Criminology

A criminal justice system is a complex sort of system charged with the responsibilities of handling crime and ensuring justice in the society among many other possible factors decided over by the society in which it applies. The way it does this has always been criticized without a clear solution being given by the critics. Everyone tends to have a different opinion and set of ideas towards an effective criminal justice systems mandate. With the diversity in the society and dynamism in the social trends and norms, it is hard to provide a concretely sealed set of responsibilities for the criminal justice system. Various models exist and some conflict with others while others overlap in definition of the role of such a system.

The current system of liberal democratic justice, the state is assumed to be all powerful, powerful than the accused. It focuses on fairness on managing criminal justice issues in ways which reflect an inbuilt tension between liberal and democratic values. It is a summary of the level of engagement of the in governing the citizens establishing the capacity of the government to regulate the behaviors with the definition of the scope and height of government authority (Parkin, 1998). It is based on political judgment of the policy makers. It is all about the authority, deviance, punishment and obedience. There are other stakes and concerns in the society that the government may find hard to trace, implement or satisfy due to the level of access in the social, rather than formalpolitical aspect. Due to this, a better criminal justice system can be put in place by considering other models and merging, substituting or possibly overlapping their definition of scope and angle of engagement of the government in the efforts of providing justice or curbing crime.

Alternative model
An efficient and mostly effective criminal justice system will have to be fair and just for it to beat the existing Australian system. These four factors justice, fairness, effectiveness and efficiency, are so important to a recommendation in pursuit for a replacement. On the basis of the society- as it is the center of crime and justice, considering the criminals are in the society and the government  somehow also relies on the society- there are other aspects to be covered, other than political policies and adherence of citizens to them, if the issue of effectiveness is to be upheld in substance. On the other hand, efficiency will be vital as resources will be used in the process of offering justice and carrying out the activities proposed for the system, and since crime issues will always be there to be dealt with, proper use will be vital. The issue of whether the system is fair or not is also primary to the proposal of it and must be addresses properly in the description.

Effectiveness
Even as the criminal justice tries to implement various methods of suppressing crime, it is a quite wide range to try and eliminate it at once. Nevertheless, the system should be in a position to reduce the level of crime in the society to tolerable levels. By engaging in such a scope, the system will ensure that the set goals are achievable and hence the efforts applied will be widely fruitful in the sense of set thresholds. In the current global technological status and revolution of various technologies in general, the level of crime is also dependent on the technology available. There are technical incidences in crime today. For the system to be effective, it must take into account the application of technologies in the process of identifying, regulating and punishing criminals (Law Reform Commission of Western Australia, 2002). It should ensure that technology is in place not to just trace the criminals and find out what happened where but also prevent crime and the reoccurrence of it. An example would be the strategy by the American police department to continuously increase the number of police cameras on the streets and private CCTVs in buildings in the major cities. This helps keep the levels of crime down as the criminals say, they have got the cameras there and in essence can help keep crime off some highly sensitive selected areas like urban regions. Also, with the issue of technology in the system, judgment could be easily given on minor events where communication between law keepers on ground and the rest of the legal framework can enable onsite punishment, like on-the-spot fines (Law Reform Commission of Western Australia, 2002). With this kind of strategy, the overall crime suppression task becomes less complex and allows for only the major crimes to go through the court processes. In order for this to succeed, it will need to be implemented and encouraged in all the three sections of the criminal justice system, that is, the law enforcement, adjudication and corrections in jails and prisons.

In effectiveness of the system, it will be of utmost importance if it focused on the victim of the crime as well, in terms of compensation. This would form a strong way of making the same offender have a lesser likelihood of repeating the crime and help create and associate a sense of loss to committing crimes. The effectiveness of the system therefore will not be in the sense of bringing offenders to justice but also reclaiming losses for the victim and reducing reoccurrence of common crimes. As from the Restorative justice model and the actuarial justice model, the estimation of occurrence or prevention of occurrence of crime is also an important part of fighting it. The system should therefore include some ways of extending its mandate to research and analysis as well as application of measures to prevent crime from happening, apart from the investigation and settling the already happened situation crime. Some of the criminal perform organized crime and to root it the system should also have some organization in predetermining the occurrence of crime. Preventive measures can contribute much more towards curbing crime and remove the need of dealing with minor incidences.

Efficiency
The system will have to be efficient to make changes in the country, considering both the society at large and the government. On the governments side, the running of the processes in the criminal justice system will have to be economical in terms of use of resources in pursuit for justice. The professional involved should be held responsible of the use of resources so that they can be managers to their funds and do their work with the minimum required resources as fast as possible. An example of this is the delay often caused in courts in the effort of a deeper search of evidence to ensure proof beyond doubt. If the judges become the managers of the cases instead of just following legal protocol in judgment, they can make the ruling of the cases faster by avoiding unnecessary adjournment (Law Reform Commission of Western Australia, 2002),. Cost effectiveness can also be attained through privatization of some processes and services, giving them the business approach. Since the private sector stakeholders who will get these tenders to provide services will want to appear efficient in the name of competition, these services can be provided at very good timelines, contributing to efficiency. An example of such services to be issued out to private sector would be the scientific forensic investigations and the punishment processes. There will be instances where the crime committed will require lengthy and costly investigations in search for proof while other methods can be used to provide justice like the encouragement of plea negotiation. Efficiency could be measured in many ways but the most important fact is that the system can handle many varying issues from identification forensics and search, there will be need for prioritization. This will set the scope of certain processes and make the entire system more efficient to the victim.

Fairness
One of the most challenging parts of the justice process is fairness. The suspected person should remain a suspect until proven guilty and be given the right to a fair trial. Such a statement can lead to a situation where there is a dilemma of luck of enough proof for a proof beyond doubt situation (john, 2008). The involvement of both the offender and the victim in such situations can lead to a faster conclusion in jurisdiction and also healing of the situation. If the system adopted advocate for healing the society through victim-offender mediation, it would lead to a situation of conviction to the offender and satisfaction of the victims.

Criminal justice is generally about helping people in the community to be law abiding through enhancing their wellbeing. Therefore, a good criminal justice system will have to embed the component of the welfare of the community in its mandate. This is a general issue for the society that will involve taking away the criminals from the society and healing them before putting them back in a more fitting form. An example of this would be the case of juvenile offenders taken to school based probations and going through therapy and psychological training, since their act of committing crime is seen in one way as a mode of communicating their inadequacy among other problems (BJA, 2000). Ones they are ready for reuniting with the rest of the society, they come back and make the community whole again with less crime. Even though this is important to the entire society, it should not be focused on mediation alone without proper establishment of the guiltyinnocent ends. The reduction of crime cannot be attained if the criminals themselves are not uncovered and ascertained to be really guilty of those crimes. The criminal justice system should therefore encapsulate to bringing criminals to justice as well as healing the crimes victims they live behind before the changed former criminals are eventually released back to the society.

Justice
Justice is majorly determined by the ruling of the cases of crime and the guilty getting punished for it. On the other hand, if someone is wrongly convicted, things could go the other way round. There are various ways that a criminal justice system can ensure that justice is being attained at all costs in the process. Just because a professional in criminal justice was trained in the field is not enough to ensure justice prevail where heshe is in charge. Many cases will involve a bad policeman, a very strict judge and so on. Due to this, a complete criminal justice system should include a mechanism to gauge the services offered by these professionals and provide standardized solutions to problems that may occur as a result of unjust rulings or arrests. This section of the system can be formed by the public defender offices in the structural layout of the system.

In order for justice to prevail, the various structural departments and divisions of criminal justice system will have to be well coordinated because of their high interdependence (BJA, 2000). It is important to identify how the departments interlace in planning, coordination, and structured discretion, but also to appreciate the complex ways in which different parts of the system interact with each other.
Some sections of the criminal justice system deal with very different sections of the society and therefore require having a unique way of carrying out operations. An example of this is the difference between the adult, the juvenile and the military justice systems (Frase). They all deal with crime but of nature unique to each other.

Dynamism
The structure of criminal justice systems in the world has been changing in an evolution following the change of culture, economies and political ideals. For example, long time ago, the main form of punishment was exile. Well, that punishment is no more, and event the payment to the victim is considered only in some cases where business or economic loss is involved as a means of compensation and not paying for capital crimes as it was in the middle ages.  Therefore, for the system to be fitting the current society, government models and economic times, it will have to be dynamic and allow for changes where necessary. The success of the system can therefore be gauged partly as its ability to evolve with time, adjusting to the societys atmosphere. Many social conventions and moral values have changed with time leading to acceptance of some values that were initially perceived as wrong being allowed in the society. An example is the way the institution of marriage has been turned into a legalized endeavor that can be terminated just like a business contract. This changed the way people looked at and engaged in marriage affairs. It therefore demanded a change in the legal system to allow for the legal separation of the parties.

The applicability of the criminal justice system deeply depends on the social-political views of the society. If the society is bound to change in these ideologies, the system should accommodate for them to remain sound and useful.

Conclusion
In the current social- political setting and technological environment, a sound and dynamic criminal justice system could be hard to entirely come up with. Considering the existing and the proposed models of criminal justice, a new model that fits the state of the society can be attained only by the consciously discussing the need, focus and mandate of the system towards serving the society and establishing standard procedures for minor reoccurring crimes and keeping with the pace of the societys evolution (Law Reform Commission of Western Australia, 2002).

The main requirements of the system will be to provide justice in an effective, efficient, fair and dynamic way. The success of the system can be measured in evidence of crime reduction and a healed society due to prevention of crime reoccurrence as well as compensation of victims and rehabilitation of the criminals. Some of the properties of the system like effectiveness rely largely on others like just and fairness. This means in effect that these properties will have to be simultaneously evident in order for overall success to be realized.

The discussion of the ideal situation of the societys needs for such a criminal justice system is the key to the structure of the system, and so the views and ideas discussed in this paper are not final and conclusive, but are contributing in the sense of analysis of the current and the past situations.

A recommendation of such a system discussed is the result of the discussion and this follows the happenings and environment identified in the social-ecological settings of the state today. If a system is put in place as such to fulfill the situations, crime can be reduced and the society healed to an acceptable, reasonable level.