This thoroughly revised and updated Second Edition of best-selling, Exploring Criminal Justice: The Essentials, provides a clear and concise introduction to the American criminal justice system in an engaging and accessible format. It examines the people and processes that make up the system and how they interact. It also covers the historic context of the criminal justice system so that readers will understand how and why we developed the system that is in place today. This Second Edition provides contemporary data and updated case studies and references for all topics, and will help your students understand the relationships between the police, the courts, and corrections. Criminal Justice: The Essentials, Second Edition will provide your undergraduate students a framework for thinking about crime and justice, aid them in becoming familiar with the terminology of the criminal justice system, and ultimately help them understand how and why the American criminal justice system works as it does. Key Features: • Presents connections between theories of crime and policy responses. This comprehensive introduction covers all major theories of crime causation, including female criminality, and goes beyond by tying the theoretical perspectives to social policies for preventing crime. • Provides historical context for police, courts, and corrections. Includes brief explorations of the historical context for these components of the criminal justice system. • Includes substantial coverage of juvenile offenders in the criminal justice system, including what happens to juvenile offenders who are waived to criminal court and prosecuted as adults. • Contains a new chapter dedicated to terrorism and cybercrime. Two of the most recent challenges to criminal justice, terrorism and cybercrime, have become extremely hot topics, are heatedly debated in Congress, and create new demands on police and the courts. • Field tested with undergraduate students. Several reviews were conducted with a large group of students to evaluate the text's readability, comprehensiveness, and ability to engage student attention. As a result, this revised Second Edition is student-friendly from cover to cover!