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Central Intelligence Agency, the United Nations, the World Bank, Freedom House, the Brookings Institute,

For this assignment, you will prepare an original annotated bibliography on an assigned topic.  You will not actually write a research paper on this topic. Instead, you will perform all of the research necessary to write the paper; and you will compile an annotated bibliography comprised of no fewer than 10 unique scholarly sources (no more than two from any one author or source). Each listing will be formatted in accordance with the most current American Psychological Association style manual. If you are unfamiliar with APA formatting, you will need to become familiar. Substantial deductions will be made for failure to follow this format.  

This assignment will count as 25% of your final grade.  As this is a course in comparative criminal justice, one of our goals is to learn how other societies organize and operate the mechanisms of criminal justice. We might ask questions such as: Do the police in the United Kingdom perform the same duties as the police in the United States? How can we tell? One of the ways we can tell is by looking at the scholarship relevant to our inquiry. Thats what youll be doing for this assignment. You will be given a country through random assignment. You will then become an expert in the criminal justice system of that country. You will read through the scholarly literature related to criminal justice in your assigned country. 

Once you are sufficiently well-read on your assigned country, you will then pick a criminal justice issue (drug smuggling, illicit or secretive finance, human trafficking, organized crime, corruption, extrajudicial killings, terrorism) and prepare an annotated bibliography related to your countrys role in the chosen transnational criminal activity. I strongly suggest that once you have done a little reading about your country, you check with me about your transnational crime subtopic.  In the example above, if your country was the United Kingdom,

then you would select a number of studies that examine criminal justice in the UK. To get started on your subtopic, you should probably go to Google Scholar and type in the name of your country and the relevant term (i.e. drug smuggling). If you are studying an issue and your country is Liechtenstein, then you might want to pick secret banking (Liechtenstein is a tax haven and a place where a lot of bad people launder dirty money). So, you would probably search for Liechtenstein and secret banking.  Youll likely get hundreds, if not thousands of results. From these studies and any others that you find, you will prepare a bibliography that illustrates the strengths, weaknesses, structure, and function of criminal justice in your country. Similarly, if youre looking at an issue,

you will want to explore how that issue impacts both your country and the countries with which it deals most directly. You should also draw contrasts and comparisons between your country and the United States.  Acceptable Sources This is the place most people have trouble (if they have trouble). Many people dont. For this assignment, you can ONLY use peer-reviewed academic journals. You may not use magazines, newspapers, popular websites, trade journals, Wiki-anything (if you cite Wikipedia you will fail this assignment no matter how great the rest of your work may be).

You can use publications by the Central Intelligence Agency, the United Nations, the World Bank, Freedom House, the Brookings Institute, Fund for Peace, Rand and other non-partisan organizations. There are a number of think tanks that perform a type of skewed scholarship that is also not suitable (the Heritage Institute comes to mind).   If you have a question about a particular source, send me an email and we can discuss it.  Each source you include should contain the following attributes:

Each source will be numbered. You will use single-spaced Times New Roman 12pt type. There will be no extra spaces between lines or paragraphs (Check for them in the MS Word preferences). Your page will have 1 margins all around. You will put one extra space between the end of an annotation and the next source. Do not indent the annotation. Use left justification. Sources will be in alphabetical order by the last name of the lead author. Each source will be properly formatted in accordance with American Psychological Association guidelines. Please study the APA guides very closely. Matching this format precisely is a major component of this assignment. There are innumerable guides available online and on the Internet. Each source will be annotated.

If you have never prepared an annotated bibliography before, theres a good introduction available through Cornell University  http://guides.library.cornell.edu/annotatedbibliography. Relatedly, you will want to study another Cornell resource on how to critically analyze a scholarly work  http://guides.library.cornell.edu/criticallyanalyzing . Your annotations should be long enough to explain these things in clear and complete detail. You should expect to write at least 150-250 words per annotation.