Professional Writing for the Criminal Justice System

This book talks about writing for the justice system. Justice professionals are employed in a wide range of settings, requiring all kinds of writing: case notes, progress notes, assessments, incident reports, case summaries, op-ed essays, press releases, research reports, meeting minutes, internal memos, grant applications, and letters to various agencies, clients, courts, and newspapers. The book begins with a review of some of the challenges that arise every day in justice-related work in terms of thought and perception. It presents a series of exercises designed to help readers develop a simple but effective writing process. Without an effective writing process, writing becomes a stressful, often rushed chore that produces a product that is often inferior, unaccepted by a supervisor, or even inadmissible in court. But practice makes perfect. The book guides readers through a full range of practice settings drawn from actual professionals currently working in the field of criminal justice. It concludes with a chapter on fundamentals of effective writing and robust writing glossary that will help readers to edit and correct their work in the final stage. As a teaching and learning tool, the book organizes material by separate criminal justice subsystems, so students can review writing that corresponds to content they are studying at any given time. In this way, writing can be practiced throughout the curriculum, rather than exclusively in one writing-intensive course.