Description
The discipline of correction faces many challenges today. Overcrowding, financial constraints, and reentry programming, and rising rates of recidivism are a few of the more pressing issues facing corrections officials and our elected legislatures.
Perhaps one of the more significant issues is that recidivism rates have hovered near 60% in recent years; recidivism being defined as offenders who are rearrested within three years of release from prison.
At least part of the reason for this and other problems is the that corrections’ officials have historically been reluctant to rely more on evidence-based practice to inform policy.
The underlying theme for this course is that it is a best practice to rely on evidence-based programming and policy to rehabilitate offenders and prepare them for release back to society.
This may take the form of programs offered inside the prison, on probation, or while being monitored on parole. It may also involve specific policy that influences sentencing and parole decisions.
This assignment is important because it helps you to understand the process of identifying relevant problems, researching literature related to the topic, and proposing a research study that can address one of the significant issues in corrections.
It is essential that our corrections’ officials rely more on evidence-based practice; this assignment prepares students to work in those fields as professionals and leaders who can assess problems and propose solutions.
The second part of the research paper assignment requires students to develop a literature review that explores previous corrections’ research and how it is relevant to your proposed study.
INSTRUCTIONS
You will conduct a review of the literature for this assignment. Do a comprehensive search within the JFL and find studies that have been conducted on your chosen topic.
Discuss how the previous studies will inform and assist your proposed study. Identify the gaps in prior research and discuss how your study would fill those gaps by doing something that has not been done previously or how it will add to the body of knowledge in that area.
This section will enable you to lay out the research plan and tell how you would proceed with your study.
Make sure you have enough references to do an adequate job of covering the ways in which the topic has been studied in the past.
The literature review should be around 5–7 pages, excluding the title page and abstract, written in APA (current edition) Style, and cite at least 5 sources.
o Acceptable sources are peer reviewed journal articles, textbooks, and web sources
from .org or .gov domains. References used should be dated within the past five
years.
