Criminal justice, often considered together with criminology, is the study of criminal offending, victimization, and processing of offenders by the criminal justice system. Criminal justice considers a broad range of topics that include: identifying motivations and opportunities for criminal offending, predicting patterns of offending, examining patterns of offending and victimization across different groups in society, evaluating the effectiveness of various crime control policies, and examining the primary components of the the criminal and juvenile justice systems. The major is an interdisciplinary program offering students a thorough understanding of criminal law, the social forces related to crime and delinquency, the evaluation of crime control policy, or the operation of courts, law enforcement agencies, and correctional institutions.<br><br>Our program offers both a major and a minor degree and contributes to the Addiction Studies concentration program. Criminal Justice at OU is an interdisciplinary program grounded in the theoretical, methodological, and applied policy traditions of criminology & criminal justice, as well as those related disciplines that have contributed to its core knowledge (i.e., sociology, political science, public administration, law, philosophy, and psychology). <br>There's a lot more to a criminal justice career than what you see on Law & Order. Criminal justice majors at Oakland University get a big-picture education that covers the full spectrum of criminal justice careers. Youll learn about policing, homeland security, cybersecurity, corrections, data analysis, and other branches of criminal justice. Our criminal justice degree also addresses social factors that influence crime and law enforcement, including race, ethnicity, and religion. Agencies actively recruit our criminal justice majors for internships because our students are mature and well-prepared. With optional concentrations in homeland security and IT security, Oakland University's criminal justice degree provides you with an excellent foundation for a successful criminal justice career. Our reputation as one of the region's best colleges for criminal justice rests on several factors. First, our criminal justice degree's cyber security component is so strong that the U.S. defense department designated us a National Center of Academic Excellence in Cyber Defense Education. More broadly, we have a holistic perspective that equips criminal justice majors to think at a systemic level, with the ability to address crime's underlying causes and long-range effects.