CALL FOR PAPERS:

Announcement:

In the fall of 2005, Bryan Baker, a MA graduate student generously donated funds to establish a student paper competition in order to promote quality undergraduate scholarship in criminology and criminal justice. The paper topics must be original papers dealing with issues and problems in the areas of criminology, law enforcement, juvenile justice, courts, corrections, prevention, planning and evaluation, and career development and education in the field of criminal justice.

Any student with a major or minor in criminal justice enrolled at the University of Memphis is invited to participate in the Student Paper Competition. Submissions must be authored by the submitting student and they cannot be co-authored. Papers must be previously unpublished. Violations of this rule will result in automatic disqualification. Manuscripts should include a 100 word abstract, be double-spaced (12-point Times New Roman or Courier), written in English, and should be between 3,500 and 5,000 words. Submissions should conform to the APA format for the organization of text, citations and references.

Manuscripts should be submitted as an e-mail attachment in MS Word to Wayne Pitts, the faculty advisor for the Criminal Justice Student Association: mailto:wpitts@memphis.edu by November 30, 2010 at 5PM. Late submissions will not be accepted. The first place submission will receive a monetary award of $200 and be given recognition at the Annual Criminology and Criminal Justice Department Meeting and at the Awards Ceremony of the Criminal Justice Student Association. A plaque displaying the names of annual winners will be displayed in the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice. Top papers will also be recommended for submission to the American Criminal Justice Association (see http://www.acjalae.org/). Depending on the volume and quality of submissions, the Paper Review Committee may also decide to give formal recognition to a second-place winner along with a monetary award of $100.

Review Process:

All papers will be peer-reviewed by a panel of criminal justice undergraduate and graduate students. This is a randomly assigned, blind review process. All submissions will be scored by at least three students. If there are wide-discrepancies between the reviewers, two additional student reviewers will score the paper.

After all the scores have been assigned, the papers will be ranked by mean from highest to lowest. The top three papers will then be subjected to a blind review by three criminal justice professors who will select the first and second place winners. Winners will be notified by the last day of final exams during the fall semester.