Finding OERs by Discipline

Title covering CJ in the community, multiculturalism, policed communities, and strategies for facilitating conflict resolution.

Lisa Storm (2015): University of Minnesota Libraries Publishing. This engaging and interactive textbook will enhance a student's ability to be successful in academics or a career in criminal justice. Covers the Legal System in the United States, Constitutional Protections, types of offenses, and an extensive case listing in the Appendix. Criminal Law is adapted from a work produced and distributed under a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-SA) in 2012 by a publisher who has requested that they and the original author not receive attribution. This adapted edition is produced by the University of Minnesota Libraries Publishing through the eLearning Support Initiative.

This OER textbook is designed for an “introduction to criminal justice” class or a similar course. It is designed to provide a survey of the field, including police, courts, and corrections, to students with no background in criminal justice.

Steve McCartney & Rick Parent (2015): BCcampus. In this book, you will examine the moral and ethical issues that exist within law enforcement. This book will also familiarize you with the basic history, principles, and theories of ethics. These concepts will then be applied to major components of the criminal justice system: policing, the courts, and corrections. Discussion will focus on personal values, individual responsibility, decision making, discretion, and the structure of accountability. Specific topics covered include core values, codes of conduct, ethics, organizational consequences, liability, and the importance of critical thinking. By the end of this book, you will be able to distinguish and critically debate contemporary ethical issues in law enforcement.

Cornell Law School (2014): CALI's eLangdell® Press. Criminal procedure deals with the set of rules governing the series of proceedings through which the government enforces substantive criminal law. This series of Federal Rules books, consisting of the Federal Rules of Evidence, Criminal Procedure and Civil Procedure, are powered by the Legal Information Institute at Cornell Law School, and created in partnership with The Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction (CALI).

This textbook was designed especially for Taft Community College Administration of Justice students. The following chapters will cover topics such as: judicial process, types of prisons, how to deal with Juvenile delinquency, and different types of sentencing.

Introduction to Criminal Investigation, Processes, Practices, and Thinking, as the title suggests, is a teaching text describing and segmenting criminal investigations into its component parts to illustrate the craft of criminal investigation. Delineating criminal investigation within the components of task-skills and thinking-skills, this book describes task-skills such incident response, crime scene management, evidence management, witness management, and forensic analysis, as essential foundations supporting the critical thinking-skills of offence validation and theory development for the creation of effective investigative plans aimed at forming reasonable grounds for belief.

By Alison S. Burke et al (2019): Open Oregon Educational Resources. This OER covers law enforcement, criminal courts, sentencing, penal institutions, and community-based sanctions. It also includes historical and contemporary perspectives on components of the criminal justice system, as well as the legal and constitutional frameworks in which they operate. Students will learn the history, functions, responsibilities, processes, and importance of each component of the criminal justice system. Students will become familiar with research and its relationship to criminal justice policy.

Larry Alvarez (2018): College of the Canyons. Compiled and distributed for use at College of the Canyons in California. Part of their ZTC - Zero Cost Textbook initiative, this PDF is available as a viewable and downloadable file in Google Drive. This textbook uses real examples of court rulings to demonstrate how the American justice system functions.