The New Criminal Justice

American Communities and the Changing World of Crime Control

John Klofas, Natalie Kroovand Hipple, Edmund McGarrell, John Klofas, Natalie Kroovand Hipple, Edmund McGarrell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780415997287
• eBook ISBN: 9781135280154
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Comparative Law
• Index: Law

Criminal Justice in the United States is in the midst of momentous changes: an era of low crime rates not seen since the 1960s, and a variety of budget crunches also exerting profound impacts on the system. This is the first book available to chronicle these changes and suggest a new, emerging model to the Criminal Justice system, emphasizing:

• collaboration across agencies previously viewed as relatively autonomous
• a focus on location problems and local solutions rather than a widely shared understanding of crime or broad application of similar interventions
• a deep commitment to research which guides problem assessment and policy formulation and intervention.

Ideal for use in graduate, as well as undergraduate capstone courses.

SECTION 1
The Changing World of Criminal Justice

It is nearly impossible to overstate the importance of President Johnson’s Crime Commission and its 1967 report. Although other organizations had examined the processes of criminal justice before, the Commission provided the most sweeping and influential analysis of the Nation’s response to crime. At its center was the concept of a system of agencies and offices in linear formation passing cases on from one to another, each with its own mission and each providing some check and balance on those that come before it. This book opens with the recognition of the power of the Commission’s work, especially as it developed the description and the diagram of the criminal justice system presented in the report of the task force on technology. The first chapter argues that the Commission’s thinking represented as close to an intellectual revolution as has been seen in criminal justice. It remains a powerful influence on our thinking, but significant changes have also occurred.

Chapter 1 of this volume presents the core of critical ideas for the book. It argues that the view of the criminal justice system as a linear model in which cases move forward across semi-autonomous agencies does not fully capture the criminal justice process today. Instead, interest in problem solving in general and crime reduction in particular has required us to consider a more complex and more powerful model of criminal justice. The emerging model emphasizes: (1) collaboration across agencies previously viewed as relatively autonomous, (2) a focus on local problems and local solutions rather than a widely shared understanding of crime or broad application of similar interventions, and (3) finally a deep commitment to research, which guides problem assessment and policy formulation and intervention.

Chapter 2 takes on the task that proved so important to the President’s Commission, the ability to describe in detail and to portray the operations of the criminal justice process. One goal of the Commission was to present a model of the way that cases are processed so that the impact of changes in the number or types of cases, or in the ways decisions were made, could be modeled and used to understand and predict probable outcomes. The well-known diagram of the criminal justice system was intended to serve as a living portrait of how that system worked and how changes in any part of it might affect changes in its other parts.

The chapter addresses the question of how case processing may be viewed differently when we recognize the increased significance of the three elements of agency collaboration, local focus and reliance of research. To those factors we also introduce a somewhat new and different tool to assist in describing criminal justice. Fuzzy logic has been used by systems analysts to allow their models to incorporate degrees of ambiguity in decision-making processes. In our case we allow for consideration of different degrees of severity of crimes or degrees of certainty about guilt or innocence or degrees to which sanctions might be thought of as therapeutic or punitive. The combination of these elements allows us to consider three different aspects of the criminal justice system including: (1) the community process by which the resources for addressing crime are assembled differently across communities, (2) the process by which behavior comes to be regarded as of greater or lesser concern to community members, and (3) ways in which communities can respond to that behavior. The principles of this model also indicate that, at each step, surveillance of offenders and potential offenders influences decision making through a feedback process. Considering the three characteristics of the New Criminal Justice and applying “fuzzy logic” focuses attention on substantially different aspects of case processing than in the original Commission approach.

Chapter 3 provides an outline of the implementation of many of the ideas discussed in the first two chapters. It reviews Project Safe Neighborhoods, a program that we will visit again in subsequent chapters. The project provided a national model of the process of strategic problem solving aimed at a reduction in violent crime and particularly a reduction in gun crimes. With support through United States Attorneys’ Offices, local criminal justice systems, working with trained researchers, collaborated in a process of problem identification, specification, and intervention. The project’s core characteristics included accountability or a focus on real crime reduction, partnerships in criminal justice, outreach to communities, and significant training focused on strategic planning. As later chapters will show, these elements could be combined in ways to produce many different programs based on local needs, but together they resulted in an often novel and cohesive approach to local crime problems.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

1 The first section of this book may be its most challenging. The reader is asked to consider with a new eye something that has become very familiar. The President’s Commission view of criminal justice has been a powerful way of organizing what we know in the field. Can you now reconsider the criminal justice system and see how our language of crime and the response to it matches the Commission model? How does our current lexicon handle things such as forfeiture cases that are not moved forward through the system? Think of drug courts that offer treatment alternatives to sanctions but which may themselves require extensive jail stays. How are these courts like or unlike other criminal proceedings?

2 The core ideas of collaboration across the criminal justice system, local focus, and use of research suggest only the broadest elements related to understanding and processing criminal offenses. They do not, in and of themselves, promise positive outcomes such as lower crime and fairer outcomes. Consider how these elements may work together to improve these sorts of outcomes and how they might also contribute to problems. What kind of safeguards might help minimize the potential problems you see?

3 These chapters suggest that criminal justice is becoming organized in new ways and around new core ideas. It is suggested that the classic model of criminal justice is changing. What are the implications of this for those who work in criminal justice? What new knowledge or skills do you think will be useful under this new approach to crime and crime control?

CHAPTER 1
The New Criminal Justice

John M. Klofas, Natalie Kroovand Hipple, and Edmund F. McGarrell

In his classic work, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn argued that “normal science” plods along based upon principles on which there is general agreement in a particular discipline or field of science (1970). Change occurs by revolution when those key principles are disconfirmed by research. The resulting crisis spawns new theories. They then go on to guide a new era of “puzzle solving” science that is propelled toward its next revolution when accepted doctrine will once again be rejected through research. For Kuhn, that is the path of progress in the sciences.

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 PRESIDENT’S 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 President’s 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 Commission’s 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 President’s Commission report concludes that analyses of its effects “should caution us about expecting too much in the way of long-term effects of blue-ribbon crime commissions” (Conley, 1994, p. xiii).

To consider only the Commission’s specific recommendations, though, may miss the forest for the trees. The President’s 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 President’s Commission provided, if not the first, certainly the strongest endorsement of the idea that the agencies of criminal justice comprised a “system” (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 “the criminal process … is not a hodgepodge of random actions. It is rather a continuum—an orderly progression of events … A study of the system must begin by examining it as a whole” (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 “Systems Model” was translated into an iconic diagram that has been reprinted in nearly every criminal justice textbook since it first appeared in the President’s Commission’s 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 “system” was soon described as an “informal system” or even a “non-system” 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 President’s 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.

THE NEW CRIMINAL JUSTICE

The fundamental argument of this chapter is that observation today will permit description of a different model of criminal justice from that described by the President’s Commission in 1967. In this new model, the organizations of criminal justice no longer operate in a sequence, connected...

Table of contents

• CRIMINOLOGY AND JUSTICE STUDIES SERIES
• CONTENTS
• SERIES EDITOR FOREWORD
• FOREWORD
• PREFACE
• SECTION 1 The Changing World of Criminal Justice
• SECTION 2 The New Criminal Justice in Practice
• SECTION 3 New Knowledge for New Practice in Criminal Justice
• SECTION 4 Where Do We Go from Here?
• REFERENCES
• CONTRIBUTORS
• INDEX