Description

THE CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM:

Properly understood the individual institutions of Parliament, the Police, the Courts and the Prisons, the Probation Service, etc are better understood as contributing services, and.—as we shall argue – cannot really be seen in their proper light until they are first juxtaposed and then amalgamated with each other to form a whole. It is only then that we can properly comprehend the CJS as a whole.

Such an overview, it is argued, has enormous advantages to our understanding of justice, and in order to illustrate these matters we have summoned the aid of two separate models.

The two models presented (overleaf) represent two different systems of criminal justice. The one is taken from the Florida State University’s website (at http://www.criminology.fsu.edu/Ci.html), ingeniously constructed by Cecil Greek, and the other is a worked replica of indictable crimes in Ireland for the year 1975 compiled by the author. Both models, it should be said, were inspired by The Challenge of Crime In A Free Society, compiled by the President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice as early as 1967. The 1975 model, therefore, was constructible some eight years after the President’s Commission (though, theoretically, it was constructible at any time since the Garda statistics were compiled), while the Bureau of Justice Statistics revised the Florida model in 1997 after a Symposium on the 30th Anniversary of the President’s Commission. (The irony that Florida State University is one of the largest schools of criminology in the US, and the DIT –- the Dublin Institute of Technology -- could not bestow one penny piece on criminology between the years 1993 and 2003 has not been lost on the author!)