Frank Schmalleger, Ph.D., is Professor Emeritus at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke. He also serves as director of the Justice Research Association, a private consulting firm and think tank focusing on issues of crime and justice.
Dr. Schmalleger holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Notre Dame and both a master’s and a doctorate in sociology from The Ohio State University with a special emphasis in criminology. From 1976 to 1994, he taught criminal justice courses at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke, serving for many years as a tenured full professor. For the last 16 of those years, he chaired the Department of Sociology, Social Work, and Criminal Justice. As an adjunct professor with Webster University in St. Louis, Missouri, Dr. Schmalleger helped develop a graduate program in security management and loss prevention that is currently offered on U.S. military bases around the world. He taught courses in that curriculum for more than a decade, focusing primarily on computer and information security. Dr. Schmalleger has also taught in the New School for Social Research’s on-line graduate program, helping to build the world’s first electronic classrooms for criminal justice distance learning. Dr. Schmalleger is the author of numerous articles and many books, including Criminal Justice Today (Prentice Hall, 2005); Criminal Justice: A Brief Introduction (Prentice Hall, 2004), Criminology Today (Prentice Hall, 2004); and Criminal Law Today (Prentice Hall, 2002). He is founding editor of the journal The Justice Professional and has served as imprint advisor for Greenwood Publishing Group’s criminal justice reference series.
Dr. Schmalleger is also the creator of a number of award-winning web sites (including cybrary.info and crimenews.info), and founder and codirector of the Criminal Justice Distance Learning Consortium (cjdlc.org), a project of the Justice Research Association.
John Ortiz Smykla, Ph.D., is currently professor and chair of the Division of Criminal Justice and Legal Studies at The University of West Florida. Previously he was professor and chair of the Department of Political Science and Criminal Justice at the University of South Alabama. Before that, he was professor of criminal justice at the University of Alabama and served as department chair for ten years.
Using multimedia, Dr. Smykla teaches courses in corrections and research methods and has supervised more than 50 master’s and doctoral students. He has taught two-way interactive corrections courses across several campuses of the University of Alabama system.
Dr. Smykla earned the interdisciplinary social science Ph.D. in criminal justice, sociology, and anthropology from Michigan State University. He holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in sociology from California State University at Northridge.
Dr. Smykla has authored or edited four corrections books. His dataset, Executions in the United States, 1608-2002: The Espy File, is one of the most frequently requested criminal justice datafiles from the University of Michigan’s Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research. Dr. Smykla has published more than 40 research articles on corrections issues, including “The Human Impact of Capital Punishment," "Placing Uruguayan Corrections in Context," "The Impact of the ‘New Penology’ on ISP," "Effects of a Prison Facility on the Regional Economy," "Jail Type and Inmate Behavior," and most recently, "Juvenile Drug Courts." Dr. Smykla has delivered more than 50 conference papers in the United States and abroad, and he serves on the editorial boards of Criminal Justice Review, International Criminal Justice Review, and Journal of Crime and Justice.. In 1986, he was a Senior Fulbright Scholar in Argentina and Uruguay.
Dr. Smykla is a member of the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences and the Southern Criminal Justice Association. In 1996, the Southern Criminal Justice Association named him Educator of the Year. In 1997, he served as Chair of the ACJS annual program committee. In 2000, he served as President of the Southern Criminal Justice Association. Among his civic activities today, Dr. Smykla is a member of the Mobile County Metro Jail Planning Committee and the Mobile Chamber of Commerce Candidates’ Campaign Workshop, a forum for educating citizens interested in running for public office about campaign issues.
