When Richard Shenk enrolled in Slippery Rock University in 2004, the school didn't have a criminal justice major. But in his second year the major was formed, allowing him to graduate with a Bachelor of Arts in criminal justice.

“I thought I was going to be a police officer after college, and then I got out and that opened my eyes to re-entry and community corrections,” said Shenk, who is originally from Erie.

A year after college, he began working for Renewal, a Pittsburgh-based nonprofit corrections agency certified by the American Correctional Association. Shenk said that the organization houses 670 inmates, including violent and non-violent offenders. Renewal has contracts with the federal government, the state and Allegheny County to take inmates into its community-based facilities.

“Seeing that there was a different way of helping people, that worked best for me. Rather than locking them up and throwing away the keys, community corrections helps people deal with the problems that led them here in the first place,” Shenk said. “Most everybody who gets incarcerated will be released at some point, so just releasing them without any tools, you're setting them up for being incarcerated again. We're helping people build a nest egg, put themselves in a better place, so they don't have to resort to that behavior.”

One of Shenk's professors at Slippery Rock University was Rebecca Ridener, Ph.D., who is one of six full-time staff members with the school's Criminology and Criminal Justice program.

“The program gives (students) a leg up against those they're competing against,” Ridener said, noting that, unlike Shenk, most of the students she teaches go into law enforcement.

“I would argue it makes them a well-rounded officer,” she said. “They have more information about the criminal justice system as a whole, criminology, understanding, research. Knowledge is power.”

Some classes in the program cover crime and the media, the death penalty, white collar crime, criminal investigations and criminal justice policy.

Ridener said that while most of her students go into policing, either at the local level or state police, the program allows for a wider variety of choices. Some of her students, she said, become correctional officers or work with offenders on treatment, and others become border patrol agents or military police officers.

“The program gives you a framework to see the world and helps our students really focus on what they want to do,” Ridener said.

Another student who Ridener taught became a Pittsburgh police officer after graduating almost four years ago.

“Growing up, I didn't want to be a cop because I thought I had better things to do than write parking tickets,” said Zachary Webb, who moved from Ohio to attend Slippery Rock University and has never left the state. “I went into school thinking I would go to the FBI. Then, you learn the system. You learn the material. They bring public speakers and you start to see the reality of how things work.”

Webb completed his undergraduate work and eventually graduated with a Master's in criminal justice. And through it all, he changed his mind about local law enforcement.

“I think it's the best job in the world,” Webb said, “One, I work with a lot of good guys. We have a great time doing what we do. There's a lot of excitement.”

Webb won the medal of valor for his response to a house fire last summer.

“You never know what's going to happen,” Webb said. “One minute, it's a quiet shift — the next minute, it's like the world's ending.”

Webb said he doesn't have any specific plans for the future and instead is enjoying his current post in Pittsburgh's police Zone 3, which includes such neighborhoods as Mount Lebanon, South Side Flats and Carrick.

“I'm having a lot of fun doing what I do now,” Webb said. “Maybe I'd like to go to the detective bureau with the city.”

Other schools in the region take a more open approach to the kinds of classes offered in criminal justice programs.

In the University of Pittsburgh at Bradford, the major offers more than 30 courses, including terrorism in a post-Sept. 11 world; substance abuse and treatment; Islam and social justice; drugs, crime and social policy; law enforcement operations; and organized crime in America.

In 2008, the school opened a facility that recreates crime scenes for students. Known as the Crime Scene Investigation House and Lab, the house is completely furnished and has panoramic cameras and two-way sound systems in every room.

Tony Gaskew, coordinator of criminal forensic studies and assistant professor of criminal justice, couldn't be reached for comment, but noted the benefits of the facility on the school's website. He said they observe the students from the lab and give them feedback on their work.

Typically, students and staff will serve as “witnesses” for the student investigators. A mannequin will typically serve as the dead victim, with sheep blood seeping out of the “corpse,” according to information on the school's site. The sheep's blood is used because it reacts to testing similarly to how human blood would in field tests that students conduct.

According to Gaskew's biography, he has more than 20 years of policing experience, including as a member of the U.S. Department of Justice's Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force, where he conducted wiretap and conspiracy investigations within the Middle District of Florida.