Types of criminal justice agencies

Virtually all social agencies are mandated to perform one of two basic types of work. Some agencies are mainly concerned with collecting information about particular people, sorting them into categories and assigning them particular statuses that indicate how these individuals are to be treated by society and government agencies. These organizations are known as people-processing organizations. They are guided more by law than by science because they must treat each person in a fair manner. Other agencies are more concerned with changing the perceptions and behaviors of particular individuals.

These agencies are referred to as people-changing organizations. These agencies are more likely to use scientific principles to guide their activities. Most of the work done by criminal justice agencies falls into the first, people-processing, type. The people-changing orientation is critical to the long-term effectiveness of the justice process but is usually performed by educational, welfare or mental health agencies. Individual practitioners will also tend to be oriented more toward one or the other of these two types of work. The practitioner's orientation does not always match the legally mandated role of the agency, however. A police officer may strive to help neighborhood children avoid crime even though she/he works in a people-processing agency.

People processing agencies are organized for the purpose of efficiently sorting people into categories. These categories are the basis for decisions on how to handle individuals in a way that will help the society. These agencies exist mainly to change the status of certain people through some type of deliberate effort. The transition from "citizen" to "suspect" to "convict" is typical of such a process. Because this change in status injures the person's social and material welfare, many safeguards must be used to assure that this power is not misused.

A complete understanding of the process of criminal justice needs to be based on a combination of five critical ideas:

1) controlling crime is a process in which definitions of behavior are central;

2) this justice process is organized around geographical and subject-matter jurisdictions;

3) most of the work is performed by people-processing bureaucracies;

4) people-changing agencies supplement and support the role of justice agencies in these efforts; and

5) this whole network of personnel and agencies is guided by power/dependency linkages that result from legal mandates.

   Operating within this context we find that the justice process is heavily influenced by how society, control agents, and significant others define various acts. The legal mandates that define crime and agency responsibilities are part of a democratic system that stresses fairness. Federal organization is designed to ensure the preservation of democracy. Crime is officially a matter of definitions worked out in this kind of political process. Informally it is a moral judgement that lies "in the eye of the beholder". Its nature varies over time, space and individuals. To paraphrase Thomas Jefferson's view of democracy - This is a terrible way to do things but no one has yet devised a better one.

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