News

For more than 20 years, the state of Florida has used radio frequency and global positioning systems as electronic monitoring devices to supervise felony offenders in the community as a method of diverting offenders from the significantly more costly alternative of imprisonment. In the wake of recent federal and state legislation, electronic monitoring will increasingly be used across the country on moderate-to high-risk offenders.

FSU’s College of Criminology and Criminal Justice and Department of Computer Science have teamed up to offer a new Computer Criminology Degree. Computer criminology includes both how to use computers to facilitate the study of crime and the study of how crimes are accomplished through the use of computers.

Associate Professor Dan Mears has been awarded tenure and Carter Hay has been promoted to associate professor with tenure in the FSU College of Criminology and Criminal Justice. Mears joined the faculty in 2005 from the Urban Institute’s Justice Policy Center. He received his Ph.D from the University of Texas. Mears’ main research interests are crime and delinquency theory, juvenile and criminal justice, and crime policy.

There are a lot of variables that factor in to deciding what university and city are a good fit for a graduate’s first faculty position: size of the city and university, proximity to family, the institution’s financial resources, recreational opportunities, departmental research focus. Congratulations to our PhD students who have secured faculty positions for next fall and found the place that was the right fit for them.

The overpopulation of prisons has endured extensive research for many years, and those that are the most responsible for funding them, the citizens, are the least informed about their effects. This is a point that Associate Professor William Bales and other researchers illustrate in the Pew Charitable Trusts study “Public Safety, Public Spending: Forecasting America’s Prison Population 2007-2011.” This study is the first of its kind.

Eugene Howard Czajkoski, 78, died Friday, February 16, 2007, at the Margaret Dozier Hospice House. He is survived by his wife of 45 years, Rosalind. In lieu of flowers, the family requests that memorial contributions be made to the Eugene H. and Rosalind D. Czajkoski Scholarship Fund, College of Criminology and Criminal Justice, attention Dean Blomberg, 634 W. Call Street, Tallahassee, FL 32306.

By Libby Fairhurst, February 2007 The juvenile justice system emerged a century ago out of the belief that young offenders were less culpable and more salvageable than their adult counterparts, but today, that system is under attack by get-tough policymakers claiming wide public support that Florida State University criminologists say simply doesn’t exist.

Undergraduate criminology student Mary Delina Wright has been awarded a 2006 University Honors Thesis Grant. The grant will support her research leading to an honors thesis, specifically focusing on the public controversy that arose about the book Eichmann in Jerusalem: a Report on the Banality of Evil and its author, Hannah Arendt.

The editorship of Criminology and Public Policy, an official publication of the American Society of Criminology, will move to FSU’s College of Criminology and Criminal Justice in Spring 2007 (submissions should be sent to the College beginning March 1, 2007). This prestigious publication is a peer-review journal devoted to the study of criminal justice policy and practice. Beginning with Volume 7, Issue 1 (February 2008), the new editors of Criminology and Public Policy will be Thomas G. Blomberg and Michael D. Reisig.

Gordon P. Waldo Fellowship Provides $16,500 a year plus out-of-state tuition waivers. Awarded to highly motivated FSU criminology doctoral students with the intellectual curiosity necessary to challenge popular ideas about the causes, consequences, and control of crime. Partners Waldo Fellow with College faculty who are leading researchers in a field the fellow is interested in pursuing. Criminology and Public Policy and Social Problems Fellowships