Criminal Justice Review

In the search for alternatives to traditional correctional efforts, community based corrections has emerged. Through a review of the literature, this paper examines what community-based corrections means today, why it has become increasingly popular and its future implications.

Court reformers for the past 70 years have been advocating court unification. This reform has, within recent years, enjoyed amazing popularity. Dozens of states are presently considering and/or implementing structural and administrative consolidation of their judicial systems. Despite the significance of these reforms, little attention has been paid to the consequences and implications of judicial unification. The present undertaking represents an attempt to fill this void.

After discussing the underlying logic of court reform, the author assesses the utility of this "theory " relative to contemporary management thought. Because court unification was developed as a "cure-all," it suffers from overgeneralizations regarding the nature of state and local justice. Indeed, it is characterized as being in direct conflict with many of the most cherished aspects of local justice. A number of alternative reform strategies are offered as potential means of reconciling the need for competent judicial administration with a concern for local autonomy and other components of American judicial tradition.

This paper presents an analysis, bi use of a diffusion paradigm, of factors which inhibit innovations in police organization. An in-depth review and analysis of the diffusion of innovations paradigm is presented and its application to resistance to departmental changes is evaluated. Police organizational structure, leadership styles, ideology, perceived attributes of the innovations, type of innovation, timeliness, communication channels and the community-social system are discussed as determiners of the acceptance or rejection of policY and operational decisions within police organizations.

A review of literature on each of the cited areas with general recommendations for the reduction of that resistance is also included. The future of changes in police departments is discussed with the conclusion that academicians have tended to be overly optimistic concerning changes within police organizations and police practitioners and chiefs have often acted without due consideration to possible areas of conflict innovative programs mays create within a department or community.

Of the many problems facing anm community effective cooperation and communication between social service organizations are of prime concern. This is especially true in considering the problems involved in coordinating community based corrections efforts. This research represents an attempt to assess the extent of the Interorganizational Relations between community based correctional agencies in an urban area. By applying the Interorganizational Relations perspective frequently utilized in other social science disciplines, a better view of the role community based corrections plai' in the total framework of social services in a community may emerge.

This paper examines an attitudinally deviant group in this society:. persons who feel that our courts are too harsh in their treatment of offenders. Analyzing data from three national surveys, the study attempts to construct a profile of leniency advocates in order to assess the likelihood of their organized influence on sentencing policies.

Two profiles emerge from cross tabular analysis. The more prominent profile characterizes those who prefer leniencY as young, urban blacks the group whose members are most like/v to be criminally victimized and arrestedfor a crime. The less prominent profile portray s leniencY advocates as white middle/upper-middle class liberals. Regression analysis indicates that three variables are the primari' predictors of a desire for leniencY in the courts: race, criminal victimization and arrest. The data suggest that, at present, there is little likelihood ofja change in court sentencing policies as the result of organized pressure form leniency advocates.

The author uses the Massachusetts Sunday Closing Laws as they existed in November of 1976 as a vehicle for examining police discretion and its relationship to the rule of law.

During the 1976 Christmas season many Massachusetts retailers open/v defied the Sunday Closing Laws (Blue Laws) by opening their stores. They did so because they believed themselves to be at a significant competitive disadvantage with retailers just across the Massachusetts borders in adjacent states, who could legall/ open on Sundays. They sensed that public opinion was behind them. They also knew that a justice of the Supreme Judicial Court, while refusing to enjoin the laws' enforcement, had indicated his belief that the law was unconstitutional on its face. The governor and attorney general openlv disagreed over whether the police should enforce the law.

In the midst of this turmoil were the states' police chiefs who had to formulate local enfocement policies.

The author mailed a questionnaire to each of the Massachusetts chiefs to determine: (1) what policy they had taken towards enforcement; (2) the reason for the police response; and (3) who had communicated with the chief in the decisionmaking process. Forty-four percent of the questionnaires were returned. The results showed that chiefs experiencing violations reported exercising broad discretion and did not uniformly comp/tv with the statutory enforcement mandate. The chiefs who prosecuted violators also reported that they became involved because of their own initiatives and not because of citizen requestsfor enforcement. The results further indicated that chiefs madefew communications with non-police persons prior to making their policy decision.

The author concludes that there should be wider input into the process by which chiefs decide enforcement policy. Recommendations are also proposed by which legislatures can facilitate the structuring and control of police discretion.

U. S. Courts in recent years have been rejecting the "hands off doctrine" and getting involved in civil suits and writs filed by prison inmates. As a result more and more inmates are becoming legally active and increasingly knowledgeable of Substantive and procedural law.

This study is an effort to see what the reaction of U. S. prison acdministrators is to inmate legal activism.

A survey of 329 state prison adlmiinistrators addressed such issues as: institutional comlpliance wdith significant court decisions regarding inmate legal services and materials, sources of legal counselor administrators, line staffand inmates and the effects of the above e variables on the numbers of inmate suits filed and judgments entered in favor of inmates.

The study of criminal justice in the United States has maintained a consistent urban focus. While this is to some degree understandable, valuable comparative perspectives are lost w hen rural areas are ignored. The present study attempts to lay a groundwork for the studi' of rural police. The literature that addresses the impact of communit v and political structures upon stiles of policing is reviewed. Though they are few in number, studies that have examined rural settings indicate a marked difference in the nature of police behavior. This work attempts to document that e vpectation.

This is an exploratorY studi' that wvas conducted through the use offield-research techniques. The determinants of police action were sought in a number of contexts. Both formal and informal community structures were examined to understand the motivation for police action. Like their urban counterparts, rural police patrols were observed to be primarily reactive in nature. This was due to the thorough integration of the police into the informal normative si stem. Because consensus about the tolerable limits of crime and deviance was Widespread, the sheriffs department was able to provide services largely compatible with the desires of the public. Four specific kinds of situations (trqffic offenses, drunks, domestic affairs and felonies) are presented to further illustrate this point. The behavior of rural police was most like that of urban officers in matters of less discretion felonies. The paper concludes hb, identi/fing the bulA of ruralpatrol as (consensual in nature.

Reform efforts of the 1960s have lead, in the 1970s, to proposals to modify the organizational structure of police agencies, to increase police responsiveness to the community' and to enhance the job satisfaction of the increasinglv well-educated police officers. This paper discusses four such organizational models and critiques a notion (peer accountability' as a primary control mechanism) central to these proposals in the light of recent research.

This study involves an examination of the relative impact of legal and extra-legal variables on dispositional outcomes bhi pre-court and court level officials in the juvenile court system. A number of studies have documented variations in case processing by police, probation officers and judges in the Juvenile Court. They reveal that differential criteria influence the disposition decisions of cases seen bY these officials. Results from this studi' demonstrate that legalfactors play a more important role in the official processing of juvenile offenders than extra-legal variables. Screening decisions by probation officers depend primarily on legal aspects of the case and secondarily on physical attributes of the defendant; legal variables and social variables are more salient in judicial level decision-making.

A demographic diagnosis of self-reported delinquencies is proposed and its utilit 1' is examined. The hipothesis that some delinquency correlates operate differentli lin different demographic categories of lvouth is supported. This finding suggests that researchers should be aware of the possible interaction between causes of' delinquencY and the demographic context in which that causation occurs. For prac titioners, the usefulness of a demographic diagnosis lies in knowing if delinquenci' causes are different in different demograhpic categories of youth.