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Hello everyone and welcome to Crisis of Crime! My name is Rachel Means and I will be your host. Thank you so much for joining me today, I'm very excited to get started. This is my very first episode so I wanted to take this time to introduce myself and this podcast. 
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I am a criminologist and I received my master's degree in Criminal Justice from Boston University and I have an undergraduate degree in Kinesiology from James Madison University. I know it's quite the jump from kinesiology to Criminal justice and it was quite the journey getting from one to the other. When I started college I wanted to be a strength and conditioning coach, but then I was very badly injured. So when I graduated from JMU, my career path wasn't quite going in a direction I wanted. So when I decided to go to graduate school, I went with a different direction of another passion of mine, which was criminology and I absolutely love it! 
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Throughout my career, I have worked for multiple non-profits with the aim of helping communities and improving youth programming to ultimately lower crime rates. When it comes to Criminal Justice, a lot of people ask me if my goal is to join the FBI or to be a warden at a prison, but for me, my interest in criminology is more about the preventative side of things. I like to study why crimes were committed in the first place and what were the circumstances in someones life that lead them to that point, and ultimately how can we prevent that from happening in the future. Throughout graduate school I focused a lot on childhood and adolescents and how experiences we have when we are young can affect us in adulthood, criminality being one of those effects. 
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In this podcast, I will be discussing multiple topics under the criminology umbrella. I'll go over the theories of crime, the history behind them, and which ones are still relevant today. I will discuss the factors that may influence an individual to commit a crime, and what we see in childhood and adolescents that can increase the chances of criminality. I'll be discussing the science behind the developing brain and how it can be affected by adverse childhood experiences and I'll also speak about the methods we can use to help cope with those experiences which can help reduce the chances of criminality. Additionally, I want to discuss our criminal justice system and how it needs to change to be more rehabilitative rather than custodial, and how this can affect recidivism rates. If this is a topic that interests you, I hope you will join us for future episodes. I also hope everyone is at home and safe and healthy. Until next time, this has been, Crisis of Crime.