Organizational Theories in Criminal Justice

Criminal Justice

The author of this report has been asked to speak to a number of questions involving criminal justice. The first is the overall trends and merits when it comes to the different manifestations of completing criminal justice tasks including privatization, e-corporations and militarization. The second question would be the historical and traditional organizational behavior theories and the corresponding effect of societal and organizational diversity when it comes to criminal justice organizations. Finally, there will be a discussion of equity theory and reinforcement theory and how both of those affect criminal justice organizations. While criminal justice may not seem all that complicated to the untrained eye, the intricacies and complexities come early and often.

Analysis

There are differing minds when it comes to the question of whether criminal justice tasks and such should be contracted out to private businesses. While the police function of policing has typically always been a public function, the same cannot be said for a lot of other parts of the job and that would mostly reference corrections. The public agencies such as the judge, the police and so forth work to corral criminals and convict them while a private group actually controls and houses the inmates while they are incarcerated. The purported upside to doing this is to keep costs down as it is asserted that private groups do the job cheaper, at least per person, than the public groups do. However, there are others that say that private groups are entirely too profit-focused and they focus more on warehousing as many people as they can in as tight a space as they can so as to maximize the money they make off of the contracts that they garner. This can create an issue as the conditions and the way in which the prisoners are handled is seen as strongly linked to how well (or how poorly) the convicts behave when they are locked up. Certainly, the private consortiums that help jail people are not creating the crime that is occurring, choosing the sentencing that the people are getting or turning jails into de facto warehouses for the drug-addicted and/or mentally ill. However, improper conditions in jails are seen as an aggravator of these already-present conditions and there is a disconnect seen between truly getting people ready for their post-sentence life and just providing "three hots and a cot" (Glushko, 2016).

When it comes to organizational behavior theories, prisons and policing are a special instance because failure to follow procedure to the letter can be extremely dangerous from a life and death as well as a public relations perspective. Even though many police and criminal justice (e.g. corrections) decisions are made in a split second, the consequences can be enduring. Given that, many criminal justice organizations take on more of a coercive and military-style style of enforcing compliance, both with the employees and the prisoners/alleged criminals. Also, there is the issue of diversity when it comes to the criminal justice organizations. There are some very loaded topics when it comes to criminal justice and many of them relate to race and gender. Just as one example, blacks are not always well-represented when it comes to prison guards or police officers but they are almost always very over-represented when it comes to prison populations (Zupan & Menke, 1988).