The Criminal Justice Links Web site <http://www.criminology.fsu.edu/cjlinks/> is exactly what its name implies ‐ a site consisting mainly of links to other Web sites which are at least peripherally related to criminal justice topics. Criminal Justice Links was created and is maintained by Dr Cecil E. Greek, an associate professor of criminology at Florida State University.
The site is organized by general subject area. There are 17 major areas which are listed and linked on the main page. The subject areas are: federal criminal justice agencies; international criminal justice sources; criminal justice information [statistics & databases]; crime and crime prevention pages; juvenile delinquency and juvenile justice; drug and alcohol information; police agencies and resources; the courts: due process and civil liberties; pornography, obscenity, censorship and the Communications Decency Act; searchable law databases; other law sites on the Web; community corrections, restorative justice, prisons and the death penalty; criminal justice education; forensics; on‐line criminal justice discussions groups and e‐journals; criminal justice images and illustrations; criminal justice in the media: true crime and crime fiction. Each subject area has a Web page with a listing of links to Web sites on that topic.
Criminal Justice Links was recently redesigned with new fonts and graphics. It has a simple and straightforward design. The home page lists all the subject areas covered and includes a chart illustrating the sequence of events in the criminal justice system which serves as an additional index to the site. The initial page is overly long, including widely spaced links to books and articles, a list of awards, and a link (currently broken) to search the FSU School of Criminology pages. The site was constructed using Microsoft Front Page and includes Java code which produces an error message in the Netscape 4.7 browser.
In “Using the Internet as a Newsmaking Criminology Tool”, a presentation given at the American Society of Criminology Annual Meeting in San Diego, CA, on November 20, 1997, Dr Greek said that Criminal Justice Links was started as an attempt to help his students navigate the Web. He chose the sites to link to based on those “appealing to a broad spectrum including students, criminal justice professionals, criminal justice policy makers, journalists and other media personnel, and concerned citizens”. Unless he is researching a new topic, he doesn’t actively search for new sites.
The links included on the site do not attempt to be inclusive of what is available on the Web in the subject area. For example, under Due Process and Civil Liberties, 30 state and local court Web sites are listed, most of them in Florida. This is only a sampling of the many state and local court sites available on the Web. Many of the links are only marginally related to criminal justice issues. Links to Web sites on tattoos and Planned Parenthood are included under Juvenile Delinquency and Juvenile Justice. A link to “Brian’s Page of Antique Weirdness” is included under Criminal Justice Images and Illustrations. Criminal Justice in the Media includes links to Web pages on everything from Alfred Hitchcock and Sherlock Holmes to science fiction.
The different subject area pages are not consistently updated, and the older ones have a large number of broken links. The page on Juvenile Delinquency and Juvenile Justice was last updated in August 1999. Out of the 146 links on the page, 36 (or 26 percent) of the links on the page were broken, and 12 of the links were to sites which had moved.
The links are loosely grouped under broad and narrow subject areas, but are not arranged in any order under the subject area. Some of the labels for the links are misleading. For example, “Family Law Advisor” links to http://www.divorcenet.com, and “A Sex Offender Awareness Page” links to http://www.sharlow.com, the Web site of a consulting group for building safer communities.
In Dr Greek’s presentation mentioned earlier, he states that “to date, little effort has been made to rate the usefulness of sites or comment on their validity and relevance”. Providing a list of links to Web sites without any evaluation of their validity or relevance greatly diminishes the usefulness of the list.
As a site originally created for college students in criminal justice, Criminal Justice Links has several major problems. It is neither a comprehensive listing of criminal justice sites nor a listing of preferred or “best” criminal justice sites. It is not maintained adequately and includes links to outdated news sources and a significant number of annoying broken links. However, it does have links to useful criminal justice sites. I would recommend with reservations Criminal Justice Links as one means of searching for criminal justice information on the Web.
