How to Write a Criminal Justice Research Paper

How to Write a Good Criminal Justice Research Paper?

Criminal justice research is a vast academic field that informs policies, decisions, and practices in this field. Thus, students learning in Criminal Justice courses need to learn research skills and critical thinking to embrace the current state of criminal justice policies, evaluate their efficiency, identify gaps, and propose reforms and improvements in this vital area of law enforcement and justice operations.

This way, academic writing becomes part and parcel of any Criminal Justice student, with topics and assignment types getting more complex as the course progresses. It’s not surprising that students come across challenging tasks on research paper writing that they often find confusing and insurmountable. However, these complications shouldn’t cause you to fall into despair, as with proper guidance, you can improve your writing skills and get to a higher level of professionalism.

Here is a detailed guide with comprehensive criminal justice research paper guidelines for students of all proficiency levels. Read on to ace your next project on criminal justice and hone your writing and structuring skills for easier home task completion.

What Is a Criminal Justice Research Paper?

To understand how you can ace a criminal justice paper, you should first capture the meaning of this academic discipline. Criminal justice is an area of academics and practice that covers everything related to crime and response to crime. Students may dwell on police, criminal courts, juvenile justice, and corrections in their studies, as well as link their topics to related spheres of law, sociology, psychology, and forensic science.

Looking at this scope of criminal justice coverage, you may understand that a criminal justice research paper is an advanced-level academic assignment that urges you to investigate a chosen topic or object in depth by applying a precisely formulated scientific method. You are tasked with writing an extensive evaluation of your assigned topic using a variety of scholarly sources of different types. As a result of your investigation, you’re expected to offer an original contribution to your field of research.

How to Start a Criminal Justice Research Paper?

Starting to work on a research paper is always a hard task that students find challenging. It’s natural to feel lost and confused at the very start of a large research process, as you may have no guidelines or specific direction to follow at this moment. Here is a set of initial steps that can give structure to your starting efforts and narrow down your focus on manageable activities.

#1 Choose a Relevant Topic

Criminal justice is an academic area of high importance and relevance to modern society, both at the national and international levels. Thus, there are always many pressing issues and unresolved problems with crime, recidivism, drug abuse, human trafficking, illegal migration, and the like most countries come across. You may find a topic relevant to your state or country by visiting the national criminal justice organizations and checking what’s trending in research at present. Such websites include the RAND Corporation, Criminal Justice Research Network, etc. – your list of authoritative institutions may vary depending on your nationality, place of studies, and the assignment’s prompt.

#2 Read on the Topic

Now that you’ve located a subject of your potential interest, it’s time to research it more widely to find out what scholars, journalists, and opinion leaders are saying about it. Your initial task is to determine whether there’s enough research around the chosen subject that could be used to back up your arguments and claims. Otherwise, your research paper will lack credible evidence for substantiating your ideas, and it risks sounding ungrounded.

#3 Formulate an Opinion

After you have read several authoritative sources and have formed a more or less informed opinion on the subject, it’s time to determine a narrower scope of your study. What aspect of the topic has raised your interest? Which angle of the problem do experts consider controversial or under-researched? At this stage, you should be more precise about your topic – for example, your broader subject may be the problem of recidivism reduction.

As you read academic literature on this subject, you may learn that one of the most important limitations former inmates have upon release is the inability to get employed because of a background check that indicates their criminal background. This way, a measure that was initially meant for the employer’s protection, is currently associated with greater recidivism, as people unable to find a job have no options other than return to crime. So, you can approach this dilemma by studying the area and proposing alternative measures for background checks or certain stratification of recidivism risks among former inmates in their resumes.

#4 Outline Your Argument

Your extensive research on the subject is sure to yield several reliable, authoritative sources with interesting arguments you may want to use in your content to back up your suggestions and observations. So, it’s time to distribute those sources across body paragraphs to shape the backbone of your argument in the research paper. This can be best done with the help of an outline – a tentative structure that will contain most of your paper’s components and ideas in a sketch format. It is brief yet comprehensive, so it can guide you at every step of the writing process.

#5 Compose the Body

The next step is to write the body paragraphs, as they will eventually determine the content of your introduction and conclusion. We recommend starting here, as you may tweak some points as you go, and there will be double work on revising the introduction after that. To avoid that redundancy, you may write the main content first and then compose an introductory section on what you’ve already got.

#6 Finalize the Paper

The final stage of writing is writing the conclusion. With all components in their places, you will now be able to reformulate the thesis statement and underline the original contribution and value of your study.

#7 Complete Editing and Proofreading

Your criminal justice research paper is far from complete when you’re putting the last full stop in the content. Now, it’s time for editing and proofreading. Don’t skip this step because it can save you from minor errors, typos, and flaws that will inevitably affect your grade. Take some time to relax after the exhaustive writing labor and return to your content in an hour or a day (depending on how much time remains until the deadline) to go through the text once more. You’re sure to spot some issues that skipped your attention at the moment of writing.

How to Structure a Criminal Justice Research Paper?

Structuring is an essential aspect that every student should master at the very start of writing. A good structure makes a paper readable and easy to grasp, while non-structured works are fragmented, chunky, and jump from one idea to another one. These issues can confuse the reader and make your professor completely lose track of your flow of ideas.

Here are a few suggestions for effective structuring of any academic writing assignment, including the criminal justice research paper:

• Introduce your topic broadly in the introduction so that people new to the subject can embrace it without complexities.
• Bring in some reliable sources written by authoritative authors in the criminal justice field to prove that your subject is really significant.
• Formulate a clear thesis statement at the end of the introduction to show what your paper is about.
• Follow a consistent paragraph structure that introduces one topic sentence at the beginning, offers supportive evidence, and ends with your own interpretation of materials and data.
• Offer more than a simple summary at the end of the research project; evaluate the study’s significance and draw links between theory and practice to show how it contributes to social change and improvements.

A separate word should be said about the format in the discussion of structuring. As a rule, criminal justice papers are composed in the APA style, which is more commonplace for social sciences, psychology, and other academic disciplines. How to write a criminal justice research paper in APA format? Here are several major guidelines to follow:

• Create a separate title page with the contents compliant with APA instructions.
• Make the whole text double-spaced.
• Add an abstract of 120-150 words after the title page.
• Use author-date citations in the text to back up your points.
• Left-align the text and leave 1-inch margins on all sides.

The rest of the APA nuances may be found in the latest edition of the APA Citation Manual your institution is sure to provide for students. Study it inside out to learn all the referencing intricacies and ensure flawless referencing and formatting throughout the paper.

How to End a Criminal Justice Research Paper?

The ending of your criminal justice research paper may have a long-lasting impact on the readers if you go far beyond a mere summary of the main points covered in the body of your project. It makes sense to produce a more critical and nuanced evaluation of what your research says about the subject, what new scientific and policy approaches it offers to the existing social problem, and how it fills the current academic gap.

Criminal Justice Research Paper Outline

Obviously, your outline will be different for every criminal justice topic you’re covering. Yet, there are some universal rules and guidelines that apply to all papers. You can apply this generic outline for your future project:

INTRODUCTION

• Broad introduction of the criminal justice subject you’ve chosen.
• Supporting evidence that proves the problem’s significance and gives important facts and figures to narrow down the research scope.
• Thesis statement that expresses the research paper’s main idea.

BODY

• Body paragraphs covering the subject point by point.
• Supporting evidence for every point is organized according to the following formula: topic sentence + supporting evidence + the writer’s interpretation and transition to the next point.

CONCLUSION

• Restated thesis.
• Significance of the study for the criminal justice area.
• Implications for practice and social benefits of findings.

Criminal Justice Research Paper Introduction

Now, let’s take a closer look at the contents that your introduction should include to fetch you the highest grade for your criminal justice research paper. Check the following points on your checklist as you write the introductory part:

• Introduction of the subject with proper clarifications of the main terminology. For instance, if you write about recidivism, make sure to explain what it is so that the readers new to the subject are not confused.
• A couple of significant facts and statistics about the problem you’re targeting, which can strengthen your point and prove that the issue is really relevant.
• A clear formulation of the research problem, research questions, objectives, and a final thesis statement.

Criminal Justice Research Paper Body

The body of your criminal research paper may have different sections depending on the professor’s prompt. Some papers should include a literature review section where you discuss the findings of previous empirical and theoretical studies on your subject, while others have that data in the introductory part. Your professor may also instruct you to formulate a concise methodology section where you explain how you collected data, what sources you consulted, whether you used human participants, and how you approached data analysis. The body of the paper always includes your actual results, whether theoretical or empirical, and their proper discussion in the light of previously published studies. You should show whether your findings support previous scholars’ works or contradict their opinions.

Criminal Justice Research Paper Conclusion

After you have covered all your main findings and have outlined your study’s original contributions, it’s important to offer a concise wrap-up of the content. Write a detailed, coherent conclusion that reiterates the most significant findings and answers the research questions formulated at the beginning of your inquiry. Draw broader conclusions and implications of your research for the criminal justice area you were investigating. If possible, point out how your suggestions and findings can improve a specific area of social life and make a positive social change. All these aspects strengthen your paper’s impression on the readers and show that you have coped with the research assignment.