The discipline of correction faces many challenges today. Overcrowding, financial constraints, and reentry programming, and rising rates of recidivism are a few of the more pressing issues facing corrections officials and our elected legislatures. Perhaps one of the more significant issues is that recidivism rates have hovered near 60% in recent years; recidivism being defined as offenders who are rearrested within three years of release from prison. At least part of the reason for this and other problems is the that corrections’ officials have historically been reluctant to rely more on evidence-based practice to inform policy. The underlying theme for this course is that it is a best practice to rely on evidence-based programming and policy to rehabilitate offenders and prepare them for release back to society. This may take the form of programs offered inside the prison, on probation, or while being monitored on parole. It may also involve specific policy that influences sentencing and parole decisions. This assignment is important because it helps you to understand the process of identifying relevant problems, researching literature related to the topic, and proposing a research study that can address one of the significant issues in corrections. It is essential that our corrections’ officials rely more on evidence-based practice; this assignment prepares you to work in those fields as professionals and leaders who can assess problems and propose solutions. This part of the research paper assignment is critical because it wraps everything together and provides the relevance to criminal justice in general with particular attention paid to corrections. This is the piece where you can discuss the evidence that should support and inform correctional policy.
The final part of the research paper assignment requires you to complete the research proposal assignment.
• You will provide a discussion section that allows for your own analysis of the findings/results from the previous assignment, limitations of your proposed study, recommendations for future research on the same topic, implications of the meta-analysis to the field of criminal justice, and finally, a conclusion to the entire paper.
• You should provide level one APA headers for each of the following: Discussion, Limitations, Implications, Recommendations, and Conclusion.
• This section should be 3-5 pages in length, written in APA (current edition) Style, and use at least three references.
o Acceptable sources are textbooks, peer reviewed journals, and websites with .org and .gov domains.
• Focus on the big picture and relate back to how your proposed study answers your research questions or validates hypotheses from an analytical perspective.