{"id":12256,"date":"2023-02-02T13:35:56","date_gmt":"2023-02-02T13:35:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.york.ac.uk\/student-voices\/?p=12256"},"modified":"2023-02-02T13:35:58","modified_gmt":"2023-02-02T13:35:58","slug":"criminal-justice-and-social-policy-what-is-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.york.ac.uk\/student-voices\/2023\/02\/02\/criminal-justice-and-social-policy-what-is-it\/","title":{"rendered":"Criminal Justice and Social Policy \u2013 what is it?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Hi, I’m Kavil! Today, I’m going to try to answer some questions that I know I had before starting my Criminal Justice and Social Policy degree<\/a>. Although Google is a great tool, there are some things that can only be answered by actually doing <\/em>the degree. Fortunately for you, I’m here to answer these questions for you!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What is social policy? How is it studied in 1st Year?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

So\u2026 let\u2019s start with the basics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Social policy is policy that’s created by the government<\/strong> that aims to improve society and life for its citizens. I thought this would be a simple concept, but as I discovered in my first year, it\u2019s not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Social policy influences many things like housing, education and employment, to name just a few. We studied each of these factors (and more) in the Introducing Social Policy<\/a> module. Initially, we focused on the \u2018who, what, when and why\u2019 of these policies, which I didn’t find too difficult.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When it came to writing social policy essays, however, I had to start thinking critically about the strengths and limitations of policies. I had to consider current issues with policies, whether they are effective, and how they can be improved. This was hard, but I found that doing some wider reading and tapping into the analytical side of my brain made things easier. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019ll be the first to admit, I didn’t always enjoy the social policy module, and thought that some of the topics were a little dry. But most of it was interesting, especially because all the policies affect or will affect us at some point in our lives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This module was mainly assessed by coursework (essays), but in the Spring\/Summer Term, we had to do one examination.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

How is criminal justice studied in the first year?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Now that we\u2019ve covered social policy, we can move onto criminal justice, the second part of the course\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In our first year, criminal justice was split into two modules: Introducing Criminal Justice<\/a> and Crime and Society<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2018Introducing Criminal Justice\u2019 focused on aspects of the criminal justice system such as the definition of crime, criminal law, sentencing, and the history of punishment. I found the prison service topic particularly interesting, as we learned about it from the perspective of prisoners, too. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

On the other hand, \u2018Crime and Society\u2019 focused on specific<\/em> crimes, such as drug crime, terrorism and violent crime. We also covered the different theories that try to explain and understand why individuals commit crime.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I loved <\/em>studying a lot of the topics in these modules, which made it easier to do the required reading and write my essays. I think it’s fair to say that these were more up my alley than the \u2018Introducing Social Policy\u2019 module mentioned previously.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That year, both of these modules were assessed by coursework \u2013 no exams to be found for me!<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Is there anything else studied in 1st Year?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

I’ve covered three of the modules that I studied in my first year, but there were four in total. \u2018Politics and Economics of Social Policy<\/a>\u2019 was the last piece of the jigsaw. As the name suggests, it’s related to social policy, but it was a module that I wasn’t expecting to study.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The politics<\/strong> part, which I studied in the Autumn Term, focused on several areas, including:<\/p>\n\n\n\n