Public Health and Crime: Integrating Education- Industry Partnerships within a Framework of Epidemiological Criminology

Although crime rates have decreased in the last several years, they remain alarmingly high. Recidivism rates in the meantime, continue to rise, with up to half of all new prison inmates incarcerated for reoffending after their initial release (Matz, et al., 2012). As the costs of a failed criminal justice system become unsustainable, scholars search for new evidence-based, innovative, and collaborative solutions that will lower crime rates and increase public health and safety. As a result of this collaboration, some criminal justice and public health leaders are seeking to develop new theoretical and methodological linkages in order to effectively address these challenges (Matz, et al., 2012). To enable scholars and practitioners to begin establishing just such interdisciplinary linkages, Akers and Lanier (2009) proposed a theoretical framework called “Epidemiological Criminology”. It is this construct that provides the theoretical framework for this paper. While a profoundly insightful construct, further exploration of its validity, poses a unique methodological challenge – one requiring an equally unique approach. To initiate the development of our methodology, we in the Franklin University College of Health and Public Administration, conducted a thematic analysis of the scholarly research in order to identify shared risk factors and common industry paradigms. The thematic analysis suggested that there were still many lingering meta-theoretical problems with developing an Epidemiological Criminology model, and that the most central problem appearing throughout the literature was the need for a collective cross-institutional vision and an industry-wide terminological taxonomy that would support the model and unify the two areas of study. As a result of these findings, we recognized that our work was two-fold. We needed to discover a) if engaging practitioners and scholars from both disciplines in a moderated dialogue would in fact mimic the meta-theoretical language and practice problems suggested in the research, and b) if engaging these practitioners and scholars in a collaborative process, would reveal multiple theoretical and practical instances where their fields in fact reflected, rather than contradicted one another. (And as a subset of this second point, we needed to determine what the design of this collaborative process would be). As such, we developed a unique research experience using an approach that provided both enough flexibility to allow for the initial suspected dialogic and ideological differences between the two disciplines and enough room for the exchanges necessary for negotiating those differences, while also providing some structural parameters for working together. We settled upon a formal collaborative endeavor that charged our experts and academics from both disciplines with developing a set of dynamic learning objectives needed for the eventual development of an academic curriculum for an EpiCrim discipline that firmly establishes the interdisciplinary linkages between public health and criminal justice.