Managing Criminal Justice Organizations

An Introduction to Theory and Practice

Richard Kania, Richards Davis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429880445
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Corruption & Misconduct
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Managing Criminal Justice Organizations: An Introduction to Theory and Practice, 3rd Edition, covers the formal and informal nature of the organizations involved in criminal justice. Kania and Davis provide an introduction to the administration, organization, and management of criminal justice organizations. This management aspect is the key to ensuring the proper running of criminal justice agencies in their efforts to combat crime. The book begins by discussing the eight principles of public management: leading, organizing, deciding, evaluating, staffing, training, allocating, and reporting. It then describes management positions in criminal justice. These include police and law enforcement management; managing the prosecution of criminal suspects; managing bail, bond, and pretrial detention services; managing victim and witness services; managing the judicial system; and managing adult corrections. The remaining chapters cover the pioneers and predecessors of modern public service management theory; leadership in criminal justice; bureaucracies and organizational principles; decision making and planning; performance evaluation, appraisal, and assessment; staffing and personnel issues; training and education for criminal justice; allocation of organizational resources; information management and organizational communications; and future issues in criminal justice management.

This text is suitable for introductory criminal justice management courses, preparing students to work in law enforcement, corrections, and the courts. The companion website offers case studies, test banks, lecture slides, and handouts, exercises and forms for use in class.

1

An Introduction to Criminal Justice Management

A textbook on criminal justice management should begin by answering some basic questions about what management is and why studying it is important. Often the words administration, organization, and management are used as if they were synonymous, and they certainly do have overlapping meanings. Other related key terms important in this discussion are supervision, agency, functionaries (officers, officials, administrators, and agents), and bureaucracy. This imprecision in our language will result in some disagreement and confusion about these terms that we and others are and should be using. Different authors have used them in different ways. So we will begin by discussing these concepts.

Management is the art of overseeing, controlling, and exercising authority over the workforce of an agency and the organizational activities needed to guide it to accomplish a purpose or function. The management of an organization is the leadership team of the organization, and is comprised of the chief executive, department or division heads, middle-level managers, and their support staffs. A manager is an official who has authority, managerial, and supervisory functions. A manager is not doing the primary tasks given to the organization, but, instead, is seeing that these tasks of the organization are being done.

Administration is the art of attending to an organizational activity or function—being in charge of some aspects supporting the conduct and exercise of that function and of the individuals assigned to achieve it. The administration is the leadership team of the organization, comprised of administrators and their support staffs. An administrator is an official who has authority and administrative and supervisory functions, some of which are managerial.

Organization is the art of planning, arranging, and structuring human activities and agencies, and also the condition of being organized. An organization is a work group united for some purpose or function; it includes managers, administrators, first-line supervisors, support staff, and the functionaries of the organization. Functionaries are the administrators; officials and officers are those who do the actual work of the agency. The term agent also is used to refer to those who are engaged by the organization to support its work; it includes those under contract to do tasks for the organization as well as employees of the organization. Organizing is the task of applying systematic structure and order to a human enterprise such as a governmental bureaucracy. Dean Champion has introduced the concept of “units of analysis” to the discussion of organizations (2003, pp. 10–14), by which he means the individuals of an agency, the small interpersonal work groups (the teams), and the formal organization as a whole (the agency).

BOX 1.1 A ROSE BY ANY OTHER NAME? MANAGEMENT OR ADMINISTRATION

In general, courses and textbooks in business curricula prefer the term management (Drucker, 1954, 1980, 1985, 1990; Fiedler & Chemers, 1974; Hersey & Blanchard, 1982; Massie, 1987; Roethlisberger, 1941; Roethlisberger & Dickson, 1939; Sisk & Williams, 1981; Taylor, 1911), while courses and textbooks in government and political science have preferred administration, as in “public administration” (Berkley, 1981; Mosher, 1975; Nigro & Nigro, 1973; Stahl, 1971). Many authors in criminal justice follow the preference for the term public administration (Carlson & Garrett, 1999; Champion, 2003; Peak, 2006; Phillips & Roberts, 2000; Souryal, 1995; Swanson & Territo, 1983; Wilson & McLaren, 1977). Exceptions abound though, as many criminal justice authors prefer the term management (Buchholz, 1990; Chase & Reveal, 1983; Cohn & Ward, 1980; Forsyth, 2004; Greene, 1982; Lynch, 1986; Lynch & Lynch, 2005; McDonald, 2002; Roberg, Kuykendall, & Novak, 2002; Thibault, Lynch, & McBride, 2001; U.S. Bureau of Prisons, 1973; Whisenand, 1981; Whisenand & Ferguson, 1978), and some criminal justice authors use both terms comfortably (Allen & Sawhney, 2010; Klofas, Stojkovic, & Kalinich, 1990). There are no hard-and-fast rules to settle this nomenclature question.

A bureaucracy is a specific type of organization managed by officials selected and appointed on the basis of their objective preparation, talents, and merits. A bureaucrat is an official or functionary within such a bureaucracy, and may be a manager, administrator or line officer.

Because management is the term more commonly associated with business, it carries additional connotations of greater initiative, more innovation, and more entrepreneurial efforts. Administration, the term in greater favor among political scientists, carries with it an implication of subservience to political institutions, the legislature, courts, and the elected chief executive transferring initiative and innovation to those branches of government and leaving administration to carry out the policies those three branches establish. As we will discover in Chapter 3, there is room for innovation, entrepreneurship, and initiative within the senior levels of the bureaucracy. It is for this reason that we prefer to focus on management. Yet it should be clear that the differences of administration and management are subtle and reflect the approach of the author choosing to write about them.

Dean Champion (2003) writes:

For our purposes, the administration of justice, or justice administration, is the description and elaboration of the structural, functional, and managerial processes involved in the coordination of activities related to determining the incidence of criminal conduct, the detection and apprehension of alleged criminals, an assessment of the credibility of evidence against the accused, a formal judgment about that conduct, and how that conduct is punished. (p. 5)

While all that is true, the main focus of this book is the managing of criminal justice organizations. What we will study has less to do with the traditional approaches to the study of criminal justice, crime, or criminological theory than it does with business administration or public administration, but this management aspect is critical to understanding the proper running (both managing and administering) of criminal justice agencies in their efforts to reduce and ameliorate crime. As Kenneth Peak (2006) uses and explains it, the concept of “administration” includes both management and supervision. His view is that it also involves the processes whereby workers are organized to achieve organizational objectives. Peak sees management as part of administration. In this book, we will reverse that. Peak and several others place administrators at the top of the organizational hierarchy, managers in the middle, and supervisors at the working level. It might be just as well to place managers on top, administrators next, and agree that first-line supervisors rank third in the administration-management team of an organization.

We do agree that all are involved in the organization of the workforce, and we also agree that there are basic, sound principles of organization in play that effective supervisors, administrators, and managers will use in the running of their agencies. So this book is about criminal justice organization, administration, and management, viewed from the perspective of a criminal justice manager. Managers use principles of administrative science to manage. Like Peak, we include within management the concept of supervision, even though it might be better seen as an aspect of leadership, to be discussed in Chapter 4, which is devoted to that topic.

As this discussion has suggested, the study of administration, organization, and management is complicated by popular misunderstandings of the key terms. It is not uncommon to find even bright, well-informed students who confuse management with administration and mix both with organization. It is easy to limit the conceptualization of organization to only its “corporate-entity” meaning, a synonym for agency (e.g., the organization, as in the FBI), thereby ignoring its process meaning (e.g., organization), that is, the process of arranging and structuring cooperative human effort. Indeed, there are scholars who use these words with such indiscrimination that the distinctions are blurred. The study of organization is not the study of organizations, but the science of how organizations are best organized, that is, structured and arranged. Champion (2003) tells us what a criminal justice organization is. “Any criminal justice organization is a predetermined arrangement of persons whose interrelated tasks and specialties enable the total aggregate to achieve goals” (p. 7). He also warns us that the agencies have diverse goals, implicitly, and sometimes conflicting goals (p. 6). Part of the task of the manager is sorting all of this out.

Management, as to be used in this book, is not just the study of the management teams of organizations, but is also the study of the art of managing, including both skills in organization and in administration. Administration here is more than just the administrative personnel component of the agency; it is the science and art of the administrative process by which the agency is operated.

BOX 1.2 FIVE FRIENDS, FIVE MANAGERS

So who, then, is a criminal justice manager? Let me introduce you to five young criminal justice managers who recently came together for their 10th anniversary class reunion. Each had majored in criminal justice at the university, and each has followed a different path in his or her career. Each is working in a different city, and they have not seen much of each other over the past decade. Over dinner, they recount their careers for each other and for you. Each has enjoyed the “fast track” in his or her career, and each is now a criminal justice manager. None is yet the chief executive officer of their agency, but each of them has the ambition to be.

Paul was a fair athlete, playing in both team and individual sports at the university. He was hired by the police department in Vollmer City right after graduation, stayed in uniform, and recently was promoted to lieutenant in the patrol division. He still plays golf and tennis when he can find the time. His department sent him to the FBI National Academy in Quantico, Virginia, last year.

Carol always had a talent for writing and was also quite sophisticated in the use of computers. She was hired as a deputy clerk of court after taking some additional paralegal courses and is now the chief clerk of the lower, misdemeanor court for Vanderbilt County. She also is writing a novel based on some of the interesting and unusual cases that have passed through her court.

Jerry minored in psychology and went into juvenile justice. After working as an intake counselor for the juvenile court and completing a master’s degree in counseling, he now runs one of the residential juvenile shelters for delinquent youths in his city. He was in a rock band while at the university and sponsors a similar group of amateur musicians among the teens assigned to his juvenile home. He feels that encouraging their musical talents will help them turn their lives around, give them career options, and enhance their social skills, and he observes that their playing entertains the other young men in their residence.

Cory went into federal corrections after graduation, leaving the state to work in a federal correctional unit. He completed an MPA part-time, online while working for the “feds.” He moved back home 4 years ago to take a supervisory position in the state correctional system, where he now is the deputy warden of a medium-security custodial unit, the Alexander Maconochie Correctional Center. He had enjoyed gourmet cooking while at the university and worked in an upscale restaurant while a student, but an assignment placing him in charge of the prison kitchen at the federal correctional institution spoiled his love for cooking for several years. He reports rediscovering the fun of gourmet cooking only recently, now t...