Question 1 Discuss the three leadership positions (supervisors, managers, and administrators) in criminal justice agencies. Include specific examples of each leadership position's roles and responsib

A Criminal Justice Process?

What is readily seen in the foregoing discussion is that our CJS may not be a system at all. Given its current operation and fragmentation, it might be better described as a criminal justice process. As a process, it involves the decisions and actions taken by an institution, offender, victim, or society that influence the offender’s movement into, through, or out of the justice system.4 In its purest form, the criminal justice process functions as shown in Figure 1-1. Note that the horizontal effects result from factors, such as the amount of crime, the number of prosecutions, and the type of court disposition affecting the population in correctional facilities and rehabilitative programs. Vertical effects represent the primary system steps or procedures.5

At one end of this process are the police who understandably may view their primary role as getting lawbreakers off the street. At the other end of the process are the corrections officials who may see their role as being primarily custodial in nature. Somewhere in between are the courts that try to ensure a fair application of the law to each case coming to the bar. As a process, the justice system cannot reduce crime by itself, nor can any of the component parts afford to be insensitive to the needs and problems of the other parts. In criminal justice planning jargon, “You can’t rock one end of the boat.” In other words, every action has a reaction, especially in the justice process. If, say, a bond issue for funds to provide 10 percent more police officers on the streets is passed in a community, the additional arrests made by those added police personnel will have a decided impact on the courts and corrections components. Obviously, although each component operates largely on its own, the actions and reactions of each with respect to crime will send ripples throughout the process. Much of the failure to deal effectively with crime may be attributed to organizational and administrative fragmentation of the justice process. Fragmentation exists among the components of the process, within the individual components, among political jurisdictions, and among persons.

A Criminal Justice Network?

Other observers contend that U.S. justice systems constitute a criminal justice network.6 According to Steven Cox and John Wade, the justice system functions much like a television or radio network whose stations share many programs but in which each station also presents programs that the network does not air on other stations. The network appears as a three-dimensional model in which the public, legislators, police, prosecutors, judges, and correctional officials interact with one another and with others who are outside the traditionally conceived CJS.7 Furthermore, the criminal justice network is said to be based on several key yet erroneous assumptions, including the following: The components of the network cooperate and share similar goals. The network operates according to a set of formal procedural rules to ensure uniform treatment of all persons, the outcome of which constitutes justice. Each person accused of a crime receives due process and is presumed innocent until proven guilty. Each person receives a speedy public trial before an impartial jury of his or her peers and is represented by competent legal counsel.8 Cox and Wade asserted that these key assumptions are erroneous for the following reasons: The three components have incompatible goals and are continually competing with one another for budgetary dollars. Evidence indicates that blacks and whites, males and females, and middle- and lower-class citizens receive differential treatment in the criminal justice network. Some persons are prosecuted, some are not; some are involved in plea bargaining, others are not; some are convicted and sent to prison, whereas others convicted of the same type of offense are not. A great deal of the plea negotiation process remains largely invisible, such as “unofficial probation” with juveniles. In addition, Cox and Wade argued, considerable evidence points to the fact that criminal justice employees do not presume their clients or arrestees to be innocent. Finally, these proponents of a network view of the justice process argued that the current backlog of cases does not ensure a speedy trial, even though a vast majority (at least 90%) of all arrestees plead guilty prior to trial.9 Adherents of this position, therefore, believe that our CJS is probably not a just network in the eyes of the poor, minority groups, or individual victims. Citizens, they also assert, may not know what to expect from such a network. Some believe that the system does not work as a network at all and that this conception is not worth their support.10

A Criminal Justice Nonsystem?

Many observers argue that the three components of the CJS actually comprise a criminal justice nonsystem. They maintain that the three segments of the U.S. CJS that deal with criminal behavior do not always function in harmony and that the system is neither efficient enough to create a credible fear of punishment nor fair enough to command respect for its values. Indeed, these theorists are given considerable support by the President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice (commonly known as the Crime Commission), which made the following comment: The system of criminal justice used in America to deal with those crimes it cannot prevent and those criminals it cannot deter is not a monolithic, or even a consistent, system. It was not designed or built in one piece at one time. Its philosophic core is that a person may be punished by the Government, if, and only if, it has been proven by an impartial and deliberate process that he has violated a specific law. Around that core, layer upon layer of institutions and procedures, some carefully constructed and some improvised, some inspired by principle and some by expediency, have accumulated. Parts of the system—magistrates, courts, trial by jury, bail—are of great antiquity. Other parts—juvenile courts, probation and parole, professional policemen—are relatively new. Every village, town, county, city, and State has its own criminal justice system, and there is a Federal one as well. All of them operate somewhat alike, no two of them operate precisely alike.11 Alfred Cohn and Roy Udolf stated that criminal justice “is not a system, and it has little to do with justice as that term is ordinarily understood.”12 Also in this school of thought are Burton Wright and Vernon Fox, who asserted that “the criminal justice system…is frequently criticized because it is not a coordinated structure—not really a system. In many ways this is true.”13 These writers would probably agree that little has changed since 1971, when Newsweek stated in a special report entitled “Justice on Trial” that America’s system of criminal justice is too swamped to deliver more than the roughest justice—and too ragged really to be called a system. “What we have,” says one former government hand, “is a non-system in which the police don’t catch criminals, the courts don’t try them, and the prisons don’t reform them. The system, in a word, is in trouble. The trouble has been neglect. The paralysis of the civil courts, where it takes five years to get a judgment in a damage suit—the courts—badly managed, woefully undermanned and so inundated with cases that they have to run fast just to stand still.”14 Unfortunately, in many jurisdictions, those words still ring true. Too often, today’s justice administrators cannot be innovators or reformers but rather simply “make do.” As one law professor stated, “Oliver Wendell Holmes could not survive in our criminal court. How can you be an eminent jurist when you have to deal with this mess?”15 Those who hold that the justice system is in reality no system at all can also point to the fact that many practitioners in the field (police, judges, prosecutors, correctional workers, and private attorneys) and academicians concede that the entire justice system is in crisis, even rapidly approaching a major breakdown. They can cite problems everywhere—large numbers of police calls for service, overcrowded court dockets, and high prison populations. In short, they contend that the system is in a state of dysfunction, largely as a result of its fragmentation and lack of cohesion.16 System fragmentation is largely believed to directly affect the amount and type of crime that exists. Contributing to this fragmentation are the wide discretionary powers possessed by actors in the justice system. For example, police officers (primarily those having the least experience, education, and training) have great discretion over whom they arrest and are effectively able to dictate policy as they go about performing their duties. Here again, the Crime Commission was moved to comment as follows, realizing that how the police officer moves around his or her territory depends largely on this discretion: Crime does not look the same on the street as it does in a legislative chamber. How much noise or profanity makes conduct “disorderly” within the meaning of the law? When must a quarrel be treated as a criminal assault: at the first threat, or at the first shove, or at the first blow, or after blood is drawn, or when a serious injury is inflicted? How suspicious must conduct be before there is “probable cause,” the constitutional basis for an arrest? Every [officer], however sketchy or incomplete his education, is an interpreter of the law.17 Judicial officers also possess great discretionary latitude. State statutes require judges to provide deterrence, retribution, rehabilitation, and incapacitation—all in the same sentence. Well-publicized studies of the sentencing tendencies of judges—in which participants were given identical facts in cases and were to impose sentences based on the offender’s violation of the law—have demonstrated considerable discretion and unevenness in the judges’ sentences. The nonsystem advocates believe this to be further evidence that a basic inequality exists—an inequality in justice that is communicated to the offender.18 Finally, fragmentation also occurs in corrections—the part of the criminal justice process that the U.S. public sees the least of and knows the least about. Indeed, as the Crime Commission noted, the federal government, all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and most of the country’s 3,047 counties now engage in correctional activities of some form. Each level of government acts independently of the others, and the responsibility for the administration of corrections is divided within the given jurisdictions as well.19 With this fragmentation comes polarity in identifying and establishing the primary goals of the system. The police, enforcing the laws, emphasize community protection; the courts weigh both sides of the issue—individual rights and community needs; and corrections facilities work with the individual. Each of these groups has its own perception of the offender, creating goal conflict; that is, the goal of the police and the prosecutor is to get the transgressor off the street, which is antithetical to the caretaker role of the corrections worker who often wants to rehabilitate and return the offender to the community. The criminal justice process does not allow many alternative means of dealing with offenders. The nonsystem adherent believes that eventually the offender will become a mere statistic, more important on paper than as a human being.20 Because the justice process lacks sufficient program and procedural flexibility, these adherents argue that its workers either can circumvent policies, rules, and regulations or adhere to organizational practices they know are, at times, dysfunctional. (As evidence of the former, they point to instances of informal treatment of criminal cases; e.g., a police officer “bends” someone’s constitutional rights in order to return stolen property to its rightful owner, or a juvenile probation officer, without a solid case but with strong suspicion, warns a youth that any further infractions will result in formal court-involved proceedings.)