Richard A. Wright - Böcker

This new study, written by a distinguished group of small college faculty and consultants, provides a contemporary portrait of small colleges--the educational advantages they offer, the problems they face, and innovative solutions now being developed. The authors discuss the benefits of education in a small college setting, including a tightly knit community of learning, a larger proportion of faculty dedicated to teaching, more personal interaction between faculty and students, a greater degree of student participation in all areas, and more emphasis on the moral/ethical implications of education. The teaching-versus-research debate and its implications for the small college are considered from the perspectives of institutional visibility, enrollments, funding, and educational values. The problems faced by small college faculty, such as teaching in a small department and the strain of fulfilling multiple and often conflicting roles, are thoroughly explored. Chapters designed to help the college teacher on the job offer suggestions on computer planning in the small college, coping with teaching courses outside one's areas of expertise, fitting in research despite heavy teaching loads, and teaching in areas such as physical education, history, philosophy, and liberal arts in general. A case study of a cooperative department established by several colleges and a discussion of the problems of limited library collections present practical information on new approaches to enhancing an institution's effectiveness.

This comprehensive examination of the effectiveness of prisons is virtually alone in showing that prisons are moderately effective in achieving specific and general deterrence and collective and selective incapacitation. Wright provides evidence which defends prisons as important social institutions and argues that noninterventionist alternative measures are less likely to prevent crime than conventional imprisonment policies. He also offers sentencing recommendations that may maximize the effectiveness of prisons as agents of social control. This up-to-date assessment is required reading for students, teachers, policymakers, and practitioners in corrections, penology, and criminal justice.

Using citation analysis, this study examines the influence and prestige of scholars, journals, and university departments in the fields of criminology and criminal justice. In the tradition of Marvin E. Wolfgang's Evaluating Criminology, the authors apply this quantitative method to evaluate the impact of individuals and their research efforts on two fields and to identify interconnections among scholars and their publications. This examination of the most-cited scholars, works, and topics in major American and international journals from 1986 to 1990 and from 1991 to 1995 provides valuable and unbiased feedback for researchers and practitioners.The nine chapters of this book detail a wide range of findings in both criminology and criminal justice. After an introduction to the methodology, chapters two, three, and four divide recent scholarship into two periods, 1986 to 1990 and 1991 to 1995, in order to consider the most-cited scholars, works, and topics. Chapter five provides a longitudinal analysis of scholars in the discipline since 1945. Chapters six and seven provide a system of prestige-ratings for relevant journals as well as page coverage analysis of the most influential scholars. The continuing controversy over whether the two fields are converging or diverging is the subject of chapter eight, and the work concludes with a prescription for further research.