High quality criminal justice education and the role of the community college

Summary We are entering a new era where the demands for quality will include higher expectations of faculty, students, and practitioners. Now is the time for action and decision. Criminal justice education has rapidly matured; rather than being complacent about the progress we’ve made, we should take the lead and become acknowledged as pacesetters for high educational standards. Recommendations for improving the quality of higher education must be considered with sincerity and diligence. The capability for excellence is present in the conscientious faculty residing in each and every criminal justice program. With proper nurturing and support, these faculty would flourish and this excellence come into full bloom. Furthermore, the task of achieving quality education in all fields will not and must not fall to one group for action. We are faced with the necessity of bringing all factions together—teacher, administrator, student, and practitioner—to develop and implement solutions to today’s education problems, not as a last resort, but in recognition of change as a constant reality. The time for change is always now.     

The growing importance of Ukraine as a transit country for heroin trafficking: U.S.-Ukraine research partnership

This research was funded by the U.S.-Ukraine Research Partnership project, which began in November of 1999 when an agreement was signed between the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) and the Ukrainian Academy of Law Sciences (UALS). This partnership program was an integral part of the Gore-Kuchma Binational Commission, established in September 1996 to solidify the close ties between Ukraine and the United States. The increasingly global character of crime has created a mutual incentive for cooperation between the United States and Ukraine. In June of 1999, requests for proposals in the United States and Ukraine were concurrently announced by both NIJ and UALS. The proposals were to address the following crime areas: organized crime, corruption, drug trafficking, human trafficking, and economic crimes. The proposals were competitively reviewed by an expert working-group made up of both U.S. and Ukrainian representatives. The result was five U.S.-Ukrainian research teams, composed of twenty-two Ukrainian and five U.S. members. The size of each individual U.S.-Ukrainian team ranged from ten to three researchers. These teams met for the first time in November 1999 at a “kick-off” conference in Kiev, Ukraine. The greatest accomplishment of the conference was that researchers began the process of overcoming communication barriers and divergent methodological approaches to formulate a joint plan for their research. For this research, Layne worked with two Ukrainian research partners to jointly develop this paper. Khruppa was responsible for collecting Ukrainian data for the report and Muzyka supplied legislative expertise and background. Layne traveled to Ukraine (Kyiv and Kharkiv) four times over the course of two years and her Ukrainian counterparts came to the United States once. It was a challenge to collaborate across distance and language barriers, but a warm, collegial relationship developed and was maintained despite these obstacles.     

State and local governments: New initiatives in low‐income housing preservation

Abstract

Preservation of the federally assisted low‐income housing stock is a critical issue in housing policy for the 1990s. Most of the low‐income housing initiatives that emerged over the last decade at the local and state levels were in response to changing economies and housing markets, to shifts in composition of the low‐income population, and to cutbacks in federal housing assistance as well as potential losses in the federally assisted housing inventory. The expansion of housing initiatives at state and local levels has critical ramifications for federal housing policy. It is a challenge to the federal government, which has not undergone a similar dramatic change in housing assistance policies. A number of areas of a new “federal partnership” need to be explored.