Oh boy...

Ms. Jenny’s CRIM 301 class challenged me like no other class had before. Her class required a lot of continuous work, and determination that I had not experienced as often as I did in this course. However, I do not regret taking the class at all, because I learned so many new things that I did not know how to do before. For example, I learned how to write a police report, annotated bibliography, and article critiques, which seems like a lot to learn in a quarter, but it was definitely possible. That being said, the most difficult part of this course involved writing a long, and detailed literature review. I started by choosing a topic of my interest, and finding articles related to my topic. You should definitely do this as soon as possible, because procrastinating will most likely result in poor quality work.  I actually did my article critiques based on articles that were related to my literature review topic, so it made the writing process a bit easier since I had learned about the subject more in-depth prior to starting my paper. I would recommend you to choose a topic that REALLY interests you, because then the assignment will not seem so tedious or unappealing to you. I would definitely recommend that future students start a few weeks before (even months, if possible) by going “bird by bird” as Ms. Jenny said. In other words, I recommend you start doing a little each day, and going section by section (theories, theorists, studies, etc.) without attempting to do everything at once like I did. To be honest, I gathered the most important information relevant to my topic all at once, and I tried to write a little bit in each section. I then went back to each section (days later), and tried to further expand it. However, by doing that I forgot a lot of the details I wanted to include in each of the different sections so I had to reread the articles/books again, which was double the work. If I knew that was going to happen, I would have done section by section since the beginning, which would have saved me a lot of time.

                My literature review topic focused on the risk factors, and causes of suicide among women in prison. I found the following article in the school’s Criminal Justice article database, and it was very helpful because it contained a lot of the information I was looking for. I found the article by searching for keywords such as: prison/jail, women/female inmates, incarcerated women, suicide in prison. You can also search in Google by pasting the article’s DOI, which should find the article very quickly for you. I tried it & it worked!

Charles, D. R., Abram, K. M., Mcclelland, G. M., & Teplin, L. A. (2003). Suicidal ideation and behavior among women in jail. Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice, 19(1), 65-81. doi: 10.1177/1043986202239742

Good luck!