Professional Documents
Culture Documents
CONCEPTUALIZING CRIMINAL
JUSTICE THEORY*
THOMAS J. BERNARD**
ROBIN SHEPARD ENGEL***
The Pennsylvania State University
. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the annual meetings of the
American Society of Criminology, held in Toronto on November 17-20, 1999.
.. Thomas J. Bernard is a professor of criminal justice and sociology at The
Pennsylvania State University. His main academic interests are in criminology the-
ory and juvenile justice.
... Robin Shepard Engel is an assistant professor of crime, law, and justice at
The Pennsylvania State University, and received a PhD in criminal justice from the
University at Albany in 1999. Her current research involves theoretical and ampiri-
cal explorations of police supervision, patrol officers' behavior, policing special popu-
lations, and criminal justice theory.
ORGANIZING
AND CLASSIFYING CRIMINAL
JUSTICE THEORIES
Earlier Classifications of Theories
The field of criminal justice has accumulated a large body of
knowledge based on much empirical testing; it has also accumu-
lated a variety of rather specific theories. Someattempts have been
made to organize and classify those theories. The three most com-
mon bases for classification are (1) type of organization within the
criminal justice system (e.g., police, courts, corrections); (2) under-
lying theoretical assumptions (e.g., consensus,conflict); and (3) pre-
dictor variables (e.g., individual, situational, organizational,
community). Although each of these classification schemespresents
a way to conceptualize the research, each has weaknesses.
The simplest and most straightforward way to organize theory
in criminal justice is to categorize it by component of the crimina]
justice system. Dividing criminal justice theory into police, courts,
and corrections has becomethe standard way to organize the field.
Most introductory criminal justice textbooks take this approach,
BERNARD AND ENGEL 3
real faded into the background, and attention moved strongly to-
ward understanding the extraordinary complexity of criminal jus-
tice. Usually somewhere in the background was an unspoken
assumption that a thorough understanding of the reality of crimi-
nal justice would lead to a reconciliation of the real with the ideal.
Initially most of these investigations were qualitative, observa-
tional, descriptive casestudies of individual criminal justice organi-
zations. The first two were Clemmer's ([1940] 1958) study of
Menard Penitentiary and Westley's (1953, 1970) study of the Gary
Police Department. Both of these predate the ABF studies, but
both gained prominence afterward when the focus shifted from re-
formism to observation and description.
In the years following the ABF studies, researchers published
many additional case studies of criminal justice organizations.
Skolnick (1966), Wilson (1968), and Rubinstein (1973) conducted
early observational studies of the police. Blumberg (1967), Sudnow
(1965), and Eisenstein and Jacob (1977) made early observational
studies of the courts. Sykes (1958), Goftinan (1961), Toch (1977),
and Jacobs (1978) conductedearly observational studies of prisons.
In someways, these researchersviewed the prescriptive ideal-"of-
ficial conceptions"conveyedin public discourse on what was legiti-
mate for criminal justice agents and organizations-as a greater
problem than the reality of criminal justice practices. The prescrip-
tive ideals made unrealistic demandson criminal justice agents and
organizations, and therefore generated the secrecy that caused
many of the problems they faced. In a sense, these observational
studies documented the extreme complexity of the reality of crimi-
nal justice while simultaneously attacking the simplicity of pre-
scriptive ideals. Criminal justice scholars came down on the side of
the real as opposedto the ideal, thus reversing the stance of the
pre-ABF reform commissions.
Yet the prescriptive ideal did not entirely disappear in these
qualitative studies, as might be expected in a purely scientific en-
deavor. Rather, it remained in the background as a standard
against which to hold the complex descriptions of the reality. In
addition, these studies often concluded with comments on what
might be appropriate criteria for evaluating legitimacy for real
criminal justice agents and organizations. That is, the studies
neither elimjnated the prescriptive ideal nor assumed that it was a
stable and unmoving reference point by which to evaluate real
criminal justice practices. Instead they brought the prescriptive
ideal into an interactive relationship with reality. The studies both
examjned the reality of criminal justice practices and considered
appropriate standards for legitimacy, given the complexity of that
12 CRIMINAL JUSTICE THEORY
than had been addressedin the earlier and more free-ranging qual-
itative, observational studies.
These quantitative studies became the "bread and butter" of
criminal justice research. Larger studies that systematically col~
lected and analyzed original observational data of police behavior
included the Black and Reiss study in Chicago, Washington, and
Boston in 1966 (Black 1980; Black and Reiss 1970), the Police Ser-
vices Study of officers in 24 departments in 1977 (Caldwell 1978;
Whitaker 1982), and the Midwest City study (Sykes and Clark
1975). In each of these studies the investigators adopted the
methodical approach of systematic observation, a teChnique that
combines the rich detail of participant field research with the objec-
tivity of systematic survey data collection (Reiss 1971). Many other
studies focused on particular questions or addressed issues raised
by the earlier studies, and relied on secondary analysis of data that
already had been collected (e.g., Brereton and Casper 1981;Klinger
1994; Smith and Visher 1981; Worden 1989; Worden and Shepard
1996).
These quantitative studies seemed to abandon all "official con-
ceptions" of what criminal justice agents should be doing, and to
focus entirely on describing and explaining what they actually were
doing. Therefore they seemed to be purely descriptive and to bear
little relation to the reformism that characterized the field at its
beginning. Even so, prescriptive ideals about what criminal justice
agents should be doing remained in the background of these stud-
ies, providing implicit value judgments about the legitimacy of
what was observed and described. For example, quantitative re-
search focused quite strongly on the effect of nonlegal variables on
criminal justice agents' behavior, including race, gender, class, and
demeanor (Engel, Sobol, and Worden 2000; Kleck 1981; Klinger
1994; Radelet 1981; Smith and Visher 1981; Spohn 1990; Steffen~
smeier, illmer, and Kramer 1998). Eventually, reviews summarized
and organized some of this research (Gottfredson and Gottfredson
1981, 1988; Riksheim and Chermak 1993; Sherman 1980; Simpson
1989; Walker, Spohn, and DeLone 1996). These nonlegal variables
typically explained a relatively small portion of the variancein com-
parison with legally relevant variables, but they received a great
deal of attention.
The reason for so much attention, as everyone knows, is that
nonlegal variables should not influence the behavior of criminal jus~
tice agents. That is, the studies contained a prescriptive ideal
against which criminal justice agents' actual behavior was evalu-
ated. In addition to explaining the agents' behavior itself, the stud-
ies focused on explaining deviations of that behavior from an
BERNARD AND ENGEL 15
and the real. They were offered as a way to make criminal justice
practices more legitimate.
In the area of police, Bittner (1974, 1975) offered a new defini-
tion of police professionalism, Goldstein (1977, 1990) defined prob-
lem-oriented and community policing, Wilson and Kelling (1982)
suggested the "broken windows" approach, and Sherman et ale
(1989) described a "hot spots" approach. In regard to the courts,
academicsproduced ideas to transform the structure of sentencing
(Rossi and Berk 1997; Ulmer and Kramer 1998) and introduced
new ideas such as selective incapacitation (Gottfredson and Gottf-
redson 1994). In corrections, earlier, more naive proposals for re-
form (e.g., Morris 1974) gave way to more sophisticated and more
realistic proposals that more fully took into account the complex re-
alities of criminal justice (Morris and Tonry 1990).
These new proposalswere quite broad; they called for reorgani-
zations of entire areas of the criminal justice system. Much more
specific and sharply focused topics also were addressed, particu-
larly through the introduction of evaluation research. At least
some of this evaluation research was basedon an experimental de-
sign with random assignment of criminal justice actions, in order to
determine the effectivenessof those actions as measured by crime-
related outcomes.
Initially, evaluation research was applied to existing criminal
justice practices (Gendreau, Little and Goggin 1996; Gendreau and
Ross 1987; Kelling et ale 1974; Larson 1975; Martin and Sherman
1986; Martinson 1974; Sherman 1992), and the results of these
studies exerted at least someinfluence over subsequent policies in
the organizations in question. Evaluation research also was ap-
plied to the reforms that had been proposed by academicson the
basis of earlier observational and quantitative research. These
studies attempted to determine how fully the reforms achieved
their purpose of closing the gap between ideal conceptionsand real
practices. That is, the researchersexamined the implementation of
the reforms to determine whether the actual criminal justice prac-
tices conformed to the new official conceptions of what should be
happening. Some found a reasonable implementation of the re-
forms; thus the reforms themselves largely accomplished their
goals. Others found that real criminal justice practices tended to
"eat" reforms wholesale and to continue unchanged.
This development eventually led to "hydraulic" theories of
criminal justice (e.g., McCoy 1984) and to arguments about "crimi-
naljustice thermodynamics" (Walker 1998). According to these ar-
guments, which were primarily structural, workload pressures
generate and maintain certain work practices even if the criminal
BERNARD AND ENGEL 17
18 CRIMINAL JUSTICE THEORY
DISCUSSION
Classifying theories first on the dependent variable and then
on the independent variables increasesconceptual clarity in discus-
sions of criminal justice theory, allows different theories to be com-
pared and contrasted with each other, and facilitates theory
building through generalization. Some theories explain criminal
justice agents' behavior by focusing on the individual characteris-
tics of the agents themselves, including police officers (Broderick
1977; Muir 1977; White 1972), attorneys (Carter 1974; Jack and
Jack 1989; Mather 1979), and correctional agents (Irwin 1980;
Kauffman 1988; Rosecrance1988). These theories are comparable
across criminal justice system components becauseone particular
type of dependent variable (the behavior of individual agents) is ex-
plained by one particular type of independent variable (individual
characteristics). Other theories explain individual criminal justice
agents' behavior as socialized adaptations to the work environment
(Blau 1974; Blumberg 1967; Cole 1970; Feeley 1973; Lipsky 1980;
Prottas 1978;Skolnick 1966). Again, these theories are comparable
becauseone type of dependent variable (individual agents' behav-
ior) is explained by one type of independent variable (socialization
into a work environment).
This type of classification facilitates competitive testing and
generalization across system componentsfor these types of depen-
dent and independent variables. In addition, competitive testing
could address the relative explanatory power of the two types of in-
dependentvariables: individual characteristics versus work sociali-
zation. Finally, such testing enables various kinds of theory
building. For example, Gottfredson and Gottfredson (1981, 1988)
described criminal justice as composedof a series of critical deci-
sion-making points of diagnosis, classification, and prediction by
criminal justice actors. They suggestedthat criminal justice opera-
tions may be viewed as individual decisions made by officials, and
describeddecision making as having three main components:a goal
to be achieved, alternative choicesfor achieving that goal, and in-
formation to guide in choosing among the alternatives. These
scholars were able to construct a theory of criminal justice because
they focusedon one type of dependent variable (individual decision~
22 CRIMINAL JUSTICE THEORY
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