Measuring Efficacy of Personnel in American Criminal Justice -- Difficulties in quantifying methods of prime prevention and control
As with all systems serving the public, the American criminal justice system strives to perfect itself to the utmost -- and a critical element of improving the system is rendering the personnel that work for the system more effective and determining of current individuals serving in police and prosecutorial capacities are currently competent at their occupations. Based on two decades of laboratory and field studies the growing body of research suggests that a community's belief in the system's legitimacy prevents crime. Lawrence Sherman (2003) notes "a strong correlation across a large sample of Chicago citizens between perceived legitimacy of police and willingness to obey the law."
However, unlike a corporation that can measure, for instance, the efficacy of the advertising department on the basis of how many widgets are sold, the criminal justice system is essentially reactive -- crime is affected by many exogenous factors that do not necessarily relate to the individuals that are employed by the system. The attacks on the Twin Towers did not mean that the NYPD specifically...
However, this does not address the additional problem of crime prevention, another critical aspect of measuring efficacy. In his report to Congress for the Justice Department, Lawrence Sherman has suggested in measuring specific area's likelihood of engaging in criminal practices when engaging in measuring the potential improvement for certain policies implemented by various criminal justice personnel in departments. For instance, neighborhoods with high populations of unsupervised male groups of teenagers often have a higher rate of…
