Chapter Three – The Criminal
Justice System in its Environment
 Understand the influence the environment has on criminal
justice agencies.
 Be able to discuss the major environmental influences on
criminal justice agencies.
 Understand the political environment of the criminal justice
system.
 Be able to explain environmental uncertainty vs. certainty.
 Understand how environmental forces can de-couple large
organizations.
 Understand the process of scanning the environment.
 Understand how agency executives manage environmental
inputs with symbolism.
 An organization’s environment is any
external phenomenon, event, group,
individual, or system.
 Environmental change causes organizational
change.
 The relationship between an organization
and its environment is interdependent.
o The organization is affected by its environment,
and
o The environment is affected by the
organization.
 Technology
o Transportation and communication changes
affect how criminal justice agencies do their
jobs.
o Creates completely new forms of criminality.
 Law
o Statutory laws like ‘three strikes’ and the USA
PATRIOT ACT profoundly change criminal
justice agencies.
o Court rulings affect criminal procedures.
o Civil litigation influences agency behavior.
 Economic conditions
o Influence the availability of resources.
o Unemployment may increase criminality.
 Demographic factors
o Large proportions of crime prone (young)
citizens increase overall crime rates.
o Movement of working class and wealthy
individuals from communities reduces available
resources.
o Immigration (legal and illegal) creates new
challenges in justice administration.
 Cultural conditions
o Dramatic changes in culture may result in new or
different laws.
o Competing cultures may cause social conflict.
 Ecological conditions
o Different ecological needs (e.g. agrarian, industrial,
service, etc.) create their own challenges for
criminal justice.
o Conflict over scarce resources affects criminal
justice agencies.
o Increased awareness of ecological issues may result
in additional responsibilities for criminal justice.
 Political conditions
oAgencies are affected by political
pressure from advocacy, interest, and
constituent groups.
oElected criminal justice actors are highly
influenced by political conditions.
oChanging social and cultural norms
eventually influence result in political
change.
 A complex decision-making apparatus
containing both formal and informal
overlapping subsystems (Fairchild and
Webb, 1995).
o Formal
• Legislative bodies, city councils, etc.
• Courts
o Informal
• Pressure from political activists and advocates
• Informal pressure from the formal system
 The forces in the environment that are related
directly to the goal-setting and goal-directed
activities of the criminal justice system (Steers,
1977). Six categories (Lauffer, 1984).
o
o
o
o
o
o
Beneficiaries
Funders
Providers of non-fiscal resources
Providers of complimentary services
Competitors
Legitimizers
 Organizations are affected by the state of
their environment.
o Simple versus Complex
• Simple – homogeneous environments with few
elements
• Complex – heterogeneous environments with many
elements
o Static versus Dynamic
• Static – predictable environments
• Dynamic – unpredictable environments
 The more dynamic and complex the
environment the greater the uncertainty.
o Environmental uncertainty
• Lack of information needed for decision making
• Inability to estimate effect prior to implementation
• Lack of information about the cost of a bad decision
o Decoupled organizations – multiple subenvironments
o Dominant coalition – leaders
o Work processors – do the actual work
 All organizations are vulnerable to environmental
forces, but these can be managed.
o Influencing input by providing expertise to
environmental factors
o Using symbols and rhetoric to influence the
environmental response
o Responding to client demand
o Decreasing vulnerability to pressure by creating
autonomy
 The role of management is to mitigate the
effect of environmental pressure and create
predictability.
 Administrators should be highly protective of
the organizations core technologies and
competencies.
 Constant scanning of the environment is
necessary for a proactive response to and/or
the protection against environmentally caused
change.
 There is interdependence between the criminal justice
system and its environment.
 Changes in the environment require criminal justice
agencies to adapt.
 New technology changes social structures, organizational
opportunities, and crime patterns to which agencies need
to adapt.
 Statutory and civil laws directly alter mandates and
constraints on the system.
 Economic conditions affect agency budgets, scarcity in
staff selection, and also may affect crime patterns and
rates.
 Demographic shifts affect local budges and demands for
service.
 Changes in culture require agencies to adapt to citizens
with new demands for services and justice outcomes.
 Changing climate patterns, community size, and economic
base have far ranging effects on economic and cultural
conditions that, in turn, affect agencies.
 Political conditions faced by agencies have the most direct
impact on agency mandates and constraints.
 The political environment is a complex process of formal
and informal political subsystems.
 Changing environmental forces require the criminal justice
agency to either make constant changes or to operate with
outdated missions, policies and procedures.
 Agency field workers and executives work with different
environmental forces and expectations.
 Agency field workers and executives have different
understandings of the agency’s mandate and appropriate
activities of its members.
 Scanning means observing the environment for potential
change and adapting the organization to respond to it.
 Agencies put forward the least costly change to meet the
demands from the environment. These are often symbolic.
 In an effort to increase employment, the
Plantersville City Council successfully convinced a
large corporation to locate a call center within its
municipal boundaries.
 This call center employs 1,000 low wage
employees.
 Almost immediately it became apparent that this
influx of low wage employees created numerous
challenges (crime, transportation, population
density, etc.) for the local police department.
 Now the Mayor is trying to convince a meat
packing plant to locate near the city.
 This plant will likely hire a large number of low
wage and unskilled labor employees.
 As the Chief of Police, how would you use your
experience with the call center to mitigate the
potential environmental change that would likely
result from the new meat packing facility?