenever possible to clarify curricular issues and academic expectations for both parties. These agreements reflect discussion of how best to advise and prepare students at two-year schools who are considering four-year degrees (ACJS Certification Standards D.3).
  5. No more than 10 percent of the criminal justice major credits are completed through knowledge-based examinations (e.g., CLEP). All credit earned through examination is clearly documented on the student’s official transcript by specific course designations and numbers, including the source of the credit. Awarding blanket credit for criminal justice courses in a “block” is not allowed (e.g., “12 hours criminal justice credit”) (ACJS Certification Standards D.5)
  6. The institution awards degrees only to those students who have earned at least 50 percent of the credit hours in the criminal justice program through instruction offered by that institution (ACJS Certification Standards D.6).