Online Courses Required for the Criminal Justice Master's Degree

Experience an in-depth review of theoretical perspectives on crime and examine the link between these theories and crime prevention and control in the United States. You’ll gain a mastery of the major criminological theories and learn to apply them to criminal justice policy and real-life scenarios.

Gain an in-depth understanding of the criminal justice topics that interest you most. You’ll review and critique academic articles, review non-academic literature and media, and author a semester paper on your criminal justice topic of choice.

Examine organizational theory and behavior among criminal justice agencies. You’ll explore organization and policy planning, budgeting, forecasting, human resource management, and project implementation in the context of police administration, courts and corrections. You’ll also pay special attention to constraints on policy development and issues with policy implementation to understand the variety of management styles used in these organizations and their strengths and limitations.

Exploration of ethical considerations and dilemmas. Moral, legal and normative obligations of the state and criminal justice professionals. Philosophies and theories of ethics and deviance.

Methods and techniques of criminal justice research and evaluation, including survey methods, systematic observation, analysis of existing data, experimentation, and introduction to evaluation design. Ethical issues in research design and procedures.

Exemplify your potential role in shaping criminal justice or security-related programs or policy at the organizational, local, state or federal level. In this capstone experience, you’ll choose an issue to resolve with a program or policy change, and present the formulation, adoption and implementation of changes in a setting of your choice.

Explore law enforcement intelligence as an analytic tool for case development and resource allocation. Examine historical, ethical, legal and operational issues affecting current practice.

Gain a broad, up-to-date, multidisciplinary understanding of homeland security. Explore a variety of issues through multiple sources, themes, methodologies and learning activities. Examine topics like public policy, public administration, law, criminal justice, and the social/behavioral impacts of terrorism and homeland security.

Complete an in-depth analysis of a selected special issue in criminal justice research and management.

Achieve a deeper understanding of the criminal justice system in the United States by exploring how similar systems operate in other countries. Through this comparative lens, you’ll examine common law, civil law, socialist law and Islamic law, then focus on the nature of policing, courts and corrections around the world.

Explore comparative criminology and its relevance in the context of the global world. Examining issues like human trafficking, firearm violence and money laundering, you’ll assess the challenges of applying criminology to understand crime, victimization and crime control in the global context.

Examine the meaning and concepts of domestic and international terrorism. You’ll study law enforcement intelligence and an integration of intelligence and terrorism to gain a deeper understanding of counterterrorism.

Explore the origins, history and mutable definitions of terrorism. Through an examination of influential contemporary and historical terrorist movements, you’ll study ideologies, organizational features and state responses. Other topics include terrorist target selection, motivations for political violence and geo-political dynamics, and how these factors explain and perpetuate terrorist violence.

Explore how analytic processes, tools, applications and contemporary issues are used in law enforcement intelligence processes.

Examine how risk perception, decision-making and uncertainty impact scenarios in an environmental or criminological context. Using case studies, you’ll explore how these factors affect outcomes and learn to apply these concepts to your personal and professional life.

Examine the theories, actors, characteristics and legal instruments associated with risk, conservation and criminology related to globalization. Through current case studies in criminological conservation, you’ll explore the international “environmental crime crisis,” the policy surrounding it and strategies for intervention.

Advanced theoretical and empirical perspectives from criminology, victimology, and organizational behavior to analyze the crime of product counterfeiting.

Special topics on policing such as crime analysis, problem solving, police recruitment, retention and development, police behavior and ethics.

Gain an understanding of the theoretical foundations of crime analysis. You’ll learn about the techniques and processes used by law enforcement agencies to document and respond to patterns of crime and gain an appreciation of the complex and evolving world of crime and intelligence analysis work. Complete this course ready to explain the historical evolution of law enforcement practices that led to the varying roles of analysts and analysis in law enforcement and apply modern analysis techniques.

Learn to apply advanced intelligence and crime analysis skills and techniques. You’ll complete this course able to apply these techniques to common issues faced by law enforcement agencies and demonstrate an understanding of how advances in modern crime analysis affect the future of the field.

Apply modern intelligence techniques to collect and analyze open-source information. You’ll complete this course with an ability to validate data sources, as well as knowledge of the history of open-source data collection and an understanding of the ethical issues surrounding collecting data from public sources.

Explore the organization and management of security operations in business, industry, and government. You’ll gain an understanding of the historical and contemporary concepts that impact safety and loss prevention in different contexts.

Master administrative and quantitative techniques for security operations, and examine security in corporate and global contexts. You’ll conduct statistical analyses, examination of financial statements, and operations research through computer techniques.

Select a criminal justice topic of interest, then conduct individual research and writing under faculty supervision.

Select a criminal justice topic of interest, then conduct individual research and writing under faculty supervision.

Observe, study and work in select criminal justice agencies. Participate in domestic and foreign criminal justice systems. Use CJ 894 to work with the Michigan State Police First District Cold Case Unit and get hands on experience working with real cold cases. This course is available in the fall, spring and summer and provides a maximum of 6 credits for CJ students and 3 credits for LEIA students.

Experience an in-depth review of theoretical perspectives on crime and examine the link between these theories and crime prevention and control in the United States. You’ll gain a mastery of the major criminological theories and learn to apply them to criminal justice policy and real-life scenarios.

Examine organizational theory and behavior among criminal justice agencies. You’ll explore organization and policy planning, budgeting, forecasting, human resource management, and project implementation in the context of police administration, courts and corrections. You’ll also pay special attention to constraints on policy development and issues with policy implementation to understand the variety of management styles used in these organizations and their strengths and limitations.

Explore the organization and management of security operations in business, industry, and government. You’ll gain an understanding of the historical and contemporary concepts that impact safety and loss prevention in different contexts.

Master administrative and quantitative techniques for security operations, and examine security in corporate and global contexts. You’ll conduct statistical analyses, examination of financial statements, and operations research through computer techniques.