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Purpose While law enforcement officers have the state-sanctioned authority to use force as a way to ensure citizen obedience with the law, research has found that when private citizens evaluate the police as legitimate, they are more likely to comply with legal demands and cooperate with the police. Although procedural justice has shown to be a highly significant predictor of perceived police legitimacy, research has found other correlates of this outcome, including ethnic identity, low self-control and structural economic disadvantage. To date, no study has explored whether strain influences perceptions of the legitimacy of law enforcement. Methods A series of linear regression equations was estimated using survey data collected from a convenience sample of college students to determine the effect of strain on perceived police legitimacy. Results Even after controlling for procedural justice, strain exerted a negative and statistically significant influence on law enforcement legitimacy evaluations. Conclusions Police officers are encouraged to interact with citizens in procedurally just manners and to also consider people's strain levels when enforcing the law.

Purpose Many studies have lent empirical support to the procedural justice model of police legitimacy; however, there has, as yet, not been widespread consideration of the potential impact of neighborhood- and community-level factors on people's perceptions of procedural justice or police legitimacy. The present study integrates the macro-level policing literature with the psychological-based procedural justice framework to uncover what effects, if any, the sociostructural environment has on procedural justice and police legitimacy. Methods Hierarchical linear modeling integrates census and survey data within a single, mid-sized city. Results Concentrated disadvantage exerted a marginally-significant impact on procedural justice, and on police legitimacy while controlling for procedural justice. Procedural justice remained the strongest predictor of legitimacy, even when accounting for macro-level characteristics. Conclusions The effect of procedural justice on police legitimacy appears to be robust against the deleterious impacts of concentrated disadvantage. This has implications for procedural justice research, theory, and policing.

In this telephone interview study, hiring and retention policies and practices relevant to sexual minority officers among twenty selected police departments in Georgia and Texas were examined. The authors examined policies and practices in place before and after the U.S. Supreme Court's 2003 decision in Lawrence v. Texas, in which the Court struck down Texas' sodomy law on grounds that it violated due process and the right to privacy, in effect decriminalizing homosexual conduct throughout the nation. Conclusions and policy implications for law enforcement hiring practices in light of this landmark decision are discussed.

Literature on police ethics has employed the term “noble cause” to describe a utilitarian orientation toward crime control. No empirical research, however, has systematically investigated the noble cause, a shortcoming addressed in this study. A survey of deputies in a western sheriff's office provided the setting for the current research. Twelve items tapping the noble cause revealed a multidimensional latent structure composed of three factors. Findings did not support the presence of a link between measures of the noble cause and crime. A positive though inconsistent relationship was found between measures of the noble cause and deputies' attitudes toward administrators.

Several studies had concluded that the police subculture holds values and attitudes that are distinct from the rest of the population. Among these values is a focus on law and order. While researchers agree that police tend to hold different values, they disagree on the source of the attitudes. Some had argued that the attitudes reflected differences regarding who was recruited for law enforcement careers while others said that the differences reflected changes that occurred to individuals after becoming officers. This study examined whether police officers and students enrolled in criminal justice/sociology classes held similar or different attitudes towards the Miranda warnings. The findings suggested that in some ways, the two groups perceived the warnings in dramatically different ways, while in other ways their differences were simply a matter of degree. Implications are provided.

Using Gottfredson and Hirschi's (1990) self-control construct for theoretical leverage, this conceptual article offers a preliminary framework for examining discretion, criminal justice decision-making, and criminal justice system behavior. Low self-control likely facilitates negative interactions between defendants, police, judicial officers, and correctional staff, potentially affecting discretionary outcomes. Research questions are provided for future investigators to begin empirical assessment of the relationships between self-control and criminal justice processing. As a global construct, self-control could be incorporated into criminal justice models as a potentially robust correlate of discretion, decision-making, recidivism, and offender noncompliance with the criminal justice system.

Criminal justice agencies are organized sequentially — “output” from one agency is “input” to the next — but most scholars argue that criminal justice is not a system in a theoretical sense. In this article, it is argued that general systems theory (GST) reveals important insights into criminal justice structures and functions. Specifically, it is argued that the criminal justice system processes “cases” rather than people, and that the common goal of criminal justice processing is to “close cases so that they stay closed.” It also is argued that processing capacity progressively declines, in that at each system point the subsequent agency cannot input as many cases as the previous agency can output. Each agency therefore experiences “backward pressure” to close cases in order to reduce input to the next agency. Overall, this article highlights that criminal justice agents and agencies are best understood as operating in the context of the larger whole, thus it is concluded that criminal justice is a system in the sense of general systems theory.

In a democratic society, public opinion of criminal justice systems is essential for the proper functioning of police departments. Since the 1970s, police organizations were increasingly concerned with their external social relationship. This was particularly true in the era of community policing. This study explored determinants of satisfaction with the police. Data from 235 residents of a small northeastern city in the United States were analyzed. The results indicated that Hispanics had the lowest global satisfaction with the police, while Caucasians had the highest. The results also revealed the importance of separating global satisfaction from specific satisfaction. The study concluded that police departments must work harder at gaining public satisfaction among African Americans and Hispanics and work toward increasing public feelings of safety in order to improve citizen satisfaction with the police.

The study focused on the treatment of victims in the criminal justice system in Barbados, a developing country in the English speaking Caribbean. Based on the administration of a pre-designed questionnaire to 458 respondents from a simple random sample of victims who made reports to the police in Barbados. It focused on victims' experiences with the police in the law enforcement process, their experiences in the courts in the adjudication process, and factors associated with these. The findings were mixed, but showed that the respondents' experiences in the law enforcement and the adjudication process were generally positive. Regression analysis showed that police seriousness about, and interest in the case were statistically significant predictors of victims' satisfaction with the police, and that these together with police politeness, and response time explained 67 percent of the variance in respondents satisfaction with the police.

Criminal justice in the Middle East conjures up images of severed hands, religious police, and qadi justice. Yet those seeking a more accurate picture find few sources. Conventional treatments of the region focus on Islamic law, although few Middle Eastern states actually base their legal systems on Islamic law. This article argues that in the Middle East as elsewhere, rulers use criminal justice to achieve two related ends: to maintain order generally, and to maintain a particular order — to preserve the regime in power and the interests and values of those who support it. A comparative historical analysis of the emergence of the police and judiciary links these two ends, and these two institutions.

The increase in the occurrence of juvenile crime has become a major concern for most communities throughout the United States. As a result, law enforcement efforts have been intensified, thus bringing the policing authority closer to the daily existence of all youth. The focus of this study was how police are trained in the area of human relations. It was the purpose of the study to investigate whether community relations aspects of police training are addressing community recreation issues as they relate to youth crime prevention. A total of 525 police academy training administrators were selected via a stratified random sampling process. A validated questionnaire, the results of a Delphi, was administered to elicit the importance placed on twenty-two competencies in the community relations area of police training. A total of 232 (44.2 percent response) respondents were used in the data analysis. It was revealed that highest priority is given to those elements of human relations training directly related to law enforcement. Police administrators noted the lack of sufficient priority placed on this area of training. There appeared to be little consensus as to the role of human relations training for anything beyond direct law enforcement. It was concluded that the leisure service organization and the police department should address the way that the linkage can be effective in addressing recreation as intervention. Further study as to the future of collaborative relationships between these two functions is suggested. © 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

Criminal justice is an academic discipline in practice but not yet in theory. An analysis of intellectual resources used in recent criminal justice books shows that theory development is still tied to established disciplines, does not accurately reflect and incorporate the multiple intellectual traditions from which the discipline of criminal justice arose, and has failed to achieve a genuine multidisciplinary and multitheoretical stance or project. Some reasons for this state of affairs and some suggestions for training and practice in the new discipline of criminal justice are advanced.

This research empirically examined indicators of charging and sentence reduction and the criminal sanctions meted out to a representative sample of felons convicted in one midwestern state court. A multivariate analysis of prosecutorial and judicial discretion examined the influence of case, personal, social, and criminal justice process factors. The utility of sentencing guidelines for achieving fairness and justice in criminal justice policy and practices was assessed.

While many efforts have been aimed at evaluating the level of institutional productivity in criminal justice, few are recent. Those that are tend to limit evaluations to departments or schools offering doctorates in criminal justice. This study sought to evaluate the recent scholarly productivity of institutions by recording author affiliation for articles published in the top ten criminal justice journals over the past decade, 1983–1992. Fourteen top-ranking universities with a total of 431 publications during the period studied were identified. As expected, many of the these top-producing institutions offer doctorates in criminal justice or criminology; however, some of their rankings have changed from previous evaluations. By not limiting the evaluation to a previously selected handful of schools, some of the top-ranking institutions herein were less expected. Among the unexpected are institutions housing masters programs in criminal justice, or sociology programs with an emphasis in criminology. While a core of schools exist that significantly influence the discipline through numerous publications in the top criminal justice journals, the boundaries separating them from other institutions are fluid and the top place rankings tentative.

Despite substantial gains made by law enforcement agencies in attracting minorities into police work, blacks still remain underrepresented in most municipal police departments. One common explanation for their underrepresentation has been that blacks find the prospect of a carrer in law enforcement unattractive, presumably because they have negative attitudes toward the police. Using survey data, this study used logistic regression to test whether attitudes toward the police predicted interest in police work among black and white high school seniors. Only limited support was found for the assertion that blacks' negative attitudes toward the police preclude their consideration of a career in law enforcement.

Public international law recognizes the right of states to protect themselves and their subjects against threats and damage from within their territory and outside. In the international sphere, the means and methods of national protection are restricted by the extraterritorial jurisdiction of courts and the laws they enforce. Criminal justice today is being confronted on an ever increasing scale by international criminal offenses that impinge on domestic concerns: drugs, securities and financial manipulations, money laundering, and terrorism, to mention only a few. This article discusses some of the issues that arise under the United States Constitution when criminal justice agencies are called upon to enforce U.S. laws beyond U.S. territorial limits. The principles of extraterritorial jurisdiction are discussed along with a number of United States court cases pointing to the importance of this new area of criminal justice.

Much of the current scholarship on police ethics ignores the fundamental impact of the rational-purposive organization on ethical decision-making. As a consequence, debate has remained relatively sterile, quibbling, as it does, about whether deontological, teleogical, or other moral theories provide solutions to moral dilemmas. This debate has failed to take into account a set of structural preconditions to ethical discourse or, for that matter, to comprehend the practical issues at stake in ethical discussion and training. This article introduces Habermas's distinction between technical and symbolic communicative frameworks as a promising strategy for rethinking ethical decision-making in the police occupation. This symbolic-interactive approach establishes bilateral communication, role reciprocity, and binding consensual norms as essential ingredients for an efficacious ethics code. Although the article concludes that modern police organizations, as presently constituted, do not offer a favorable environment for these conditions, it suggests ways of debureaucratizing policing to foster their development.

Ethics historically has not been viewed as a core topic for criminal justice education. This note proposes that the new dilemmas created by the privatization of correctional services and the increased attention given moral issues and business ethics in the media will awaken academic interest in this area. Based on review of the literature on teaching ethics in higher education, courses that encourage students to explore their personal codes of ethics and refine their individual decisionmaking abilities are advocated over those oriented toward the acceptance of a specific belief system and defined ethical code. Universities are encouraged to determine their own ethical codes and evaluate the approaches that are being used to teach ethics.

There is still much confusion over the teaching of police ethics, a confusion rooted not only in uncertainty about the specific character of police ethics but also in the varied audiences and contexts for which its teaching is intended. This article attempts to separate out the main questions that the teaching of police ethics must confront and then to provide some critical evaluation of the options to which these questions give rise.

The views of 105 police chiefs throughout the United States were obtained in regard to their ranking of the seriousness of 60 criminal offenses. Responses indicated that the chiefs see most crimes very much in the same light as do citizens surveyed by Rossi et al. (1974) in Baltimore a decade ago. There also is considerable consensus among chiefs throughout the country in their views about seriousness. Variations between the present findings and those of similar studies of other populations are also set forth.

This paper examines the relationship between higher education and ethical practice among law enforcement officers. The spoken and unspoken values of the academic world and their influence on college educated police is explored. The specific values of studying options available to law enforcement practitioners in an academic setting is reviewed, e.g., the role of a policeman acting as a witness at a trial. The areas where college experience can appreciably increase the ethical awareness of policemen is presented.

The impact of law enforcement on political change may be observed in three sets of attitudes by groups and individuals: national consciousness, that is the acceptance of the nation as a meaningful identity symbol; class consciousness, that is identification with a class against other classes; and legitimacy, that is the acceptance of the state as a rightful source of commands. A discussion of general theories of law enforcement and their impact on these attitudes, and of politics and the police in post-civil war Nigeria leads to the conclusion that the police, by the manner in which they enforce the laws, do have an effect on legitimacy orientations, though a weak one. Law enforcement agencies do not contribute significantly to the creation of social and political changes but reflect changes that arise and are fought out in other spheres of societal life.

The recent history and current trends of criminal justice educational programs are examined in light of traditional definitions of professions, disciplines, and sciences. The author concludes that criminal justice is clearly emerging as a unique academic profession and as a nontraditional discipline. The nature of contemporary criminal justice education is discussed to develop predictions of its directions.

Various commissions from the Wickersham (1931) to the National Advisory Commission on Higher Education for Police (1978) have calledfor the upgrading of police educational levels. Junior colleges, colleges and universities have responded by creating a plethora of educational programs. However, currently, little is known about the nature, form, or practice of criminal justice education in the United States. In attempting to fill this void, data from the Law Enforcement Education Program (LEEP) are presented concerning the number of students, criminal justice majors, and degrees awarded as well as institutional control, location, and type. These previously unpublished data are presented in a primary form Cfrequency distributions and cross-tabulations) to allow the reader to draw conclusions about the nature and scope of criminal justice education. Brief interpretations, however, are provided.

This article reviews the most current criminal justice education research. It examines the interrelationship between the work of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences, the Joint Commission on Criminology and Criminal Justice Education and Standards, and the National Advisory Commission on Higher Education for Police, and describes and compares some of their more important findings. Discussed are types of criminal justice programs; characteristics of criminal justice faculty, particularly in terms of earned academic degrees; agency work experience; commitment to research and teaching; types of criminal justice curricula, as typified by certain educational philosophies; and criminal justice students. Although this article notes several areas with which future research might become fruitfully involved, the area in need of most immediate attention, and the area that current research has all but ignored, is the criminal justice student.

Theories are scientific tools which give meaning to the social and physical reality that scientists study. They also play a crucial role in generating and storing the information of a discipline. The academic field of criminal justice has a wealth of facts but a dearth of theory. As a result, this field is still only partially developed. This article is a call for greater attention to theory so that the analysis of the criminal justice system and its components can be more fruitful. A survey of 25 criminal justice textbooks published since 1975 shows that the analysis of criminal justice retains a facts-without-theory flavor. For criminal justice as an academic field of study to grow, theory must be integrated much more into criminal justice research and education than has been the case. The theoretical frameworks of such social theorists as Durkheim, Marx, and Weber, among others, are suggested as sources to draw upon to develop an integrated comprehensive theory of the criminal justice system.

The types of changes facing criminal justice education administrators and faculty mandate attention to the real world of fiscal stress and the concomitant problem of student declines. Current trends emphasize that all of those involved in the criminal justice education field must look beyond short-term cyclical problems involving the delivery of criminal justice educational services. The issues of fiscal tension and student declines require hard choices, the development of new administrative skills, and the recognition that new behaviors will be mandatory for criminal justice education administrators during the rest of the eighties.

Most criminal justice curricula are limited to crime and the criminal justice system. Such programs could profit from evolution into a curriculum covering all means by which behavior is controlled in society. Subject areas of such a social control curriculum would include: sources and nature of behavior; selection of behaviors for social control; criminal justice systems; non-criminal justice, legal, social control systems; and nonlegal, social control systems. Crime and criminal justice would remain major topics, but would be complemented by and blended with the topics of noncriminal behavior and non-criminal justice system controls on behavior. However, the focus would remain on social control of behavior and would not be expanded to include all community interaction.

This study involves the application of traditional perspectives from anthropology to an examination of criminal justice research. The survey of several samples of published research confirms the paucity of criminal justice research in non-Western settings. Moreover, most of the reported research is not broadly representative, having been concentrated in a few non-Western countries. The implications of these findings for criminal justice education, research and theory are discussed, as are means for promoting cross-cultural research. The concepts of holistic and traditional comparative criminal justice are contrasted.

Professions are guided by codes of ethics to aid them in performance of their duties and to ensure maintenance of high standards of conduct. Police officers are faced with a maze of obligations in the performance of their official duties. The “Law Enforcement Code of Ethics” and “Canons of Police Ethics” were created to make explicit the conduct considered appropriate for police officers and to guide them in the performance of their duties. This study investigates how police officers in several police agencies view their professional ethics. Some of the broader questions examined in the study are the following: Do police officers have a clear understanding of the “Law Enforcement Code of Ethics” and the “Canons of Police Ethics?” Do they feel constrained by agency, societal, or other factors from behaving professionally? Do they consider their ethics adequate to guide professional conduct, and are they willing to abide by the principles? The responses indicate reliance on personal ethics in situations where standard police ethics are not clear, and suggest the need for further research in police ethics.

The role of anthropology in law enforcement involves three aspects of law enforcement activity; forensic anthropology, police-community relations research, and legal ethnographic research on the law enforcement agencies themselves. The first of these contributions to law enforcement by physical anthropologists faces competition from other closely related fields. Police-community relations research is a potential growth area for the application of anthropological efforts, as is legal ethnographic analysis of police organizationa. These latter two areas are within the realm of social anthropology, while the former is a specialty of physical anthropology. This article reviews the contributions of anthropologists and the applications of anthropological methods to law enforcement. It contends that criminal justice educators and police practitioners alike can benefit from knowing more about how these anthropological specialties have contributed and can continue to contribute to law enforcement.

The Delphi Forecasting technique was utilized to assess the general direction and magnitude of broad future trends in the occupationally-related values of police officers. Two panels of experts were established and utilized in the Delphi Process: one composed of veteran police officers and the other consisting of law enforcement educators, top echelon police administrators, attorneys, and social ethicists. Two major trends emerged in the course of the study: a movement toward professionalization and a movement toward unionization. These two movements were found to embody generally conflicting sets of occupationally-related values. The increasing emphasis of police chiefs and their administrators on managerial efficiency was identified as the critical factor influencing the future of these trends.

This article explores the congressional criminal justice policy-making process in the United States, using efforts toward federal criminal-code revision and capital punishment as case examples. It examines how interest groups and symbolic politics affect criminal justice policy and thereby attempts to enhance understanding of the political realities of criminal justice policy making. Based on the findings reported here, an approach to criminal justice policy making is recommended. This approach builds on the disjointed incremental model found in the political science literature and should facilitate criminal justice policy makers in becoming more effective participants in the legislative process.

Examination of present educational programming reveals three primary deficiencies. First, most curricula include far too many professionally oriented courses. Second, most programs place undue emphasis upon curricula designed to train students to perform specific operational tasks. Third, there is a need for criminal justice educational programming to provide a broad theoretical orientation to the entire criminal justice system and process, rather than a focus upon any particular component. The tendency of community colleges to classify criminal justice programs as vocational/technical in order to qualify for supplemental funding has exacerbated these deficiencies. Future development of criminal justice curricular programming should include: incorporation of systemic examination of the entire criminal justice process, placement in the context of a liberal arts education based in the social sciences, and analytic rather than prescriptive content.

This article reviews recent research about interest groups in criminal justice policy making and considers the state of knowledge in this area. Portions of major studies by Downs, Berk et al., and Berk and Rossi are discussed. These studies came to varying conclusions about the nature and importance of interest group influence. Three points are suggested by the research described: (1) groups composed of criminal justice professionals (law enforcement personnel, corrections officials, attorneys) are more influential than those with social service or reform concerns, (2) particular social, cultural, and economic conditions in the various states affect interest group structure, power, and goals, (3) criminal justice legislation is generally enacted on a consensual basis without open conflicts in state legislatures and without major public involvement in the process. Some evidence that would tend to modify these conclusions is also presented. Avenues of future research concern are suggested and a framework for further analysis of interest groups in the politics of criminal justice is proposed.

Although generally accepted as an interdisciplinary field, criminal justice has focused on the social sciences. Criminal justice education, if it is to remain vital and growing, has to experiment with courses involving material beyond the social sciences. Using examples found in many law schools, criminal justice instructors can employ the art or humanity of literature in their classes. Fiction, especially short stories and one-act dramas, can be inserted into core courses or used as the basis for a special course on criminal justice and literature. The new approach offered by literature encourages students to reexamine various aspects of the criminal justice system.

There is a great deal of evidence that would indicate that the characteristics of a community are related to public policy decisions. This investigation examines and compares the community and departmental characteristics of cities that employ college- educated chiefs of police by means of lateral entry with a group of matched communities that do not. It is hypothesized that the particular characteristics of cities in terms of general socio- economic status (SES) characteristics will play an important role in the style of law enforcement that prevails. By uncovering these characteristics, some generalized assumptions can be made about what citizen expectations of police managers and police department policies might be.

The function and services of the National Criminal Justice Reference Service of the National Institute of Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice (Department of Justice, Law Enforcement Assistance Administration) are delineated. Instructions for use of the reference system are included.

The author discusses the factors which contribute to the selection of research priorities at the National Institute of Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice, the research center of the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration. The legislative mandate; the leads suggested by past research; the needs of LEAA, state, and local criminal justice planning agencies; staff suggestions; and outside expert opinion are the sources considered. Descriptions of current and proposed research projects illustrate the development of the Institute's 1974 Program Plan. In outlining future research directions, the importance of considering the citizen's perspective in criminal justice is emphasized.