Analysis of Two Criminal Justice Articles

The two articles chosen for this analysis represent two new ways of looking at a subject that seems resistant to change -- the criminal justice system. Flanagan (2000), argues in the Journal of Criminal Justice Education, in an article entitled "Liberal education and the criminal justice major," that new perspectives are needed on the part of both faculty and students, in order to achieve an academic environment where the major electives and extra-classroom experiences in the current Criminal Justice curricula become more skewed toward the goal of "integrated learning," so that it becomes a major part, in fact, the keystone, of a revised architecture of liberal education.

Nunn (1995), in a challenging article called "The trial as text: Allegory, myth and symbol in the adversarial criminal process - a critique of the role of the public defender and a proposal for reform," in the American Criminal Law Review, also argues for change, a change in the way we view the myth of the criminal justice system. Nunn provides ample evidence for his nimble reasoning, and concludes by calling for the creation of a new Cabinet post, the position of Federal Defender General should be created to enhance the public image of public defenders.

The intrinsic connection between these two articles is that the changes Nunn calls for are evolutionary, and must be developed by the educational process, the exact same process that Flanagan

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o occur are "hard won" and thus more legitimate. The function of the myth, then, is to bestow peace of mind by encouraging the belief that justice is being done in the criminal justice system" (Nunn, 1995, 746). If, as Nunn argues, the Criminal Justice System is a myth within a myth, and, since myth traditionally is a reflection of society, then shouldn't it be possible that people could be trained to see through the myth? That is a small part of what Flanagan hopes to accomplish with his call for making the study of Criminal Justice an integral part of any Liberal Arts education. He sees this as being entirely possible since colleges today acknowledge that since there is a renewed "emphasis on the importance of [colleges] producing liberally educated college graduates, [then there are] opportunities for criminal justice educators to make their field a keystone in the architecture of a liberal education...[by using] multidisciplinary perspectives that characterize the field of criminal justice, as well as its core intellectual concerns, make criminal justice well suited to serve as the infrastructure for a high-quality undergraduate liberal education program. He emphasizes that the field of Criminal Justice as a college em
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Some common words found in the essay are:
Criminal Justice, Justice System, Public Defender, Reconstruction Nunn, Mythic Courts, Liberal Arts, Boyer Levine, World Report, criminal justice, Federal Defender, Law Review, liberal education, justice system, criminal justice system, nunn 1995, public defender, flanagan 2000, liberally educated, major electives, architecture liberal, field criminal, field criminal justice, producing liberally educated, architecture liberal education, renewed emphasis importance,
Approximate Word count = 1730
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)

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