Criminal Justice System

The office of the county sheriff has now entered its second millennium, having originated in the late tenth century. But, despite its long history and the vital role it continues to play in the administration of justice, very little empirical research has been conducted regarding this unique general-service county-level policing organization in the United States or the numerous other common-law nations that have inherited it. It is primarily, however, in the United States where the county sheriff has shown the most staying power and ability to remain relevant in the twenty-first century. Given that the county is the political level at which justice is most often administered in the United States, the county sheriff plays a complex and pivotal role, providing court security, process service (both civil and criminal), management of the county jail, general police services, reactive and proactive law enforcement, and numerous other services not generally provided by other police agencies. Despite the prediction by some observers that this ancient policing agency would soon fall into dormancy, especially as the incorporated areas of most counties continue to increase in size, it remains a vibrant and vital part of modern policing in the majority of states across America. As an open and nonmilitarized model of policing, the county sheriff’s office stands well situated, both organizationally and in terms of inherent service style, to embrace community-oriented policing. Historical Overview Because the office of the county sheriff has its origins in the shires of England, it is important to understand the etymology of the term, which sheds light on the formation and evolution of this important modern-day American police agency. The progenitor of the ancient English sheriff was first known as a “reeve,” the locally elected conservator of the King’s peace within a shire, the equivalent of an American county; the term “shire reeve” later evolved to become the word sheriff, the term we recognize today. Shortly after the Norman invasion of 1066, the office was removed from local elective control and placed under the centralized authority of the national government, as an appointive office, changing fundamentally the relationship between the sheriff and the citizens of the shire. Researchers have argued that it was the removal of the sheriff from its local origins and control to a distant national office that eventually led to the demise of the English sheriff’s office (now the ceremonial office of the high sheriff) as a functional policing entity; today it is little more than an ornamental historical artifact of British government, serving no substantive policing function. By contrast, in the United States the sheriff’s office, as a result of its local elective nature, remains a vitally active county-level component within the contemporary criminal justice system. By the mid-1600s, the English sheriff’s model and its inherent multiple policing functions had been imported to the burgeoning American colonies with little change, save the fact that it was eventually reconstituted in the colonies as an elective office. In the United States today, there exist approximately 3,100 sheriffs’ agencies, generally at the county or parish level. […]

Shift Work Shift work refers to a work schedule that is different from the traditional eight-hour, five-day-per-week daytime schedule. Examples of shift work include evening and night shifts, compressed schedules (fewer than five days, more hours per day), and shift schedules that rotate (working daytime for a period and then moving to evenings or nights or working the same shift but rotating days off). Shift work is common in a number of occupations that require round-the-clock operations such as public safety, medicine (doctors, nurses, technicians, and so on), and transportation (trucking, airlines, and so on) as well as mining and manufacturing, where full-time operations are necessary for profit making. A significant amount of research has been conducted on the impact of shift work in the areas of medicine, transportation, and manufacturing, whereas there has been limited attention paid to shift work in public safety, even though the potential for harm may be equally or more pronounced. Much of the accumulated evidence on the impact of shift work has led to greater regulation of work hours and schedules in some fields in order to protect the public and improve worker safety. Needless to say, law enforcement schedules and hours are not regulated, although many agencies have adopted policies limiting work hours per day, pay period, or month. What Is Fatigue? Fatigue is the subjective experience of being persistently tired, weak, weary, or exhausted mentally and/or physically (Dittner, Wessely, and Brown 2004). Fatigue is often either a characteristic of, or contributor to, various diseases and conditions including chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS), cancer, multiple sclerosis, and depression (Dittner, Wessely, and Brown 2004). Fatigue is often the result of overexertion both mentally and/or physically, but interestingly can also be caused by boredom. Rosekind and his colleagues (1994) asserted that sleep loss and circadian disruption are the two principal physiological sources of fatigue. Other nonprimary causes of fatigue include long and irregular work hours, moonlighting, shift work, stress, and poor sleep quality (Vila 2005). Fatigue is also a fundamental source of stress among police (see, for example, Brown and Campbell 1994; Burke 1994; Violanti and Aron 1993). Shift rotations or changeovers to new shift schedules can disrupt circadian rhythms and sleep length, thereby resulting in fatigue. Shift changes and extended shifts lead to increased fatigue, and it is common for police to work double shifts due to staffing needs of community policing demands. Additionally, agency demands and required court appearances may lead to the need for increased overtime on the part of officers, thereby lengthening their shifts. The Effects of Fatigue Across a broad array of occupations, it has been reported that chronic sleep restriction in which one gets fewer than seven hours of sleep per night for an extended period has been shown to be associated with on-the-job errors, injuries, traffic accidents, personal conflicts, health complaints, and drug use (Dinges, Rogers, and Baynard 2004). It has been well established that increased fatigue worsens mood, decreases alertness, impairs performance, adds to the likelihood of poor judgment, and can lead […]

A simple but profound shift in thinking has helped police organizations to realize new gains in crime control, crime reduction, victimization, and fear. Many police agencies have adopted prevention as the overarching goal of policing, rather than as a specialized function or set of activities. Understanding prevention as the strategic goal of the policing process puts into practice Sir Robert Peel’s ninth principle of policing: “The test of police efficiency is the absence of crime and disorder, not the visible evidence of police action in dealing with them” (Lee 1901). For police, prevention in the past has consisted primarily of exhorting people to “lock it or lose it” and dispensing advice on door locks and window bars for their homes and businesses. Crime prevention typically was (and often still is) an addon program or appendage to the police agency, which normally included a few officers who were trained to go to citizens’ homes and perform security surveys or engage in public speaking on prevention topics. The introduction of situational crime prevention (SCP) in the 1980s by Ronald V. Clarke (1983) offered a new, proactive crime prevention and control strategy to law enforcement practitioners and academics alike. SCP departs from most criminological theories by focusing on the occurrence of crime rather than the detection of offenders. Simply put, SCP provides a means of reducing crime by reducing crime opportunities and increasing the risks to offenders. The Evolution of Situational Crime Prevention Crime prevention is not a new idea. Our earliest ancestors maximized lighting from the sun and moon and employed defensive placement of homes on the side of cliffs, with only one entrance and exit (Scanlon 1996). Cave dwellers established ownership of a space by surrounding it with large boulders. The Romans developed and enforced complex land laws. Walled cities and castles exist throughout the world. It is a natural human impulse to claim and secure an area to prevent problems (U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, n.d.). In the early 1960s, environmental prevention strategies emerged in the works of Jane Jacobs (1961), author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities. She argued against urban renewal strategies that promoted the building of high-rise public housing complexes that invited crime through poor design. Jacobs’ ideas about safe neighborhoods also incorporated the urban areas surrounding buildings themselves. A decade later, C. Ray Jeffrey (1971), drawing on Jacobs’ works, coined the phrase ”crime prevention through environment design” in a topic of that title. Jeffrey believed that the proper design and use of the environment can help reduce the incidence of crime and improve people’s overall quality of life. Concurrent with Jeffrey’s work, Oscar Newman (1972), an architect, argued that flaws in the physical environment were responsible for, or at least facilitators of, criminal behavior. Newman believed that the physical characteristics (building design) of an area could suggest to residents and potential offenders that the area is well cared for and protected, or that it is open to criminal activity. The 1970s experienced a rise of community-based crime […]

The spatial concentration of crime and victimization at geographic locations is a well known and robust empirical finding within criminology. Several studies have indicated that crime is concentrated at micro places such as street addresses, segments, and block groups (Sherman, Gartin, and Buerger 1989; Weisburd et al. 2004), and evaluations of place-based policing tactics at micro places indicate that geographically focused policing tactics are a promising crime reduction strategy (Braga 2001; Weisburd and Eck 2004). The implementation of such micro place policing strategies was guided, in part, by the empirical finding of crime concentration at places and theoretical insights from situational crime prevention theory, routine activities theory, and the ecology of crime literature (Skogan and Frydl 2004; Weisburd and Eck 2004). As a result, many policing scholars have noted that the police are more likely to make observable impacts on crime when they target the criminal event itself and the environmental conditions that allow for it to occur, rather than targeting the development of the individual criminal offender (Weisburd 1997). Although criminal activity is concentrated at a larger level of geography as well, such as communities or neighborhoods (Shaw and McKay 1942/1969), the policing literature has not yet fully incorporated theoretical insights from the social disorganization literature in the research on policing of larger units of place. This article discusses the relevance and implications of social disorganization theory for the policing of community-level areas characterized by structural and social disadvantage. Social disorganization theory and policing are linked through such concepts as procedural justice and legitimacy. Research from the social disorganization literature has shown that communities characterized by concentrated disadvantage (that is, extreme structural and social disadvantages such as poverty, public assistance, high percentage of female heads of household, unemployment, percentage of youth) influence the formation of individual perceptions regarding the legitimacy of the police and the extent of criminal activity within the area (Kubrin and Weitzer 2003a). In the sections that follow, I review social disorganization theory and several key insights and discuss the implications of those insights for policing areas of concentrated disadvantage, most notably the importance of perceptions of favorable police legitimacy and procedural justice. Social Disorganization Theory Social disorganization theory is among the oldest and most prominent of criminologi-cal theories. Originating in the 1930s from the influential Chicago School, Shaw and McKay (1942/1969) developed an ecological theory of delinquency based on the finding that high rates of delinquency remained stable over time in certain neighborhoods regardless of changes in the racial or ethnic composition of residents. Social disorganization refers to the inability of a community to regulate the activities that occur within its boundaries, the consequences of which are high rates of criminal activity and social disorder (Kornhauser 1978; Sampson and Raudenbush 1999; Markowitz et al. 2001). Structural disadvantages such as population heterogeneity, residential instability, and poor economic conditions hinder the formation of community cohesion by limiting informal social networks and weakening a community’s ability to exercise effective informal social control over the activities that occur within its boundaries. The focus in […]

As it has evolved since the 1835 formation of the Texas Rangers, state law enforcement has fallen primarily into three categories: state police forces, highway patrols, and other enforcement agencies. That last category represents a myriad of agencies, most with very specific, limited regulatory functions that may or may not include the power to arrest. Highway or state patrols, as their names imply, were created to patrol roadways in order to enforce driving regulations, licensing requirements, and weight limitations for commercial traffic. Not all agencies that bear that designation have remained so limited in function. State police forces traditionally have had the broadest arrest powers and, in some instances, the most diverse roles, including investigating crimes on their own initiative and/or in response to requests from sheriffs’ offices or local police departments. State governments, particularly in periods of budgetary restrictions, continue to reorganize, even eliminate, their law enforcement agencies. In addition, advancements in identification technologies, public pressure for protection of children, and most recently rising terrorist threats have led to realignments and additional functions for state agencies in all three categories. With certain exceptions, it would be fruitless here to count the number of agencies involved in any specific aspect of state policing/law enforcement; however, certain agencies do illustrate types of policing and state law enforcement. State Regulatory Enforcement Agencies These agencies largely fall into three loosely defined groupings: revenue collection, capitol protection, and conservation or environmental policing. But their functions are often blurred. State budgets rely heavily on taxes applied to tobacco, alcohol, gasoline, and most recently gambling. Indiana State Excise Police, for example, regulate the sale of tobacco and alcohol primarily to collect revenue but also to protect public safety by prohibiting after-hours or underage drinking. Besides checking the licenses of commercial vehicles, the South Carolina State Transport Police ticket for littering and arrest for unsafe transport of hazardous materials, among other duties. Nevada relies on its long-standing Gaming Control Board agents to police its very extensive gambling industry. In other states that more recently have been experiencing the rise of casino or riverboat gambling, such as Louisiana, Maine, Missouri, New Jersey, and Oregon, gaming law enforcement has been entrusted to the state police or highway patrol. Protection for state capitol complexes ranges from small, nonsworn units, such as in Minnesota, to divisions or bureaus of the state police or highway patrol. Even smaller uniformed units, as in Alabama or Delaware, have statewide arrest powers and provide security for various official buildings and state executives. One of the oldest, the Pennsylvania Capitol Police, originated in 1895, a decade before the Pennsylvania State Police. Some capitol police, such as those in Kansas, Idaho, and Iowa, have been and remain part, respectively, of their states’ highway patrol, state police, and state patrol. The trend may well be for capitol police to be absorbed into larger existing agencies. Citing 2001 terrorism, Florida’s legislature moved its capitol police from the more mundane Department of Management Services to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. Conservation police are […]