Assignment:
For your CSI paper, you will analyze your Crime of the Semester Investigation (CSI) crime using the data, concepts and theories presented over the course of the semester.
This should be an academic examination of your CSI crime. As such, you should ensure you are well organized, with a solid introduction and conclusion. Make sure your tone is formal and academic, not a personal narrative of opinion. Instead of relying on what you "think" must have happened, use the concepts and theories of the course to provide a high-level analysis of the crime, the people involved, and the place in which the crime happened. Each word of your paper should be there for a reason-do not fill up space with flowery language. Focus, and give me your best work.
The final document will be due on the date/time set in the course schedule.
Important Guidelines and Suggested Outline for Final Document
Below I offer one type of outline, or plan of attack for the paper. This is here to guide people that are not sure where to begin, or have a hard time with organizing their papers. If you are comfortable using your own organizational plan, by all means, please do! This is just meant to act as one possible way to write the paper. Deviate as little or as much as you would like from the organization I lay out, but you should still use it as a sort of "checklist" to yourself to make sure you are including all of the required elements.
First, provide an informative introduction. Ensure that introduction gives the reader a roadmap of the topics you will be addressing in the paper. A good introduction should provide a brief outline of the rest of the paper.
Second, briefly explain your CSI crime. Make sure you give us all of the information we need to know about the crime, offender and victim(s), if applicable, that will relate the crime to the concepts and theories you will use later in the paper. For example, if you are later going to discuss how age and race are important components, make sure you outline those demographic details in the beginning. Include the location of the crime and/or where the offender grew up, so talking about your CSI city, and some of its attributes, makes sense later in the paper.
Third, give us some context for the crime itself. Explore why that crime is considered illegal in the first place (if that seems relevant), or how that crime fits in with our ideologies about crime. Look at the chapters of the textbook that pertain to the types of crime. Where does your crime fit? What do we know about that crime, and who commits those types of crimes? Was your case typical? Atypical?
After that, tell us a little bit about the city in which the CSI crime took place, outlining what about the area may have influenced the crime. In explaining why aspects of the area may or may not matter, you may need to call upon some of the theories and/or correlates we have read about and discussed. If so, give a brief explanation of the theory or correlate, and how it relates to our understanding of the crime. You will be diving into both correlates and theories later in your paper, but you may need to use them here to justify why you looked at certain demographics in your CSI city. Remember to explain things clearly, as if writing to an audience that has never taken a criminology course.
Next, explore the correlates of crime, and how they may or may not help to explain your CSI crime. How did class play a role? Gender? Age? Race? What is it about the way we socially construct those categories that may have impacted this crime, or the way it was handled? Was your offender typical or atypical, based on what we know about crime? Why? Perhaps the demographics of the victim are just as important, if not more important, than those of the offender. If this is the case, explain.
Then, explain at least TWO of the theories discussed in class, and connect them to your CSI crime. Explain the theories in some detail, as if writing to an audience who has never taken a criminology course. Why do people commit crime, according to this theory? What factors are most important in predicting if someone will commit crime? Using each theory, explain how the theory helps you to understand the crime. What factors led to the crime? Relate these factors directly to the crime theory. In other words, use the terms of the theory to explain/describe the CSI crime. Evaluate how well this theory works based on the example of your crime. How well can the theory explain the crime? Where is it lacking? When you talk about the theory, make sure you give credit to the actual theorist; do not just cite the editors of the book. Give credit where credit is due! One way to cite this would be (Sutherland, as cited in Barkan 2012).
Last, make sure to finish your Project with a solid conclusion, tying together all you have learned about your CSI crime and addressed in your Final Project. A good conclusion should tie directly to the introduction, and not introduce any new information.
Format Specifications
You must use in-text citations to back up everything you say that is not an original thought that spawned in your own brain. You must also attach a thorough, complete and accurate Works Cited page, including at least 5 references.
Your project should be no less than 5 pages, and should not exceed 7 pages in length (should be between 5 to 7 pages), be typed in 12-point font, double-spaced, and have one-inch margins, and follow ASA citation guidelines.