What Is Criminal Justice Research? Areas, Funding, and Career Paths

Criminal justice research is the systematic study of the institutions that respond to crime — police, courts and corrections — and of whether their policies, practices and programs work as intended. It is an applied, interdisciplinary field: its questions usually come from practice (Does this patrol strategy reduce violence? Does pretrial release change court appearance rates? What happens to people after release from prison?) and its answers are meant to inform agencies, legislators and communities. This guide explains what the field covers, how it differs from criminology, which data and funders researchers rely on, how evaluation research works, and what the ethics rules look like when the participants are incarcerated.

What criminal justice research covers

The criminal justice system is conventionally described as three connected components, and research tends to be organized around them:

• Policing — police organization, patrol and investigative tactics, use of force, police-community relations, procedural justice, and the adoption of technology such as body-worn cameras, crime analysis and forensic tools.
• Courts — charging and plea decisions, pretrial detention and release, sentencing, specialty and problem-solving courts, indigent defense, and the role of prosecutors, defenders and judges.
• Corrections — prisons, jails, probation, parole, reentry, and community supervision, including how conditions of confinement and supervision relate to later outcomes.

Cutting across all three are juvenile justice, victim services, and the use of forensic evidence. The last of these overlaps with forensic science, which has its own laboratory-based research community. Because the system is a sequence — arrest, charge, adjudication, sanction, supervision, release — many studies follow people or cases across component boundaries rather than staying inside one agency.

Criminal justice versus criminology

The two terms are often used interchangeably, and many university departments carry both names. The working distinction is one of emphasis. Criminology is the scientific study of crime itself — why it occurs, how it is distributed, and what theories best explain offending. Criminal justice is the study of the system that responds to crime — how agencies are organized, how decisions are made, and whether interventions achieve their goals. A criminologist might test a theory of why offending declines with age; a criminal justice researcher might evaluate whether a reentry program lowers rearrest. The fields share methods, journals, conferences and many scholars, and each borrows heavily from sociology, psychology, political science and economics.

A brief history of the field

Scholarly attention to policing and justice administration dates to the early twentieth century, but the modern research enterprise took shape in the 1960s. The President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice (1965–1967) produced a wide-ranging assessment of the American system, and the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968 created the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA) and a federal research arm that later became the National Institute of Justice (NIJ). Federal support for research and data collection grew from that point, and university programs in criminal justice expanded alongside it.

The professional societies followed a parallel path. The American Society of Criminology (ASC) traces its origins to a meeting held on December 30, 1941 at the home of August Vollmer, a retired Berkeley police chief and criminology professor, aimed at furthering college police training. The Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences (ACJS) began in 1963 as the International Association of Police Professors, formed at a gathering in Pullman, Washington, and later took its current name.

Field experiments became a defining feature of the discipline. Well-known examples include the Kansas City Preventive Patrol Experiment of the early 1970s and the Minneapolis Domestic Violence Experiment of the early 1980s. These studies showed that routine police practices could be tested with experimental designs, and they helped establish the evidence-based policy orientation that now characterizes much of the field.

Research methods

• Evaluation research — the core applied method (see below).
• Randomized and quasi-experimental designs — randomized controlled trials of tactics and programs where assignment can be randomized, and difference-in-differences, regression discontinuity, matched-comparison and interrupted time-series designs where it cannot.
• Administrative-data analysis — agency records on arrests, bookings, court dockets, sentences and supervision outcomes, often linked across agencies.
• Surveys — victimization surveys, surveys of officers and correctional staff, community surveys on trust and legitimacy, and surveys of incarcerated people.
• Qualitative methods — interviews, observation and ethnography of police work, court processes and prison life, useful for understanding how policies are implemented in practice.
• Spatial analysis — crime mapping and hot-spot analysis, which underpins place-based policing research.
• Systematic review and meta-analysis — synthesis of evaluation findings to answer “what works” questions; see the entry on systematic review. The Campbell Collaboration maintains a Crime and Justice coordinating group for this purpose.

Evaluation research

Evaluation research asks whether a program, policy or practice achieved its intended effect, and often also whether it was implemented as designed and at what cost. Typical components are a process (implementation) evaluation, which documents what was actually delivered; an outcome or impact evaluation, which estimates the causal effect on outcomes such as reoffending, victimization or court appearance; and sometimes a cost-benefit analysis. The central design challenge is the counterfactual: what would have happened without the program. Randomization is the strongest answer, but agencies frequently cannot randomize for legal, ethical or practical reasons, so credible quasi-experimental comparison groups are common. Evaluators also work under real constraints, including agency data quality, staff turnover, and the need for data-sharing arrangements such as a data use agreement.

Data sources

Two federal agencies dominate the data landscape. The Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), established by the Justice System Improvement Act of 1979, is the statistical agency of the U.S. Department of Justice. Its collections include the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), which captures victimizations whether or not they were reported to police (the survey has been fielded since the early 1970s and was substantially redesigned in the early 1990s); National Prisoner Statistics; the Census of Jails; and surveys of people incarcerated in state and federal facilities. The FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program and its National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) provide crimes known to police. Many of these datasets are archived for secondary analysis through the National Archive of Criminal Justice Data at ICPSR; check each dataset’s access tier, since some files are restricted and require an application and a data use agreement. Researchers should also remember that each source measures something different, and that no single series is a complete count of crime.

Funding

The National Institute of Justice (NIJ) describes itself as the research, evaluation and technology agency of the U.S. Department of Justice, and funds work in areas that include crime prevention and control, forensic and investigative services, justice system operations, technology, victimization, and youth safety and justice. NIJ sits within the Office of Justice Programs (OJP), which also houses BJS, the Bureau of Justice Assistance and the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP). The National Science Foundation funds more theory-driven work through its social and behavioral science programs, and private funders such as Arnold Ventures support evidence-based policy research; see the guide to Arnold Ventures’ evidence-based policy grants. Federal solicitations, priorities and award mechanisms change from year to year, so applicants should confirm current opportunities directly on the funder’s site rather than relying on past program descriptions.

Many criminal justice grants are made to universities or to the agencies themselves, with the researcher as a subrecipient or partner. That makes the pre-award and post-award work of a sponsored programs office central to practice: negotiating subawards with police departments or correctional agencies, setting up data-sharing terms, and handling the human-subjects review described next.

Research ethics with prisoners and justice-involved people

People in the justice system are a recognized vulnerable population in research, and the ethical framework is anchored in the principles of the Belmont Report and the Common Rule (45 CFR 46). Incarceration limits freedom and can make voluntary consent harder to guarantee: participants may fear that declining will affect parole, housing or treatment, or may see research payments as disproportionately attractive.

For this reason, Subpart C of 45 CFR 46 (sections 46.301 to 46.306) adds protections for prisoners, defined in §46.303 as individuals involuntarily confined or detained in a penal institution, including pretrial detainees and people confined under court order in alternatives to incarceration. Subpart C was added to the regulations in the late 1970s. Under §46.304, an IRB reviewing such research must have a majority of members with no association with the prison involved and at least one member who is a prisoner or a prisoner representative; §46.305 sets additional findings the IRB must make; and §46.306 limits the research to defined categories, which include studies of the causes, effects and processes of incarceration and criminal behavior, and studies of prisons as institutional structures, with further categories carrying additional federal consultation requirements. See the entry on 45 CFR 46 Subpart C for a question-by-question treatment. Subpart C turns on a participant’s confinement status, not on the study setting: research with people who have been released, including on parole, does not trigger it, and a study of correctional staff alone does not either.

Other issues recur across the field: confidentiality when participants may disclose uncharged offenses (a Certificate of Confidentiality may be relevant), data-sharing agreements with agencies, and the interaction of research with active legal proceedings. For the basics of review, see What Is an Institutional Review Board? and the IRB entry. Newer forensic methods raise their own questions; see forensic genetic genealogy: IRB and ethical considerations.

Societies and journals

• Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences (ACJS) — an international association founded in 1963, with an applied and educational emphasis; its annual meeting is a main venue for the field. It is the society behind Justice Quarterly (established 1982) and Journal of Criminal Justice Education.
• American Society of Criminology (ASC) — the larger society, tracing to 1941, which publishes Criminology and Criminology & Public Policy and holds an annual meeting.
• Other venues — Journal of Criminal Justice, Journal of Experimental Criminology, Crime & Delinquency, and discipline-specific outlets in law, sociology and public policy.

Training and career paths

Criminal justice is taught at the associate, bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral levels, often in departments of criminal justice, criminology, or sociology. A bachelor’s degree is a common route into agency roles and entry-level analysis; a master’s degree is typical for research analyst, policy and program-evaluation positions; and a doctorate is the usual credential for faculty positions and for leading independent research. Researchers work in universities, federal and state statistical and research agencies, state statistical analysis centers, nonprofit and think-tank research organizations, evaluation consultancies, and in analyst or research units inside police departments, courts and corrections agencies. There is no licensure requirement for conducting research, though some practitioner roles carry their own agency-specific certification.

Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between criminal justice and criminology?

Criminology studies crime — its causes, patterns and theories. Criminal justice studies the system that responds to crime — police, courts and corrections. They overlap heavily; see What Is Criminology? for the other side of the line.

What does a criminal justice researcher do?

Typical work includes evaluating programs and policies, analyzing agency and survey data, designing field experiments with agency partners, writing grant proposals, and translating findings for practitioners and policymakers.

What are the main sources of criminal justice data?

BJS collections such as the NCVS, National Prisoner Statistics and the Census of Jails; the FBI’s UCR and NIBRS; and agency administrative records. Many are archived at ICPSR’s National Archive of Criminal Justice Data.

Who funds criminal justice research?

Mainly the Department of Justice’s research and statistics agencies (NIJ, BJS, OJJDP), the National Science Foundation for more basic work, and private foundations. Check current solicitations, since priorities change.

Can researchers study people in prison?

Yes, within limits. Subpart C of 45 CFR 46 requires additional IRB protections and restricts the categories of research that may be approved when participants are prisoners.

Do you need a PhD to work in criminal justice research?

Not for many applied analyst roles, where a bachelor’s or master’s degree is common. A doctorate is generally expected for faculty positions and for directing independent research programs.

Related CASRAI guides

Neighboring disciplines and topics: What Is Criminology?, What Is Sociology?, What Is Forensic Science?, What Is Public Health?, What Is Statistics? and the branches of science series.