Accountability in Criminal Justice Administration

AuthorPeter A Sallmann
Published date01 December 1976
DOI10.1177/000486587600900406
Date01 December 1976
AUST &NZ JOURNAL
OF
CRIMINOLOGY (December 1976) 9(235-247)
ACCOUNTABILITY
IN
CRIMINAL
JUSTICE
ADMINISTRATION
Peter
ASallmann0
235
Introduction
This
paper
is
not
empirical in content.
Nor
is
it ascholarly theory.
It
is
intended
to
be
aseries
of
suggestions for purposes
of
orientation in respect to the
criminal justice system.
The
idea
is
that
there
is
agreat
need
for the "democratization"
of
the criminal
justice system.
The
components
of
the system should
be
called
upon
to
provide
much
fuller
and
more
acCurate information
about
what
they
do
and
how
they
do
it. This
would
mean
that· the system
would
be
opened
up
for much greater
public scrutiny. This
would
put
the community in a
better
position to assess
what
~e
system as awhole
appears
to
be
doing,
how
it accounts to the victim,
what
it
does to the
offender
and
how
its various agencies relate to each other. More
informed
judgments
could
then
be
made
about
the sheer efficiency
of
the
system
and
also
about
the
degree
of
humanity involved in
the
manner
in which
we
go
about
handling the crime problem.
In
amost valuable contribution to this' Journal, Munro
proposed
the use
of
open
systems analysis as aresearch framework.l
Open
systems analysis
emphasizes the trans-agency nature
of
the criminal justice process.
It
requires the
analyst
or
researcher to step
back
from the process
and
look
at
it in its totality.
This
would
mean
that
before
making adecision in
regard
to aparticular
component
of
the system,
one
would look
at
the implications
of
that decision for
the criminal justice system as awhole.
The
closed systems approach,
on
the
other hand, tends to consider criminal justice problems
purely
in the context
of
their relevance to the particular
component
of
the system concerned,
eg
looking
at
police personnel requirements purely from the police perspective.
The
police
may
say that
they
need
more
people,
but
what
is
there
about
the criminal justice
system as awhole that convinces us
that
more
people
are required? It
may
be
that constraints outside the police
department
necessitate the inefficient
and
wasteful
deployment
of
police.
Munro points
out
that
by
far the
predominant
approach
is
the closed systems
or "efficiency" approach. This sort
of
attitude prevents the problems from
being
examined in
an
inter-related
and
inter-dependent fashion.
The
tendency
of
this sort
of
isolated
approach
to
prevail
h.as
led
some writers
to question
whether
we
are, in fact, justified in referring
to
a"system" in the
criminal justice context.2Wolfgang says that,
"we
speak
of
the criminal justice
system as if it
were
an integrated, functionally, flourishing operation. Yet it
is
a
non-system, afailure."3
Carter
points
out
that,
"our
systems
of
justice are
not
LLB (Melb), MSAJ (American), Barrister
and
Solicitor
of
the Supreme
Court
of
Victoria,
Lecturer in Legal Studies, La
Trobe
University, Bundoora, Victoria, 3083

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