Criminal Justice Looks to the Future

Although we are a leading Criminal Justice undergraduate and graduate education provider, we recognize that to continue to meet our goals, we will need to be proactive in the delivery of occupationally-related courses to supplement the liberal arts-based education for our students. Our goal is to have all our degree programs online within one year, said Bob Prout, Chair of the Department of Criminal Justice. We have had a very successful run since our beginning in 1972. Today, there are more than twenty-two hundred SCSU Criminal Justice bachelors and masters degree graduates in positions in virtually all counties in Minnesota, as well as in almost all other states and in dozens of other nations.

We have been able to assemble some top-flight faculty, and we could choose to rest on our accomplishments and continue exclusively with our traditional face-to-face course offerings. However, we recognize an increasing share of undergraduate and graduate students will choose to complete part or all of their course work online. We have the faculty, the curriculum, and the technical support to provide a quality online environment.

Society, SCSU, and our students win when we cooperate in offering more occupationally-related, technical and professional courses, Prout said. As an example of this cross-departmental relationship, he cited the close cooperation between the Geography and the Criminal Justice Departments in the development of a Global Information System crime-mapping course.

Prout provided the following examples of recent developments in the Department of Criminal Justice :

1. Under the direction of John Campbell, former dean of the FBI Academy, the first cohort of ten Public Safety Executive Leadership students completed their graduate degrees. Several of the public safety in-service members of this group live and took all of their classes in the Winona area, proving the feasibility of distance education for completing this new Criminal Justice Department graduate degree. A new cohort is underway in Duluth, and one is expected in Bemidji next semester.
2. John Campbell coauthored Into the Minds of Madmen: How the FBI=s Behavioral Science Unit Revolutionized Crime Investigation. The book describes the pioneering work of the Behavioral Science Unit when John was its Director in the 1980s.