Criminal Justice System

8 Key excerpts on "Criminal Justice System"

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  eBook - ePub

  Crime and Criminal Justice in America

  • Joycelyn Pollock(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Section 1 The Criminal Justice System and Social Control Passage contains an image

  1 Criminal Justice as Social Control

  Chapter Preview

  1. What Is the Criminal Justice "System"? Is It a System?
  2. What Is Social Control? How Does The "Social Contract" Justify State Power?
  3. What Is the Historical Foundation of Our Legal System?
  4. How Big Is the Criminal Justice System Compared to 50 Years Ago?
  5. What Are Some Current Issues in Criminal Justice Today?
  6. How Do Ideologies Affect Objective Analysis of Criminal Justice Issues?
  7. Focus On Data: Are Illegal Immigrants More Likely to Be Criminal?
  8. Summary
  9. Critical Thinking Exercises

  Criminal justice refers to the system of social control that encompasses police, courts, and corrections. The academic field of study includes aspects of the sociology of law, along with sociology, psychology, management science, and other fields. In this textbook, we will present what we know about crime, the theories that have been developed to explain why people commit crime (Chapter 3 ), law enforcement (Chapters 4 –6 ), courts (Chapters 7 –9 ), corrections (Chapters 11 –13 ), and juvenile justice (Chapter 13 ). The final chapter (Chapter 14

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  Social Justice, Criminal Justice

  The Role of American Law in Effecting and Preventing Social Change

  • Cyndy Caravelis, Matthew Robinson(Authors)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 2 illustrates that these principles are still important to people in the United States; but the priority given to one principle or another often depends on the context or circumstances.

  In this chapter, our focus is exclusively on the Criminal Justice System. Our focus is on the criminal law, which defines crimes against the state and federal government, as well as each of the agencies of the Criminal Justice System—police, courts, and corrections. The goal of this chapter is simply to reexamine in greater detail what each of the branches of criminal justice does, and also to discuss in the broadest terms ways in which each can help bring about, as well as interfere with, the realization of social justice in American society.

  Law and Crime

  Recall in Chapter 1 that we defined criminal justice as the efforts of government agencies at the local, state, and federal levels to reduce crime and achieve justice for crime victims while also protecting the due process rights of criminal defendants. That is, the Criminal Justice System is the tool used to achieve crime reduction (efforts aimed at decreasing crime) and due process (efforts aimed at assuring Constitutional rights are protected).

  The Criminal Justice System is an enforcement mechanism that includes the police, courts, and corrections. Yet, everything these agencies do depends on the criminal law because it is the criminal law that determines what is illegal and how agencies of criminal justice must operate when processing a person through the system.

  Criminal Law

  Recall that the criminal law defines harmful acts as crimes, specifies possible punishments, and sets forth rules of due process that must be followed by police, courts, and corrections. Specifically, it is the substantive criminal law that defines harmful acts as crimes and specifies possible punishments and the procedural criminal law

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  Understanding Criminal Justice

  A Critical Introduction

  • Azrini Wahidin, Nicola Carr(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  At a very simplistic level criminal justice is delivered through a series of stages: charge; trial; sentence; appeal; punishment. The Criminal Justice System is a term encompassing all those institutions that respond officially to the commission of offences – notably, the police, prosecution authorities, the courts and the probation and prison services. These are referred to collectively as the Criminal Justice System. The overarching objectives of the system, as defined by Sanders and Young (2000: ibid.), is to regulate ‘potential, alleged and actual criminal activity within procedural limits that are supposed to protect the citizen from wrongful treatment and wrongful conviction’. In the following section and throughout the succeeding chapters, we will challenge the idea of the Criminal Justice System being a ‘joined-up system’ by examining how in practice criminal justice agencies operate to perform their key functions.

  As already outlined, there are three distinctive Criminal Justice Systems with separate procedures and agencies in the United Kingdom: England and Wales; Scotland; and Northern Ireland. The Ministry of Justice for England and Wales, the Justice Department in Scotland and the Department of Justice in Northern Ireland are responsible for criminal justice in the three jurisdictions. Some overarching justice policy and functions are implemented at a ‘national’ (i.e. at whole-UK level) and are coordinated by the Home Office; these include counterterrorism operations, border controls and the security service (MI5).2 While these are clearly important areas, here our primary focus is the ‘domestic’ criminal justice arena. Across the jurisdictions a broadly similar range of processes applies for adults who are accused of a crime. Separate systems and process operate for children and young people, (under the age of 18), and these are fully described in Chapter 7 .

  The next section details the criminal justice process from the detection or reporting of an offence to the imposition of a penalty. Different agencies are responsible for each stage of the process, and throughout a person, variously described as a suspect, a defendant or an offender (depending on the stage and status of the process), will come under the auspices of the different agencies that comprise the Criminal Justice System

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  Methods of Criminological Research

  • Victor R Jupp(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  4 Studying the Criminal Justice System Introduction Criminological research is concerned with a wide range of problems and issues. These have been outlined in Chapter 1 and encompass questions such as ‘what is the extent of crime?’, ‘what is the social and ecological distribution of crime?’, ‘can criminal behaviour be explained in terms of the characteristics of individuals?’, ‘what are the social determinants of crime?’, ‘how is crime experienced by victims?’, ‘what are the systems for the control and prevention of crime and for the punishment and treatment of offenders?’. Research about these questions focuses on particular ‘objects’ of inquiry. These are the basic units of analyses about which data are collected. They can include specific individuals such as a professional fence (see, for example, Klockars (1974), The ProfessionalFence), social groups such as gangs of soccer hooligans (see, for example, Williams, Dunning and Murphy (1984), Hooligans Abroad) and institutions such as the British Police (see, for example, Holdaway (1983) Inside the British Police). Here we ground ourselves in case studies about different ‘objects’ of inquiry with particular reference to those individuals, social groups and institutions which comprise the Criminal Justice System. This is done as a vehicle by which a number of problems and issues about criminological investigation can be considered

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  Criminal Justice in America

  • Roscoe Pound(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  I

  The Problem of Criminal Justice

  The Place of Criminal Justice m Social Control

  One way of approaching such problems proceeds in terms of what I have ventured to call social engineering. It conceives of the legal ordering of society as a practical process of eliminating friction and waste in the attainment of human desires. If one likes, he may say that this process is required in order to maintain and further civilization. But the immediate task of social control, of which law is only one item, is a task of adjusting or harmonizing conflicting or overlapping human desires and human claims founded thereon.

  From such a standpoint, the end of law is the adjustment or harmonizing of conflicting or overlapping desires and claims, so as to give effect to as much as possible with the least sacrifice. It is the same as the end of all social control. The legal order is but that part of social control which is achieved through the activity of politically ordered society. Law is the body of precepts, of rules and traditions of art for applying those precepts, and of received ideals for shaping, supplementing, and developing them, by which this part of social control is carried on. The basis of the authority of law is immediately the power of organized society. But behind that power is the pressure of the desires and claims involved in life in civilized society, which must be satisfied as far as may be, if civilized society is to maintain itself. Ultimately the law rests upon the basis of its accord with the conditions of Ufe in civilized society.

  Hence, today jurists approach the law from psychology rather than from metaphysics. They think of the scope and subject matter of law from the standpoint of the concrete desires and claims of individual men in civilized society, not from the standpoint of the abstract qualities of the abstract individual, nor from the standpoint of the logical implications of the abstract individual free will. They consider the desires or claims found to be involved respectively in the individual life, in the existence and functioning of the political organization of the given society, and in the general social life therein. They think of the precepts, worked out by experience, discovered by a judicial process of trial and error, found by juristic research, or devised by legislative inventive wisdom, whereby these desires are adjusted and given effect, or the resulting claims are secured, so far as may be, in a systematic, ordered social control through politically organized society.

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  The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Sociology

  • George Ritzer, Wendy Wiedenhoft Murphy(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  2001 , p. 34) observes that the persistent pattern results from “childhood neuropsychological problems interacting cumulatively with their criminogenic environments producing a pathological personality.” With the adolescent‐limited pattern, “a contemporary maturity gap encourages teens to mimic antisocial behavior in ways that are normative and adjustive.” Clearly, biological, psychological, and social levels of explanation are evident even in this summary statement of her work. This is characteristic of efforts to answer the questions posed by Sampson, and it is a central characteristic of life course theory. For this reason, this approach offers a framework for criminology to move closer to an interdisciplinary theory of criminal behavior that will more fully justify the emergence of the field as a new discipline in the social and behavioral sciences.

  For almost two centuries after Beccaria, criminologists did not pay consistent and organized attention to the Criminal Justice System. Rather, the tradition of criminology begun by Lombroso – the search for the causes of crime – was the focus of criminology until the last half of the twentieth century. This period of searching for the causes of crime passed through four distinct phases of theoretical development: six single factor reductionism; systemic reductionism; multidisciplinary theories; and interdisciplinary theory. Today, interdisciplinary theory stands as the dominant model for explaining crime (and other human behaviors). Criminology today rests on two foundations: the interdisciplinary explanation of crime and the analysis of the fairness and effectiveness of the Criminal Justice System. Both of these fundamental aspects of criminology are informed by the application of scientific methods (as called for by Beccaria, Lombroso, and Sutherland).

  Society's Reaction to Law Breaking

  But what of the other focus of criminology – how societies react to law breaking? As Ingraham (1987 ) observed, following his comparative analysis of criminal procedure, all systems of justice are organized to apprehend offenders, determine guilt, and impose punishments. Though the means to do this may vary in time and space, the functions are always performed. This focus requires within a society an agreement on the meaning of crime. Today, we see growing concern that criminology's definition and measurement of crime has not changed to reflect the contemporary reality of crime. While efforts are underway to improve police reporting of crime (Strom and Smith 2017 ) and our surveys of criminal victimization (Langton et al. 2017 ), it is clear that these measures do not capture much of the crime as defined and experienced by members of society. Crimes by business, pollution, intellectual property theft, cybercrime and fraud, and hate‐motivated crimes are just examples of crimes that have become of increasing importance but are not counted by our traditional measures and are not investigated by police. This has prompted researchers to urge a reconceptualization of crime and the development of measures that are consistent with that reconceptualization (Lauritsen and Cork 2017

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  Victimology

  • William G. Doerner, Steven P. Lab(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  injustice system would be a more apt description.

  Today, crime victims remain nothing more than witnesses for the state. Victims no longer take matters into their own hands to extract retribution and restitution from their offenders. The victim must call upon society to act. The development of formal law enforcement, courts, and correctional systems in the past few centuries has reflected an interest in protecting the state. For the most part, the Criminal Justice System simply forgot about victims and their best interests. Instead, the focus shifted to protecting the rights of the accused.

  THE RE-EMERGENCE OF THE VICTIM

  The Criminal Justice System spends the bulk of its time and energy trying to control criminals. It was within this preoccupation of understanding criminal activity and identifying the causes of criminal behavior that the victim was “rediscovered” in the 1940s. Interestingly, the victim emerged not as an individual worthy of sympathy or compassion but as a possible partner or contributor to his or her own demise. Students of criminal behavior began to look at the relationship between the victim and the offender in the hopes of better understanding the genesis of the criminal act.

  As interest in victims began to sprout and attract more scholarly attention, writers began to grapple with a very basic issue. What exactly was victimology? Some people believed that victimology was a specialty area or a subfield within criminology. After all, every criminal event had to include a criminal and a victim, by definition. Others countered that because victimology was so broad and encompassing, it deserved to stand as a separate field or discipline in its own right. They foresaw the day when college catalogs would list victimology as a major area of study along with such pursuits as biology, criminology, psychology, mathematics, and political science.

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  Toward Justice

  Broadening the Study of Criminal Justice

  • Kristi Holsinger, Lori Sexton(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  This does not mean that it is impossible to work toward social justice, or to effect social change, from within the CJS, as a CJC scholar, or even as a CJC student. In the remainder of this chapter, we will discuss the prospect of bringing about social change from each of these three positions. Let’s start by discussing what it means to work toward social change from within the CJS, and what needs to be accomplished before this can begin.

  CREATING JUSTICE WITHIN THE Criminal Justice System

  Despite the CJS itself not being an agent of social change, there are many possible avenues to pursue social change within the CJS. CJS professionals at all levels have insight, expertise, and access that afford them a measure of power not available to those who work outside the CJS. This is a double-edged sword right now for many CJC students reading this book who may find themselves frustrated by lack of access to the very agencies and institutions that they are seeking to improve. Even entry-level CJS practitioners have gained insider access to government agencies that are fairly closed off from the public. Prisons represent the obvious extreme; they are physically closed institutions that grant access to few outsiders (e.g., visitors, journalists, researchers), and only after meticulous screening. While law enforcement agencies and court systems have far more permeable boundaries, they are still fairly difficult for average people to really know, let alone have the ability to influence. Thus, working within the CJS affords practitioners a unique opportunity in terms of access and knowledge.

  This opportunity is not without constraints, however. Access is the first step, but it certainly isn’t everything. Working within the CJS means working for the CJS—operating according to policy and customary practice designed and executed to handle individual cases, not social problems (as discussed in Chapter 5 ). While many CJS professionals have discretion in how they do their jobs, they are not at liberty to simply shift the focus of their concern from an individual level to a societal one. In a sense, then, working toward social change while working as a CJS professional means doing two jobs instead of one: dealing with individual cases and considering how these cases are linked to larger social problems. By carrying out their jobs in a way that attends to the broader social context and affords priority to the social justice impact of their actions, CJS professionals can begin to work toward social change. To use the language of Chapter 1 , CJ practitioners can use their sociological imaginations to lay the groundwork for social change. We also know from Chapter 1

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