Structure of Criminal Justice
The formal structure of any criminal justice organization is the officially prescribed distribution of authority and task responsibility among its offices and officials. The authority of officials to decide, to act, or to delegate responsibility is prescribed in the structure, and there is often some further specification of the conditions or bases for action. Command and intelligence gathering structures specifying how new policies and procedures are to be communicated from the top to the bottom of the bureau, or laterally. The most readily identifiable characteristics of the traditional approach to organizational structure are the idea that there exists an ideal structure to which all organizations should conform to be maximally effective. Specialization of function enhances the efficiency of bureau operations. It enables officials to become highly proficient in a relatively narrow professional task, and it generally allows workers to become more productive since organizing complex work into simple repetitive tasks increases the speed of production. Specialization, and the stability it brings is a mixed blessing to public bureau, as many have noted. We want and need this degree of predictability in a law-enforcing institut
Consideration of environmental conditions focuses attention on the flexibility required of boundary-spinning units and on various ways to integrate them with the rest of the organization. Decentralization can also increase the visibility of lower-level departments and emphasize their importance. (Hall 16)Key elements of the new organizational systems are that their structures emphasize a network rather than a hierarchy of authority and command relations, with open, lateral, upward communications based on consultation, not just downward commands. Although specialization brings expertise, it may also lead to a kind of unwillingness or inability to see alternative solutions to, or divergent points of view about, what a program should mean or how it could be implemented. The greater the level of differentiation, the greater the need for integration. ion, but we regret the rigidity that is the seemingly inevitable side effects. Second, no organization: public, private, or nonprofit, can use the design principles as their sole basis of structure. Members are loyal to their work and their professional communities, but not necessarily to a single firm. The traditional approaches to organizational structure placed high value on stability, symmetry, clarity of lines of command, and on fully rationalizing the structure of the bureau. The idea behind the program-based structure is that all the bureau's resources, it's professional specialties, its command and communication structure, and its management procedures focus on the administration of policy and program goals. First, the theory and research should not be conceived of as final, but rather, as emerging. The integration process includes all the mechanisms and procedures by which the differentiated tasks are coordinated and ordered to achieve the organizations purpose. A third, and still developing, approach to the criminal justice organizational structure is the one that creates structures that are self-designing or that "learn" over time. The traditional centralized hierarchical structure, with its long chain of command and pattern of downward communication, is not designed to either discover or respond to change rapidly. The addition of specialized departments or subdivisions at a single hierarchical level and the evolution of new levels in the hierarchy both have the effect of differentiating the organization, that is, making finer lateral and hierarchical task distinctions.
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Acceptance Essays
