Ignorance Is Knowledge as Knowledge Is Power

In the words of the American essayist, poet, and leader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, “We are shut up in schools and college recitation rooms for ten or fifteen years, and come out at last with a bellyful of words and do not know a thing. The things taught in schools and colleges are not an education, but the means of education.” As I have conducted the research for this project, the words of this quote have become more apparent to me. This because of the ignorance that I have shown throughout the years of education that I have sat in classrooms wondering, “When and where am I ever going to use this knowledge?” Well, the answer to this question has become quite blatant, the answer being anytime and everywhere all throughout the rest of my life. The knowledge that I will gain through the courses taken and the subjects studied throughout the rest of my academic career will help in the preparation for the knowledge that I will gain throughout my chosen career being law enforcement.

One day a police officer walked into the restaurant where I once worked. I began talking to him about the things that he must do on a daily basis. This is when I realized what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. Since then I have shown a great ignorance in what kind of knowledge one must have and how this profession must organize such knowledge. Since I have shown such ignorance, I am grateful for the chance to review and research the organization of knowledge in criminal justice, as an academic and career discipline. Through the research that I have conducted on the Law Departments at Old Dominion University’s academic website, I have revealed to myself how knowledge in the academic department of my career field is organized. I consulted ALM Properties, Inc. to find information on how knowledge is organized in the profession. Sandy Young enlightened me on the rest of the information that I was either misinformed or uniformed on. These sources of information were great resources to help me better understand how knowledge is organized into different taxonomies in both my academic discipline and my chosen career field.

The academic discipline of criminal justice is separated into two fields, criminal law and criminology. Criminal law defines the specific behaviors that are prohibited by and punishable under the law. Criminology on the other hand is the scientific study of the non-legal aspects of crime and delinquency, including their causes, correction, and prevention. (Criminal justice)

The criminal law aspect of criminal justice can be divided into four subcategories. These four categories include corrections, criminal procedure, police science, and forensics. Corrections refer to one of the components of the criminal justice system that is used to punish criminal offenders. Criminal procedure is the rules governing the series of proceedings through which law is enforced. Police science is a term often used to describe the studies and research which deal with police work either directly or indirectly. This can include crime science which is the study of crime science in order to find ways to prevent, detect, and solve criminal activity in an ethical manner. (Crime Science) Forensic science, or forensics, is the application of many different sciences to answer questions that are asked during a legal trial. The different sciences vary from forensic archaeology to forensic toxicology. These sciences answer questions from when or where this crime has taken place to who the victim of a murder may be.

The second portion of the criminal justice academic discipline is criminology. Criminology is defined as the study of crime as an individually and social phenomenon. (Criminology) Research in the criminology includes incidence and forms of crime as well as its causes and consequences. (Criminology) Criminology is a multiple discipline field in the behavioral sciences. The knowledge that this field uses relies heavily on the research of sociologists, psychologists, as well as writings in law. Behavioral sciences are the sciences that study the way that different organisms interact in their natural environment. Sociologists provide massive amounts of information to the criminology field because they show how criminals interact in their everyday lives with the other organisms in their natural environment. Psychology provides vital information to the criminology field by studying and trying to determine how the mind of a criminal works. This provides useful especially in the classifications of people that have committed the ultimate crime of homicide. A perfect example how knowledge from the psychological discipline supplies information to the criminology field is the scale that Dr. Michael Stone created to categorize the “Most Evil.”