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Alumni Spotlight, Jason Scott, Ph.D., '95
When I entered Roberts Wesleyan College as a freshman criminal justice student twenty three years ago I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and I could have never anticipated where my degree would eventually take me. At that time I knew that I was interested in the topic of crime and justice but it was my experience as a student in CJ and Psychology at RWC that fostered a greater curiosity and love of learning. At Roberts I experienced faculty that were enthusiastic about sharing their passion for criminal justice and encouraged me to explore the important connections between research and policy and Christian faith and justice. People like Rod Bassett, Ron Hallman, Debra Heath-Thornton, and Joe Jones were instrumental in my eventual decision to pursue a graduate degree and a career in higher education.
After graduating from RWC in 1995 I entered the School of Criminal Justice at the University at Albany where I completed a M.A. and a Ph.D. My time in graduate school provided me with opportunities to be engaged in a number of interesting research projects. For several years I served as the coordinator for the Police Community Interaction Project (PCIP), a collaborative research endeavor between SUNY Albany and Indiana University that was sponsored by the National Institute of Justice. This research sought to identify community building processes at work in urban neighborhoods and to determine how we could better understand police contributions to these. This project provided the data I eventually used in my dissertation to explore the collaborative relationships between police departments and urban neighborhood associations and their potential contributions to community building and public safety.
Since 2005 I’ve been a member of the faculty in the criminal justice department at the Rochester Institute of Technology where I teach classes in the areas of law enforcement, community justice, and criminal justice policy. While at RIT I’ve had the opportunity to balance and integrate my love of teaching and research. Between 2007 and 2012 I served as the research partner to the Rochester Safe and Sound project, a comprehensive anti-gang initiative that was sponsored by the U.S. Attorney General’s Office. This project provided prevention, enforcement, and reentry activities to address local gang violence in Rochester. The highlight of this work was the opportunity to help coordinate the efforts of local criminal justice agencies, community partners, and student researchers.
A lot has changed in criminal justice in the short time that I’ve been in the field. Violent crime in the United States has declined substantially since I was a student at Roberts. The city of Rochester experienced an average of 63 homicides per year during the four years I was a student at RWC in the early 1990s. Over the past four years that average has dropped to approximately 37 homicides per year. In 1991, my freshman year at Roberts, there were over 2,100 homicide victims in New York City; last year there were fewer than 350 homicide victims in the city. Criminal justice agencies and community-based social services have dramatically improved their collaborations. The deployment of police resources is now done in a far more strategic and sophisticated manner than ever before. Court innovations like drug courts and mental health courts are beginning to change the way our legal system responds to complicated social problems. Unfortunately some of these improvements in public safety have come at the expense of public trust and confidence in law enforcement and the criminal justice system, especially in communities of color. Sadly, lower crime rates have not directly translated into healthier communities or improved confidence in the police. Today’s criminal justice students face a host of new challenges and opportunities; ones that I’m confident Roberts graduates will be well equipped to address.