Technocratic Criminal Justice Model
Criminal Justice System
When distributive, restorative as well as procedural justice fail to satisfy the aggrieved party retribution may go some way to ensuring this. Retributive justice ensures that offenders are punished in proportion to their offences to render the offended psychologically satisfied and it is in this vein, that criminal justice derives its life and purpose. Criminal justice involves a chain of activities, events, functions or tasks used by society through their governments to uphold law and ensure order.
These involve preventive as well as reducing crime, arrest and trying of offenders, just sentencing and enforcement of those sentences by the government among others. It may also refer to the form of justice that applies to criminal as against civil or administrative cases and refers to any decisions arising from all stages of the criminal justice system. Criminal justice has its own principles, practices, and set of laws, procedures, and codes of practice among others (Siegel, 2009).
The criminal justice system thus comprises of mechanisms for enforcing the law, adjudication as well as correctional facilities which work in tandem to ensure the attainment of the ends of criminal justice. These are the police, the courts and the correctional facilities.
Police are on the van guard of crime prevention and control and in accomplishing this task the police may legally coerce or use actual force. Under the criminal justice system, the police have four key responsibilities. Keeping of the peace, that is, ensuring that people and their rights are protected, combating crime and arresting of suspected violators of the law or other peoples rights, prevention of crime especially through public education where the public are advised to avoid situations that could compromise their security and providing social services. Social services range from recovering stolen property to giving first aid services to injured accident victims.
The courts act as adjudicators, using due process in deciding whether crimes have been committed or not, and in their role, they also must decide appropriate sentences to fit the crimes. The sentences handed down by the courts are enforced by the correctional facilities. These are charged with deciding on parole, probation, community service among others.
Criminal justice systems are numerous and varied across the world, all with common ends but with equally distinct approaches of attaining those ends. These differences more often than not result from their different views and definitions of punishment. How exactly does a system define punishment, the need to punish, the objective of, whom to punish, to what extend should the punishment go and what form of punishment if at all to impose. Even so, criminal justice systems exhibit the following basic characteristics the discretion, filtering, there is huge dependence resource wise and their tasks come in specific sequence (Davies, 1996).
All actors at all levels of criminal justice are invested with discretion, the officials have considerable freedoms to exercise their judgments and make appropriate decisions regarding the cases that come before them. By way of example, police officers are free to deal with crime situations as they see fit while prosecutors are free to reach a decision on what charges to prefer against a suspect if any, judges and magistrates decide on the length of the sentences to pass and once those sentences are handed down, the correctional facilities through probation and parole officers are equally free to decide on eligibility for parole or probation among others. However, this discretion is exercise in consideration of several factors which ensure that the public officials do not abuse their positions (Burns, 2006). Discretion has considerable advantages in saving costs, since officials can make decisions on cases bearing in mind their financial situation as against if those decisions were made at a higher lever, in addition, discretion may ensure greater, prompt justice is served as against rigid procedures and laws among others.
Although the criminal justice system may raise some revenues through levying of fines, it is heavily depended on other arms of government, political powers that be, to allocate it resources to ensure it runs smoothly. This creates strings that the political class may hold on the criminal justice system but it is also a helpful way in which the criminal justice system can be kept accountable to the public. This is because politicians play to the wishes of the public and would thus allocate more or less resources to the police, or the prosecutors if the public feels those are priority areas.
The functions of the courts, police and the correctional facilities are interlinked in a sequence and unless there is harmony in their functions, they can hardly accomplish any thing since the prison warder cannot arrest a traffic offender and lock him up nor can a judge. The police must arrest an offender who must then be passed on to the prosecutors (Bittner, 1979). The prosecutors would determine the type of charges to prefer before the courts can make decisions whether to send an offender down or not.
And finally, many of the suspected offenders who come into contact with the criminal justice system will fall out of the system at different stages, thus the system serves as a filter. A suspect may be arrested by the police but then let go for want of evidence, some passed on to the prosecutor are let go because the prosecutor feels they would be better served in a drug rehabilitation centre than being sent to prison while other would be released by the judge or jury or better yet by the prisons parole board.
The basic aims of criminal justice as well as the system include punishing of wrong doing which will not only deter and control further wrongs but will as well protect the community and its property from harm resulting from the commission of crimes. In addition, a criminal justice system should protect the public peace front affront and reinforce social norms by reprimanding serious offences against set ways and above all, protect the vulnerable in society against unfair treatment by the powerful in society (Sales. et al, 2008).
The notion of existence of a system is perhaps misleading since most of the functions of the criminal system are disorganized and loosely planned and hardly regulated. No governments have or even can wholly reform its system of justice and existing system are mainly a blend of both old as well as new components. In addition, the police, the courts as well as correctional facilities among other players of the systems all hold differing priorities, discretions and goals which at times conflict not only with each other but also with the whole system as whole. A fact which hardly bodes well especially considering that the institutions as well as the varied actors in criminal justice are highly dependent on each other.
Criminal Justice Models
Herbert Parker attributes the disharmony in the criminal justice system to the existence of separate systems of values in criminal justice namely crime control and due process. The latter considers order as an indispensable prerequisite for a free society and thusly criminal justice must concentrate on repressing crime, fiercely standing up for the rights of victims and to do this, the powers of the police must be extended and restrictions lifted to allow for easier arrest and prosecution of offenders, suspects should be presumed guilty and the purpose of investigations is to establish the truth affirming the guilt (Burns, 2006)..
On the contrary, the process model asserts the provision of basic fairness and due process as the most important function of the criminal justice, and to ensure this, the powers of the police should be limited, victims must be presumed innocent and the rights of the defendants must hold supreme against the might of the might of the government. The criminal justice system should compromise of procedural safeguards that would guarantee fairness to the defendants as well as holding authorities to account on their actions. These two models make up the objectives of the current Australian model of justice.
The liberal democratic justice system in Australia draws on both the due process a the crime control models. The model asserts that a criminal justice system has broad ends to attain but the process of attainment of those ends is subject to big picture principles which balance societys wishes against criminal justices wishes. This system heavily relies on the state agencies to function and in realization of the might of the state it is thusly tilted towards the defendant that is, the defendant is presumed innocent until proven otherwise. The advantage of this system is that it builds in societys perception of fairness and justice can be tailored to suit societys views of what is fair.
But the adversarial approach could be bettered if the court adopted amore cooperative approach to adjudication. In this
Technocratic Model
The technocratic model is geared at regulating rather controlling crime, focuses at minor but frequent crimes. It employs technology to help detect and punish crime. Criminal justice system has always in cooperated new knowledge which is applied to help not just combat crime but control it as well. Criminology has increasingly been drawing on technology, developing and using predictive models useful for crime prevention, employing information technology to gather intelligence and disseminate it and employ it in the fight against crime. Technologies to help determination and monitoring of risk have been invented that help identify and monitor, crime hotspots, possible offenders among others. With the help of these technologies, probation officers can sit easy in their offices and still track probates, jail is no longer meant for rehabilitation but for incapacitation of the inmates.
The tries to ensure the courts are kept out as many cases as can be possible. In addition the model aims at preventing common harms incurred by society, as a whole, rather than individual losses and harms. In addition, the model is hardly interested in the moral aspects of the law and the attendant philosophies of criminal justice but is instead geared at reduction of common harms to society at large.
Advantages
Technocratic criminal justice systems approach is practical as regards crime. Crime will always happen and in fact, is impossible to stop crime from happen at all and thusly what is required is to ensure that crime is reduced to the minimum level possible as the situation permits.
Use of technology in the detection, surveillance of potential criminals and reduction in the role of the state in criminal justice is well in line with economic rationalism and the need to contract the role of the state in the lives of individual citizens, without increasing crimes. In addition, the technocratic model concentrates on common, situational crimes which are numerous and can easily be prevented by use of burglar alarms, CCTV cameras as well as other surveillance technology.
The technocratic model lays emphasis on minor but frequent crimes. It is not difficult to see that throwing the book at petty offenders will cost the tax payers more money than the benefit of getting them off the street, not least because petty offences are numerous and varied than can be handled by the current criminal justice. This models approach of targeting and dispensing justice on the spot is more helpful in decongesting the courts.
What is more is that the more the role of the state is scaled back the less and less costly the criminal justice system would be to maintain. Thus the technocratic model is cost effective.
The current criminal justice model, the role of the police is largely reactive, investigation, arrest of criminals among such roles. Detection of possible crime will ensure that the police to be more proactive rather than reactive in their approach in fighting crime. This will involve more targeted patrol, better response to the calls from victims for help and keeping tabs on offenders (United States National Advisory commission, 1973). This coupled with improved information storage and analysis techniques presented by the information revolution, as well as the increased sharing of the same information, and increased cooperation between the police and other agencies will improve the polices ability to prevent crimes, ensure safety among others (CliffsNotes, 2010).
All the models of criminal justice deter crime by punishing offenders, only after those crimes are committed and only if the perpetrators are apprehended and successively prosecuted but rather than chasing crime prevention, technocratic criminal justice system is mainly geared at crime prevention. By concentrating on detecting and controlling crime rather than focusing on deterring crimes by way of punishing crimes, the technocratic system is tilted towards ensuring public safety rather ensuring retribution for offenders.
While the current Australian model of justice uses the state infrastructure to attain objectives, the technocratic model could leverage both the public as well as private avenues to prevent and control crime. Private security firms as well as private business establishments can set up surveillance cameras and burglar alarms and thusly prevent crime without involving the government. It is an effective an efficient way to reduce crime which blends both the privatized justice model and the current system. This model as well builds some of the advantages of the actuarial model allowing for risk to be forecast and neutralized in good time.
The challenge presented by globalization and the growing sophistication of criminals as well as crimes can be dealt with, with the adoption of knowledge based policing and a more proactive criminal justice system. The police need build networks with other networks to widen the net for apprehending criminals (Skol, 2009). Adoption of technology would certainly help, which is while the technocratic model would go some way to helping Australia better cope with the challenges of the new times.
Disadvantages
The model is disinterested in the moral aspects of the law as well as criminal justice and thusly does guarantee fairness, since fairness is a moral and societal construct that varies one society to another. As such the aims of justice which aims at providing solace to the victim would be undermined at the excuse of crime prevention.
Non involvement of the communities, lack of mediation between the parties, as well as the lack of victim participation among such other factors would equally result in a less satisfactory justice than is necessary.
The reliance on technology in detection and prevention of crimes is not only expensive to have such infrastructure but any attempt to shift the burden of the cost of such a system to the public would run the risk of selling justice. As a consequence, the poor would not access those services and thusly, they would be left out of the justice system.
The technocratic model is not a holistic system and thusly it cannot effectively replace the liberal democratic justice system, rather, it can only be used to augment or improve the current system
There is a certain need to reform the current Australian criminal justice system, not necessarily by changing it all together. The suggested possible candidates for the replacement of the liberal democratic justice system are not entirely contradictory of the goals, and ways of operation of the current model. This provides excellent challenges as well as opportunities to draw on the benefits of multiple systems and make the countrys criminal justice system more workable as well as responsive to the changing world as well as needs of society. The prospects offered by the restorative justice model are tempting but are hard to asses. As such, the real change could result from the technocratic model that seeks to leverage expert knowledge and use of technology in combating and preventing crime. Few in society today are more interested in justice, than there are those who fear for their security and thusly, the criminal justice system must move fast and assure safety to the public other than serving up vengeance.
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