Criminal Justice Program

Welcome to the Criminal Justice program at Fitchburg State College. Emphasizing both the intellectual and the practical, our program combines spirited academic inquiry into the criminal justice system and the criminal mind with a focus on how our graduates can use their education to help enhance safety, security, and prosperity.

If you're a prospective student, please browse the links to the left to get familiar with our college and our program. Our website isn't very old, and we're continually trying to improve it, so if you have any suggestions for what you'd like to see here, please send them to the CJ Program Coordinator, Rich Wiebe. This goes for current students and anyone else, as well.

If you are an alumna or alumnus of our program, we'd greatly appreciate it if you took a few minutes to fill out our online survey. Thanks!

Why Take Criminal Justice at Fitchburg?

1)         If you want to become a police officer, we provide a program that is certified by the Massachusetts Board of Higher Education under the Quinn Bill, which means that our graduates will receive higher initial salaries from Massachusetts police departments (all else being equal) than graduates of non-certified programs.

2)         If you want to work in corrections, we provide the kind of education which will prepare you for the newest trend in the field: prisoner re-entry. Because 60-70% of prisoners released into the community will commit additional crimes, the state of Massachusetts (and other jurisdictions) have begun to put a significant amount of resources into programs designed to help prisoners who are about to be released, as well as those newly released, adjust to life on the outside without resorting to crime or drugs. These resources mean more jobs for well-qualified individuals who understand the importance of realistically preparing prisoners for the prosocial life they may never have led.

3)         If you want to go to graduate school, or simply to understand more about why crime happens and what can be done about it,  we provide a solid grounding in the social sciences and the scientific method. We don’t tell you what to think - instead, we provide you with the tools you can use to develop your own judgments about criminal justice issues, and about public policy and human behavior in general. This means we are preparing you not merely for your first job, but for your career.

4)         If you want to go to law school or work within the justice system, we provide a good foundation for continued legal education, through courses in criminal law; courts and the legal process; race, crime, and law; law and society; and criminal procedure.

5)         If you want to learn more about crime other than “street crime”, or crime that appears to be motivated by more than simple greed and laziness, and what law enforcement can and cannot do about it, we provide coursework in domestic and international terrorism, hate crime, white collar crime, and organized crime.

6)         If you want to begin to perceive the differences between the reality of crime and how it is portrayed by the mass media, to examine the popularity of crime and the criminal justice system as subjects for movies and television shows, or to understand how the media get viewers to see things in a certain way, we provide courses that critically examine the relationship between crime and the media. Students who take our Crime on Television or Crime in the Movies course never watch the screen the same way again.

7)         If you want to fit a criminal justice major or minor into your already busy schedule, we provide a mix of evening and online courses, including summer courses. When you are ready to set up your program of study, either a college admissions counselor or a faculty member will be glad to help you get started. Once you are in the program, you will be personally advised by a full-time Criminal Justice faculty member.

8)         Finally, if you simply want to learn about  what historically has been the most perplexing, damaging, and frustrating  facet of human behavior (besides war), we provide a window into the causes and cures of crime. We don’t just present a bunch of theories and ask you to pick your favorite - we help you critically examine theories and research to develop a picture of crime and delinquency that you can apply to your career, home, and everyday life. And we show you how misconceptions about crime and criminals - the misconceptions most people carry around with them (derived in whole or in part from television, movies, and news about crime) until they take criminal justice courses or read academic books and articles about criminal justice - can result in policies that are almost guaranteed to fail, and in many cases, result in more, not less, crime in the streets and boardrooms of America.