Professional Ethics in Criminal Justice: Being Ethical When No One is Looking

Professional Ethics in Criminal Justice: Being Ethical When No One is Looking is designed for the Ethics in Criminal Justice course.

Every major issue, problem, scandal, and crime in the criminal justice field has ethics at its core. Professional Ethics in Criminal Justice: Being Ethical When No One is Looking presents the three major ethical schools of thought (virtue, formalism, and utilitarianism) in a clear way that emphasizes how ethics impacts individual decision-making. Extensive Critical-thinking exercises, Ethics in the Movies features, and Ethics in Books features use current events and media to raise ethical questions and help readers develop ethical-reasoning skills. Separate chapters are devoted to law, police, courts, corrections, and liability so learners see the direct connection between ethics and specific aspects of the criminal justice system. Professional Ethics in Criminal Justice helps readers recognize ethical decisions and provides the framework for analyzing ethical dilemmas.

Jay S. Albanese is professor in the Wilder School of Government and Public Affairs at Virginia Commonwealth University. He served as chief of the International Center at the National Institute of Justice (NIJ), the research arm of the U.S. Department of Justice. Dr. Albanese received his Ph.D. and M.A. degrees from Rutgers University and his B.A. from Niagara University. He was the first Ph.D. recipient from the Rutgers School of Criminal Justice. Dr. Albanese is author or editor of 18 books that include Organized Crime: From the Mob to Transnational Organized Crime (7th ed., Routledge, 2015), Criminal Justice (5th ed., Prentice Hall, 2013), Transnational Crime and the 21st Century (Oxford University Press, 2011), Comparative Criminal Justice Systems (with H. Dammer, 5th ed., Wadsworth, 2014), and editor-in-chief of The Encyclopedia of Criminology and Criminal Justice (Wiley, 2014). Dr. Albanese is recipient of the Elske Smith Distinguished Lecturer Award from Virginia Commonwealth University and the Scholar Award in Criminal Justice from the Virginia Social Science Association. He is a Fulbright Specialist and has served as executive director of the International Association for the Study of Organized Crime, on the Executive Board of the American Society of Criminology, and is a past president and fellow of the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences

1. Recognizing Ethical Decisions: Ethics and Critical Thinking 1
2. Virtue Ethics: Seeking the Good 11
3. Formalism: Carrying Out Obligation and Duty 25
4. Utilitarianism: Measuring Consequences 36
5. Crime and Law: Which Behaviors Ought to Be Crimes? 47
6. Police: How Should the Law Be Enforced? 68
7. Courts: How Ought a Case Be Adjudicated? 89
8. Punishment and Corrections: What Should Be Done with Offenders? 104
9. Liability: What Should Be the Consequence of Unethical Conduct? 120
10. The Future: Will We Be More or Less Ethical? 135