Learn from Experts, Fight for Justice
In this online criminal justice program, you’ll enhance your foundational knowledge, develop written and oral communications skills and expand your critical thinking, reasoning and research abilities. Our faculty are experts — criminal justice practitioners and scholars — who take an active role in mentoring their students.
As an online graduate student, you’ll be challenged to apply ethical principles to complex social and legal issues. You’ll also have opportunities to gain professional experience through credit-bearing internships in criminal justice.
Ways to Study Criminal Justice Online
Students in the criminal justice graduate program can choose from six tracks:
- General Track: Choose six electives from across the tracks in addition to the four core courses.
- Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging: Learn to develop partnerships, facilitate inclusive conversations, create change within an institution, and understand methods for researching, implementing and evaluating diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. - become fluent in the languages of social identity, the impact of social context and group dynamics and psychological and neuropsychological constructs that result in implicit bias, discrimination and marginalization.
- Forensic Behavioral Health: Take courses on addiction, mental health and youth culture and deviance and learn how to manage these issues
- Federal Law Enforcement: Dig into topics like forensic financial analysis, white-collar crime and federal justice with this track.
- Intelligence and Crime Analysis: Explore the intelligence area of criminal justice at a variety of levels, including intelligence policy and process.
- Homeland Security: Classes on terrorism threats and strategy, risk assessment and the sociology of disaster are covered in this track.
Criminal Justice MS/Applied Behavior Analysis Certificate Dual Program
This unique 42-credit Criminal Justice MS/Applied Behavior Analysis Certificate program meets BCBA requirements and prepares students to use a behavioral analytic approach to intervention when working with individuals who struggle with addiction, self-harm, thoughts of suicide and mental health disorders within the criminal justice system. It provides the necessary skills to support neurodivergent people (e.g., those with autism) with navigating the juvenile and criminal justice systems; it also provides the skills for criminal justice officials to help them avoid criminalizing those with mental illness and neurodivergent people.
Accelerated Bachelor's/Master's Program in Criminal Justice
Through Saint Joseph’s University's 4+1 program, current undergraduate students who are completing a B.S. in criminal justice can also start earning credits towards the MS, allowing them to earn a master’s degree in criminal justice in just five years. Students interested in this option must apply to the graduate program in their junior year and be conditionally accepted before they complete their bachelor's degree.