Criminal Justice Update
The Department of Criminal Justice has witnessed a blur of activity this 2008 Spring semester! We've been heavily engaged in a number of major initiatives, including revising our programs to better serve our students, developing new community partnerships, recruiting new faculty and a department-wide collective effort to significantly enhance our research profile. Considerable success has already been realized in these areas and we anticipate additional related activity in the days ahead.
Our enrollments remain high and steady, once again evidencing the popularity of criminal justice on the college campus at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. Currently, the Department has a little more than 750 undergraduate majors and about 60 graduate students in the Master of Justice Policy program. The Department continues to augment the student experience through extracurricular activities offered by our two student organizations (Lambda Alpha Epsilon for all majors and Alpha Phi Sigma, the National Criminal Justice Honors Society, for those demonstrating academic excellence). These organizations offer wonderful opportunities to connect with other criminal justice majors and enrich the overall criminal justice experience at UTSA. This past March, senior criminal justice major Alison Routh and JPY graduate student Natalie Dominguez traveled to Cincinnati, Ohio to the annual Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences conference where they competed in the national criminal justice student scholarship competition. The Alpha Phi Sigma Guest Speaker series continued this year (with support from COPP Dean Jesse Zapata) featuring Dr. Mitchell B. Chamlin from the University of Cincinnati who visited the UTSA Downtown campus in April. Dr. Chamlin spoke on the controversial topic of abortion as a means of crime control to a crowd of slightly over 250 students and faculty in what again proved to be a very successful event.
In other Department news, Dr. Roger Enriquez is now coordinating the Masters of Justice Policy Program and has been hard at work in his new role as the Graduate Advisor of Record. The Department recently hosted a luncheon for our honors students that featured a guest presentation by Dr. Christopher Schreck from the Rochester Institute of Technology on school violence and we are hopeful that several of our graduating students will stay on to pursue graduate study in criminal justice here at UTSA.
Haven for Hope invited the Department to assume a research and evaluation component within the Haven for Hope campus. The Department will be provided with office space on the second executive floor of the Haven for Hope facility now under construction. This space will be used to: 1) engage grants acquisition germane to the homeless and Haven for Hope's rehabilitative and transformative mission, 2) provide evaluation services as needed by Haven for Hope to strengthen the grant proposals specific to Haven for Hope submitted by the over fifty public sector and non-profit service providers affiliated with the campus, and 3) supervise internships directed toward campus activities.
On the community partnership front, we've been hard at work solidifying new collaborations. The Department is heavily engaged in multiple initiatives with Haven for Hope, San Antonio's new transformative homeless campus. In partnership with faculty from the Justice Administration Department at the University of Louisville, the Criminal Justice Department has submitted a capital grant proposal to the Centers for Disease Control to reduce and disrupt cycles of violence among the homeless with specific focus on sexual victimization. Haven for Hope utilized UTSA criminal justice graduate students to assist in its annual homeless count in San Antonio, leading to request that the Department conduct a survey of the extent of homelessness in the Bexar County jail. The survey is under development and will be conducted soon. Conversation is on-going with County Commissioner Tommy Adkinson regarding funding and to connect the release of homeless from the jail to the larger community-wide jail reentry initiative. The Department has also been working with Haven for Hope in the context of its community restorative justice initiative under the direction of Dr. Michael Gilbert.
We are also in the process of partnering with the San Antonio River Authority to develop a water security plan in the event of a bioterrorist threat to the south central Texas water supply, making plans to host the Second National Restorative Justice Conference in 2009, and working with the San Antonio Area Foundation, United Way and Bexar County Council of Government to assist with standardizing justice related service costs across San Antonio area non-profit service providers to ensure that resources generate maximum social betterment throughout the community.
This update unfortunately includes the saddest of news. Earlier this semester, longtime faculty member John Byrd suffered a heart attack before passing away during a related surgery shortly after. John was a wonderful colleague and great faculty citizen, evident in part by the numerous letters and calls of sympathy from current and former students, colleagues and the larger criminal justice community. Additional information is on the Department homepage.
Next Fall should bring continued upward momentum for UTSA Criminal Justice as we anticipate the arrival of three new assistant professors - Marie Tillyer and Rob Tillyer from the University of Cincinnati and Rick Hartley from Texas A&M. Also joining the faculty as an adjunct instructor will be San Antonio Police Chief William McManus who will manage to offer an upper division course on contemporary issues in policing, thus greatly facilitating our objective of connecting academic criminal justice to the field. These additional faculty members will enable greater breadth and number of courses the Department will be able to offer in the upcoming semesters – an improvement that should translate into student benefit in terms of smoother progression through our programs. Remember to check out the Department's summer semesters course offerings, including a couple of online options. Have a good Summer and please contact the office if we may be of assistance.
Submitted by J. M. Miller, Ph.D., Professor and Chair,
Department of Criminal Justice.