Criminal Justice System as an Extremely Important Institute, Essay Example

Criminal justice system is an extremely important institute in the modern society. People involved in this sphere are responsible for maintaining certain standards of life in the society. Without criminal law enforcement, the entire society will collapse into chaos. Previously, the separate institutions like the police, court and correctional facilities were mostly capable of performing their functions effectively. However, in the second part of the 20^th century it became clear that all of the institutions stated above are not always cooperating in the most efficient manner. Time delays and extra expenditures reduced the effectiveness of law enforcement and it became clear that certain steps to improve the situation were urgently needed. This was the time when need for trained criminal justice administrators was finally acknowledged. Several steps were made to ensure that professional managers in this sphere appeared.

The main problem for the entire system arose precisely then – it became clear that the criminal justice system is very poorly integrated. Unfortunately, criminal justice system is often defined as a “nonsystem”, as its parts fail to cooperate to reach the common goal. It has a very controversial nature – as the institutions that form the system actually have different goals and consequently operate in dissimilar ways: police are the frontline of the public defense and are expected to act sometimes brutally in order to stop crime, courts are in fact supposed to remain as impartial as possible, while the correction professionals can be argued to not care about the entire system effectiveness at all and view at it neutrally (Gulick, K. 2000). This is the very first problem that is present in the criminal justice system – lack of integration, cooperation and mutual activities. Such dispersion of goals and means threatens to drive the entire scheme towards inefficiency.

Therefore, the most important and the most urgent task for the modern criminal justice administrators is to drive the system towards greater cooperation. Lack of true leaders in this sphere might be the main reason why this problem remains unsolved. Any government official is usually well-trained to perform his/hers duties, but rarely is ready to take the step forward. Researchers claim that lack of motivation predetermines the actions of the criminal justice administrators – they only wish to be responsible for their narrow list of duties, and do not wish to contribute to systemwide efficiency (Gulick, K. 2000).

Modern criminal justice system managers face multiple problems and tasks, which depend mostly on the specific sphere they are operating in. Police managers are responsible for a list of functions, all of which have a significant social role: (Cronkhite C.L. 2007)

1. Property control – responsibility for maintaining the recovered property and evidence
2. Vehicle maintenance – as the staff need to be highly mobile, perfect conditions of the vehicles is required at all times
3. Recordkeeping – classifying, indexing and filing all the criminal activities reports.
4. Budgeting – reasonable distribution of the funds in order to reach maximum efficiency
5. Inspection and control – making sure all of the police officers are working to the top of their abilities, checking the quality of the work performed.

Multiple functions, stated above are only the “tip of the iceberg” of all the activities that a police manager is expected to perform. It is clear that such a broad variety of issues is very hard to keep track of. Too much functions is often determined as the main problem for police administrators.

Court administration also bears a number of complicated and problematic issues. Managing the court procedures requires a great number of actions as well: “it entails statistical analysis, records management, case flow management, fiscal responsibilities, and personnel management, designing and implementing procedures within the pre- existing court guidelines” (associatedcontent.com, 2006). A successful court administrator is expected to have a variety of skills: caseflow Management, Court Financial Management, Human Resources Management, and Technology Management (Ericksen, C. 2005). These are the fundamentals of the court management, taught at the Institute for Court Management – a main facility that trains skilled criminal justice administration. Efficiency remains the core issue here, as some simple and logical decisions may improve the results of the entire system. The case of one New York court is the great example: it is common knowledge that home violence cases are among the lengthy and relatively complicated ones for viewing in court. Some judges find it rather stressing to process. In order to improve the court effectiveness home violence cases were viewed at a different location on specific dates. The speed of one case process has improved significantly, which indicates that simple ability to think out of the box is a valuable asset for the criminal justice administrators.

General areas that need extra attention from the criminal justice administrators today include: diversity, professional ethics, leadership and usage of technologies. Diversity is becoming important, as employees are coming from various origins and using their specific abilities and experiences may contribute to the final goal. Professional ethics is closely related to motivation: material stimulus is definitely not the main motivating factor for the government officials, so situate leadership patterns are better to be used. Managers in the criminal justice today are also expected to posses significant knowledge in the modern ways of data processing and storage.

Overall, the criminal justice administrators are not much different from any other managers, as they perform the same functions and use similar motivation and leadership techniques. Some additional training is still required, as some details of the work are rather specific, due to the nature of the work.

References

Cronkhite C.L. (2007). Criminal Justice Administration: Strategies for the 21st Century. Jones & Bartlett Publishers. ISBN 0763741116

Gulick, K. (2000). Pulling Criminal Justice Practitioners Together. Corrections Today, Vol. 62. Retrieved March 30, 2009 from: http://www.questia.com/read/5001108496?title=Pulling%20Criminal%20Justice%20 Practitioners%20Together

Ericksen, C. (2005). ICM And Court Adminstration: the First Thirty-Five Years. Justice System Journal. Retrieved March 30, 2009 from: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa4043/is_200501/ai_n14905498

Contemporary Challenges for Court Administrators. (2006). Retrieved March 30, 2009 at: http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/31705/contemporary_challenges_for_court_administrators.html?cat=17