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Criminal justice research: A point of departure in offender rehabilitation and restoration.

Grigsby, Robert S
June 4, 2015

Source: (2000) Iowa: Restorative Criminal Justice Institute of Iowa.

The author argues that criminal justice research, as a branch of social science, has succumbed to the myth of “value-freeâ€? science and research; thus it has failed to understand adequately the problems of crime, criminals, and criminal behavior. In response the author calls for a new approach to criminal justice research – a clinical social science approach in which research into human behavior is conducted with the attitude or aim of treating or effecting change in problematic behavior. On this basis, the author analyzes the politics of crime, the politics of hate, the structure of criminal justice research, the lack of rehabilitation in prisons, and causes of behavioral problems. The paper concludes with a detailed summary of the results of a longitudinal study of adult state prison inmates.

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