Prior to beginning work on this assignment, read Chapters 2, 7, and 9 from the text. Additionally, watch Bryan Stevenson at TED2012: We Need to Talk About an Injustice (Links to an external site.). Looking ahead at your Capstone Paper in Week 5, provide an outline highlighting the major points of your paper for review and discussion among your classmates and instructor. In your outline, include all major ideas your Capstone Paper will address, with brief two to three sentence explanations for each.

In your paper, outline the following:

• Revise your thesis statement that you created in Week 1, which identifies your social and criminal justice issue.
  • Incorporate any feedback that you received regarding your thesis statement from your instructor.
• Summarize your chosen social and criminal justice issue.
  • Describe what makes this an issue.
  • Provide data to show how this issue has made an impact on society.
  • Explain which social justice principles need to be addressed and why.
  • List the cultural and diversity issues present in your chosen social and criminal justice problem.
  • Evaluate how addressing your chosen issue contributes to the goal of a more just society.
• Analyze the empirical research on your chosen topic.
  • You may use your Week 1 Annotated Bibliography to complete this section of the paper.
• Propose a possible resolution to your chosen social and criminal justice issue.
  • Evaluate which branches of the criminal justice system are impacted/involved and how they either help or hinder the issue.
  • Analyze how the criminal and social justice theories (in relation to the United States Constitution) and landmark U.S. Supreme Court decisions impact your chosen issue and support your resolution.
  • Examine how the judiciary, corrections, and law enforcement systems address social equality, solidarity, human rights, and overall fairness for all and how these essential concepts impact your issue and resolution.
  • Evaluate how poverty, racism, religion and other sociocultural variables may apply to contemporary social and criminal justice by drawing information among the fields of, but not limited to, criminology, law, philosophy, psychology, science, and sociology.

As with all well-researched and organized writing, your topic (first) sentences of your paragraphs contain the major ideas of your paper. Therefore, this outline can be used in the construction of the body of your Capstone Paper in Week 5. Please visit the Ashford Writing Center to access information on how to develop Outlining (Links to an external site.).

The Capstone Paper Outline

• Must be 1,000 to 1,500 words in length (not including title and references pages) and formatted according to APA style as outlined in the Ashford Writing Center’s APA Style (Links to an external site.)
• Must include a separate title page with the following:
  • Title of paper
  • Student’s name
  • Course name and number
  • Instructor’s name
  • Date submitted

For further assistance with the formatting and the title page, refer to APA Formatting for Word 2013 (Links to an external site.).

• Must utilize academic voice. See the Academic Voice (Links to an external site.) resource for additional guidance.
• Must include an introduction and conclusion paragraph. Your introduction paragraph needs to end with a clear thesis statement that indicates the purpose of your paper.
  • For assistance on writing Introductions & Conclusions (Links to an external site.) as well as Writing a Thesis Statement (Links to an external site.), refer to the Ashford Writing Center resources.
• Must use at least five scholarly and/or credible sources in addition to the course text.
  • The Scholarly, Peer-Reviewed, and Other Credible Sources (Links to an external site.) table offers additional guidance on appropriate source types. If you have questions about whether a specific source is appropriate for this assignment, please contact your instructor. Your instructor has the final say about the appropriateness of a specific source for a particular assignment.
• Must document any information used from sources in APA style as outlined in the Ashford Writing Center’s Citing Within Your Paper (Links to an external site.)
• Must include a separate references page that is formatted according to APA style as outlined in the Ashford Writing Center. See the Formatting Your References List (Links to an external site.) resource in the Ashford Writing Center for specifications.