INFORMING PUBLIC POLICY Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

INFORMING PUBLIC POLICY - Essay Example At first, the authors give us a ‘brief history’ of the journal and examine the role eminent personalities such as Jeremy Travis in conceiving a journal for breaching the gap between policy research and criminal justice policy. According to Clear and Frost (2007), the best thing about the journal was that it sought to â€Å"simultaneously maintain a high degree of academic credibility and inform public policy† (p.633). The journal upheld a dissemination strategy to avoid the confinement of policy-relevant research to the academic world. The American Society of Criminology (ASC), under the presidency of Lawrence Sherman, made the journal its official publication. From 2004 onwards, the journal was fully supported by the ASC. Because of this collaboration, CPP reached out to many policy framers through the organizational network of ASC. Importantly, the journal had a pan-American reach. Certainly, its widespread distribution was the result of an excellent media disse mination strategy involving U.S. Newswire and Rubenstein Associates. Criminology & Public Policy was a notable success in terms both circulation and quality. Among the newcomer journals, CPP holds its head high. The genre of ‘reaction essays’ was the major attraction of the journal, which was solicited from the writers by the editors themselves. The authors are of the view that engaging with the media is a difficult task and put forward the rather interesting statement about criminologists that they are â€Å"very reluctant to offer definitive policy recommendations and frequently include a host of caveats to any of the implications that they do raise† (p.636). They also give account of the difficulties pertaining to drawing concrete policy formulations from empirical researches. This problem arises out of the very nature of criminological empirical research, i.e. empirical