Public criminology
[8] Advocates of public criminology argue that the energies of criminologists should be directed towards "conducting and disseminating research on crime, law, and deviance in dialogue with affected communities.
For example Uggen and Inderbitzin[3] find inspiration in the work of Clifford R. Shaw, who studied the relationship between neighborhoods and crime in Chicago starting the 1920s.
[25] Uggen and Inderbitzin find similar inspiration in the work of Elliott Currie,[citation needed] a professor of criminology, law and society at the University of California at Irvine who works on policy and specializes in cases of violent crime, the social context of delinquency, etiology of drug abuse and the assessment of drug policy, race and criminal justice,[4][26] and George Kirkham, a police officer-turned-criminologist who wrote a book entitled "Signal Zero.
[14] Another set of concerns suggests that initial forays into public criminology have been blind to the political-economic agenda that shapes the Criminal Justice system.
For example, Christopher Uggen and Michelle Inderbitzin highlight the structural disincentives towards practicing public criminology, starting in initial graduate training.
[3] Similarly, Kenneth Land stresses his concern that there are few employment opportunities for public criminology, causing economic barriers for those who might choose to pursue it.
[20] Likewise when criminologists Carrie Sanders and Lauren Eisler opened up a college course on criminology to the public, the attendees did not find some of the subject matter engaging.
[21] Such problems have led some authors to suggest that the core effort of public criminology should be towards creating inclusive, democratic spaces in which such conversations might take place.
For example, The Marshall Project was founded in 2014 by Neil Barsky and Bill Keller as a way to "create and sustain a sense of national urgency about the U.S. criminal justice system.
[33] In addition, Ian Loader and Richard Sparks provide a sociological evaluation of criminologists and the way they shape their position to fit into social and political controversies to correctly illustrate them for the public to view.
Cold War Radiological Weapons Program Exposed Innocent Americans.” [37] Her independent research, using the Freedom of Information Act, she uncovered the correspondence and notes from the Manhattan Project scientists.
