John M. Klofas, Natalie Kroovand Hipple, and Edmund F. McGarrell
Rarely has change in American criminal justice been described in terms of revolution. More commonly change in this field has been described using more modest terms, usually by invoking the language of organizational change or knowledge utilization rather than the language of revolution (see Stojkovic et al., 2008; Havelock, 1979). Among the common descriptions, change in criminal justice has often been seen as the result of rational planning (see Hudzik and Cordner, 1983). From an alternative view, reforms have sometimes been driven by the coercive power of the courts (Ekland-Olson and Martin, 1988). Through the sixties, the Supreme Court under Earl Warren was often seen as moving criminal justice to the left, whereas later Courts have been viewed as reaching different results in their compromises of conflicting liberal and conservative ideologies. Scholars have argued that struggles over these ideological positions dominate policy making in the field of criminal justice (see Cullen and Gilbert, 1982). And too, change may result from technological innovation. The influence of the squad car or radios or even 9-1-1 systems comes to mind (Gaines et al., 2003). On the other hand, change in criminal justice has sometimes been viewed as the barely perceptible reflection of incremental steps driven by a wide range of marginally potent influences (see Schafer, 2004).
REVOLUTION AND THE 1967 PRESIDENTâS COMMISSION
If one were to seek to understand change in criminal justice in the United States as revolutionary the only event in recent history that might qualify for investigation would be the publication of the 1967 Presidentâs Crime Commission report, The Challenge of Crime in a Free Society (1967a) and its companion volumes, although there is certainly no consensus on this point. Arguably the Commission report presented a number of ideas that represented significant departures from the past. The task force report on crime and its impact brought attention to victimization issues and the measurement of crime (Reiss, 1994). Kelling and Coles (1996, p. 46) argue that the Commissionâs support for decriminalizing drunkenness had a significant influence. The report on juvenile delinquency and youth crime pushed an agenda of diversion and deinstitutionalization (Pisciotta, 1994). The report on science and technology has been credited with having significant influences on the development of forensics and information systems (Blumstein, 1994). Despite these claims, however, none of these effects would seem to rise to the level of revolutionary in either their description or their impact. In fact, a 25-year retrospective look at the impact of the 1967 Presidentâs Commission report concludes that analyses of its effects âshould caution us about expecting too much in the way of long-term effects of blue-ribbon crime commissionsâ (Conley, 1994, p. xiii).
To consider only the Commissionâs specific recommendations, though, may miss the forest for the trees. The Presidentâs Commission did take one position that seems to be taken largely for granted today, but which arguably rose to the level of revolutionary at the time. That position has been so widely accepted that few seemed able to imagine that a different paradigm once shaped thinking about criminal justice or that a new paradigm could emerge. Specifically, the Presidentâs Commission provided, if not the first, certainly the strongest endorsement of the idea that the agencies of criminal justice comprised a âsystemâ (see Walker, 1978). With analytic roots in the understanding of biological and mechanical systems, the criminal justice system was seen as moving cases forward from one agency to the next, almost always in one direction but having some built-in feedback and self-regulating mechanisms. The Com- mission noted âthe criminal process ⌠is not a hodgepodge of random actions. It is rather a continuumâan orderly progression of events ⌠A study of the system must begin by examining it as a wholeâ (p. 7). Although the Commission notes that lower serious offenses might be handled differently, and that there were local differences, it presented a unified overall design. The depiction of this âSystems Modelâ was translated into an iconic diagram that has been reprinted in nearly every criminal justice textbook since it first appeared in the Presidentâs Commissionâs summary report.
Still, agreement has not been universal. Kelling and Coles (1996) provided one critique of viewing criminal justice as a system, particularly with reference to the police role. They note that the system model, which placed police at the front end of the structure, had the effect of narrowing the expected role of the police nearly exclusively to law enforcement. Lost was the view of the police as a provider of a wide range of general services while functioning as a branch of local government. Police departments, which were once seen as primarily local institutions, now were to be viewed as reflecting a set of common national interests and bureaucratic procedures. They were recognized as the front end of a largely linear system through which people, or more to the point cases, moved. Under the system model, the loosely coupled agencies of criminal justice pursued their own separate missions, one after another, and, in doing so, provided some checks and balances on one another. It is a model of clarity of purpose and rationality of process.
Of course, the extent to which the operation of the system ever truly reflected the ideal type suggested by its model could be debated. Certainly, critics found the inefficiencies worthy of note. What the Crime Commission described as a âsystemâ was soon described as an âinformal systemâ or even a ânon-systemâ and other models were invoked to describe it, among them, for example, the model of wedding cake (see Walker, 1988) whose virtue was to recognize differences in case treatment according to the significance of the underlying offense.
Despite these re-examinations one should not underestimate the power of the system paradigm. Even today, the tendency is to see police, courts and corrections as having largely separate missions linked by the unidirectional movement of cases across them. Criminal justice systems in different jurisdictions, including the state level or federal level, are also seen largely as only loosely coupled with local agencies. In this view criminal justice is examined as a process in which inputs from one part are exported to the next in a sequence moving from police to courts to corrections. The process is described with a language using concepts of case flow and outcome. Even most of its critics accept the basic systems perspective, but complain of its fragmentation and inefficiencies. They often support reforms to streamline or otherwise improve system efficiency.
There are also other indicators of the potency of this paradigm in criminal justice. Some have found virtue in what others have lamented as fragmentation. In maintaining that creating a more monolithic system merits caution, Kevin Wright (2004) has argued that the existing complex system has several advantages. First, in its current state, the system allows its loosely connected member agencies to reflect diversity in ideas about justice. Some interests, he argues, can reflect such goals as incapacitation and retribution, whereas others represent interests in reintegration and community supervision. Second, the lack of integration across the system allows adaptation to special problems. Wright notes that corrections can moderate, but not fully reverse, harsh sentences resulting from periodic public outcries. Finally, he argues that the inconsistencies and irregularities across the system serve as a check on state power (see also Forst, 1977).
Even its strongest critics, then, appear to have adopted the basic premise of the Presidentâs Commission. But today there is also reason to question that premise. Although perhaps not so dramatic as the crises that Kuhn argues undermine scientific paradigms (1970, p. 66), there are changes in criminal justice that remain mostly ignored, but which may portend even more significant change in the near future.
