"Project of the American Bar Association, Criminal Justice Standards Committee, Criminal Justice Section"--T.p. verso.

The criminal justice process is dependent on accurate documentation. Criminal justice professionals can spend 50-75% of their time writing administrative and research reports. Report Writing for Criminal Justice Professionals, Fifth Edition provides practical guidance--with specific writing samples and guidelines--for providing strong reports. Much of the legal process depends on careful documentation and the crucial information that lies within, but most law enforcement, security, corrections, and probation and parole officers have not had adequate training in how to provide well-written, accurate, brief, and complete reports. Report Writing for Criminal Justice Professionals covers everything officers need to learn--from basic English grammar to the difficult but often-ignored problem of creating documentation that will hold up in court. This new edition is updated to include timely information, including extensive coverage of digital reporting, updates on legal issues and privacy rights, and expanded coverage of forensics and scientific reporting.

Criminal Justice Report Writing offers both recruits and experienced officers a wealth of information about report writing. A pre-test and post-test help you assess your stengths and determine which skills need your attention. Topics include organizing and writing reports, bullet style, reviewing sentence skills, avoiding usage errors, and applying the specialized vocabulary needed for report writing. Sample reports are included. Exercises are provided throughout the book, and an Answer Key allows you to check your progress at each step.

Providing a complete view of U.S. legal principles, this book addresses distinct issues as well as the overlays and connections between them. It presents as a cohesive whole the interrelationships between constitutional principles, statutory criminal laws, procedural law, and common-law evidentiary doctrines. This fully revised and updated new edition also includes discussion questions and hypothetical scenarios to check learning. Constitutional principles are the foundation upon which substantive criminal law, criminal procedure law, and evidence laws rely. The concepts of due process, legality, specificity, notice, equality, and fairness are intrinsic to these three disciplines, and a firm understanding of their implications is necessary for a thorough comprehension of the topic. This book examines the tensions produced by balancing the ideals of individual liberty embodied in the Constitution against society’s need to enforce criminal laws as a means of achieving social control, order, and safety. Relying on his first-hand experience as a law enforcement official and criminal defense attorney, the author presents issues that highlight the difficulties in applying constitutional principles to specific criminal justice situations. Each chapter of the text contains a realistic problem in the form of a fact pattern that focuses on one or more classic criminal justice issues to which readers can relate. These problems are presented from the points of view of citizens caught up in a police investigation and of police officers attempting to enforce the law within the framework of constitutional protections. This book is ideal for courses in criminal law and procedure that seek to focus on the philosophical underpinnings of the system.