Ep. 83 - What are the Criminal Justice and Intelligence & Crime Analysis majors?

In Episode 83 of the CSUSB Advising Podcast, Matt Markin is joined by fellow academic advisor, John Noriega to chat with Dr. Christine Famega, Professor and Interim Director of the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at CSUSB! Dr. Famega discusses both the B.A. in Criminal Justice and the B.S. in Intelligence and Crime Analysis. What are the differences? What are the career options? What are you learning in your classes. Find out answers to all of these questions and more!

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Transcript

Matt Markin  
Welcome back to another episode of the CSUSB Advising Podcast. This is academic advisor Matt Markin here in the Academic Advising Office at CSUSB, and joining me today to co host is fellow academic advisor John Noriega. John, welcome. 

John Noriega  
Thank you, Matt. 

Matt Markin  
And do you want to talk to us about who what majors were learned about today and and who our guest is?

John Noriega  
Of course, welcome. Welcome once again. My name is John Noriega, and welcome back to our CSUSB Advising Podcast. Today, we have the honor to have Dr. Christine Famega, the interim director from the school of criminology and criminal justice, who will be sharing more information about the criminal justice major and the crime and intelligence major as well. Dr. Christine Famega, welcome.

Dr. Christine Famega  
Hi, thank you. 

Matt Markin  
Dr. Famega, before we jump into talking about the majors here, we were interested to learn a little bit more about yourself. Can you tell us about you and your path in higher ed?

Dr. Christine Famega  
I'll start by saying that I didn't exactly plan to go as far as I have with my education. It's it just kind of happened. I went into Bachelor of Arts program right after high school, went to University of Manitoba in Canada, where I'm from, and I didn't know what I wanted to major in when I started, so I took some gen ed classes, and I ended up majoring in theater for a Year, and then I realized it was going to be hard to make a career in theater in the middle of Canada, so I tried some criminology classes, and I did good in them. And so that's what I changed my major to. So I ended up going on to get a master's degree because I couldn't really find a job in my field after getting a bachelor's degree, and I went on to work for a year in North Dakota after I got my master's degree. Down there, I worked for the Bureau of Criminal Investigation, and but, well, this isn't really for me. So I, you know, I went back to school again. And, yeah, at some point I realized that I really liked being in school, and so I just kept going to school, and thought I should work in a school. And here I here I am.

John Noriega  
That is awesome. That's awesome. And yeah, I mean, this kind of brought you into higher ed and now landing into the School of Criminal criminology and criminal justice. How would you describe the the majors that are housed in in the school of criminology and criminal justice. How would you describe the major and the area in particular?

Dr. Christine Famega  
Okay, well, we have, we have two majors or two programs. We have a Bachelor of Arts in criminology and criminal justice. Criminology is the scientific approach to studying criminal behavior. So that degree focuses on explaining the nature of crime, the causes of crime, and the extent of crime in society. And then criminal justice is the study of agencies of social control that handle criminal offenders. So that part of the degree, you know, teaches you about law enforcement, the court system, the correction system. So that's all the focus of the Bachelor of Arts degree, the second program, which just started in 2020 is a Bachelor of Science degree in intelligence and crime analysis. And crime analysis is about collecting and examining data using analytical techniques to detect patterns and solve problems. So that degree is much more focused on data than it is on people I guess you could say.

Matt Markin  
Awesome. Thank you for explaining that. And I guess that kind of leads into our next question, which is, you know, generally speaking, students may want to know a little bit more about, you know, what kind of things am I might be learning, or types of classes might I be taking, whether I'm doing the criminal justice BA, or I'm doing the BS and intelligent Crime Analysis. How would you describe that to students in terms of what they might be learning and doing in their classes?

Dr. Christine Famega  
Okay, but the BA program, students are going to learn how the criminal justice system works. And why people offend, how society and and law react to crime, how we measure crime, how to conduct scientific research that can address policy and criminal justice reform and we also address the realities and misconceptions of the criminal justice system and evidence based practices to affect change. In contrast, the Bachelor of Science degree is a professional degree that we developed to train students for a career as an intelligence or crime analyst. So this program very much focuses on an opportunity for them to learn advanced analytical skills that are required in a big data world. So this degree offers extensive training in research, analytics, data management. The instruction involves practical, hands on activities to develop these skills, and it interweaves the curriculum, not just from criminal justice, but also from Geography and Environmental Studies, from information and Decision Sciences and from political science and history. So in both programs, students are learning how to do research methods, statistics and analysis, but they are definitely different in their in their focus, career wise.

John Noriega  
Thank you for that. And yeah, lots of different skill sets that are coming in from both the criminal justice and the intelligence and Crime Analysis major. I know a question that students are are probably asking themselves right now is, what career areas can they go into with with these skill sets? So in in your years of experience, what career areas have you seen your students go into after graduation?

Dr. Christine Famega  
Well, we've had a lot more graduates from the Bachelor of Arts program, the criminology and criminal justice program, and students with that degree often go into law enforcement, to local police or state police, occasionally even federal police agencies. They go into private security. Many of them work in probation, as probation officers or in parole. They oftentimes work in correctional facilities, jails or prisons or juvenile detention facilities, and then there's a lot of students that just go on to work for other types of social service agencies like victim witness assistance or support programs like that, as far as the Bachelor of Science degree, most of our graduates from that program have gotten jobs as crime analysts at police departments or sheriff's departments. Some of them have also gone into the military, and we have one graduate who's working as a fraud investigator for banks.

Matt Markin  
Wonderful and, let's say students listening to this, and they're like, you know, I'm very interact more interested now in either, you know, the BA or the BS, but maybe they're on the fence if they want to look more into it, or, you know, think about declaring it or applying to declare it. What advice do you have for a student like that? 

Dr. Christine Famega  
Well, there are a couple of things that they should, you know, also consider in their decision making that are realities of working in this field. One is that most careers in this field, even internships that you do in this area, require passing live scan, which is a form of background check that requires you to be electronically fingerprinted, and it sends your fingerprints to the government, which performs a criminal history background check. So you know if they're not willing to do that, or they know that they're not going to pass a background check, then that probably should factor into their decision making. Another issue that students don't often realize is that most careers in this field also require quite a bit of writing, more than you would think. Police officers, probation officers, parole officers, have to write a lot of reports. They do a lot of documentation. Those reports end up getting entered into evidence in in courts so they. Have to be fairly well written. So if you're on the fence and you're interested in in the area, but you don't like writing, then that probably also would not be a good choice for you. That I think those are probably the two, you know, largest things that stand in the way of of students who think they might be interested in pursuing careers in this field.

John Noriega  
Good to know. Thank you. Are there any misconceptions that students might have about the the two majors?

Dr. Christine Famega  
Yes, many, because of TV and movies, they portray careers and jobs that are much more fun than the ones that actually exist. I guess probably one of the most common misconceptions is that getting a criminal justice degree is a good degree to become a CSI or crime scene investigator. Crime scene investigators are primarily responsible for identifying and documenting and collecting and bagging evidence from crime scenes. They work in the field and the reality is that many agencies, most agencies, require their CSIs to begin their careers as law enforcement officers, so they have to get hired on by a police department or Sheriff's Department, complete the police academy and then apply for those positions as a sworn officer. There are some agencies that allow CSIs to work without law enforcement experience, but those ones actually prefer that students have a degree in biology or chemistry or forensic science, as opposed to criminal justice, because forensic science degrees give you an understanding of how to examine evidence and the laboratory testing that's done on evidence and that better prepares students for careers analyzing crime scenes we we don't do any of that in criminology and criminal justice. So crime scene technicians are also a job that that students are often interested in, and they're essentially the second step in evidence collection, that's those are the people that perform analysis in laboratories of the evidence to gain a better understanding of how criminal activity occurred. They run experiments, they study evidence. They spend the majority of their day in a laboratory setting. And again, that's really you're looking more at a degree in forensic science for biology or chemistry for those types of positions.

Matt Markin  
Good to know. And Dr. Famega, our last question for you is, are there any resources that you can talk to us about that might be available to students that are in the major through your department?

Dr. Christine Famega  
Yeah, on our website, we have a link to faculty that provide career advising to our students. They have hours listed on there. They welcome students to drop into their office, or they can also get advising online through zoom. And we maintain a bulletin board, also accessible through our website, where we post all the jobs and internships and volunteer opportunities in the field that we know about so students can stop there and see if there's anything they're interested in. And of course, we also welcome any information about other jobs that might not be on there that we can post for them as well.

Matt Markin  
All right, wonderful. Dr. Famega, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast today to talk to us about your department, as well as the majors for the BA in criminal justice and the Bs in intelligence and crime analysis. Thank you so much.

Dr. Christine Famega  
Very welcome. Thank you for having me.