Diversifying the Study of Crime & Justice
Key Observations
- Academic institutions lack a diverse faculty pool, specifically Black faculty members within the field of criminal justice and criminology graduate programs.
- We found that sixty-eight percent of colleges and universities have one or no Black full-time, tenured/tenure-track faculty-members in their department.
- We must recognize and acknowledge how academic institutions maintain and reproduce systemic inequality.
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Recent killings of unarmed Black persons have led to unprecedented support for structural reforms in the criminal legal system and academia. These changes would involve a massive realignment of the criminal justice system. For their part, academic institutions have responded by issuing public statements and countless online discussions to talk through many of these issues. Despite their efforts, universities have failed to address the lack of diversity among their faculty. More directly, the lack of Black faculty within Criminology and Criminal Justice (CCJ) graduate programs is extremely problematic considering the current state of affairs between Black Americans and the criminal legal system. In a field of study where racial/ethnic, class, and gender discrimination is rampant — and the racial disproportionality in the use of excessive force by law enforcement, sentencing, and incarceration rates is beyond problematic — we no longer have the liberty of ‘waiting for change.’ Our call to action and immediate steps towards change must be swift.
Click HERE to read the full article in The Criminologist of The American Society of Criminology.
