Researching Law Volume 31 Issue 1 - Flipbook - Page 14
R ESEA RC HI N G L AW
oriented policing and that we could
make policing more friendly, more
respectful to citizens, get better
results, and that would be building
on the wisdom of officers out in the
field. It was such a different time.
Q: Why is it important
to acknowledge the
administrative aspect of
criminal justice as studied
by the ABF Survey team?
Elizabeth Mertz:
Traci Burch:
When the joint ABF-Wisconsin
research team first went out and
looked at what was going on in a
systematic way across different
places and with a research protocol
at hand, they were just blown
away. The criminal justice system
was nothing like what people
had thought. It was all discretion.
Officials were making it up as
they went along because they just
didn’t have any sense of what their
guidelines should be. That may not
have changed much, but at least
we know much more about what’s
happening. There is now a more
developed sense of how people in
the field get instruction.
In political science, there is a gap
between how the law is written
and policymakers’ intention, and
the implementation stage and the
action. Sociologists as well look
at how what they call “street-level
bureaucrats” are implementing
things. Therefore, it’s good to
see whether there are gaps in
how a policy was intended versus
the actual action. To evaluate
administrative programs, we kind
of shed light on that disconnect
and think it helps show ways that
we can fix problems as they arise
in ways that policy and lawmakers
didn’t intend.
JOHN HAGAN
John D. MacArthur Professor
of Sociology and Law,
Northwestern University
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John Heinz:
The criminal justice system doesn’t
work a lot of the time as a “system”
because it is loosely coupled. The
ABF has made a lot of contributions.
It shows where the system functions
efficiently as a system and where it
doesn’t function. It’s like any other
large organization.
John Hagan:
Knowing that the process is
important was crucial in terms of
setting a foundation that could
begin to observe the changes as
they were starting to happen. It’s
interesting to think that up until this
piece of research, most of what was
done in criminology was what we
call “etiology,” studying the causes
of what makes people criminal. This
idea of looking at the system and
how it responds to these behaviors,
answers to these people, that was
all new and different and it shifted
the focus.
It’s interesting to think that up until this piece
of research, most of what was done in
criminology was what we call “etiology,” studying
the causes of what makes people criminal.
This idea of looking at the system and how it
responds to these behaviors, answers to these
people, that was all new and different and it
shifted the focus.