Criminal Justice Theory

Criminal Justice Theory

Select any three units of analysis and describe some dependent variable on which those units vary?

We believe that a meaningful categorization of criminal justice theories must cut across the components of the criminal justice system: police, courts, and corrections. It cannot simply organize theories and research within each separate component. We also believe that such a classification must be able to incorporate the similarities in content found in theories across those components, and to facilitate generalization and competitive testing of the theories. Finally, we believe that categories must be able to include considerable detail and specificity in order to be useful; they cannot be so broad that the entire field is divided into only two or three categories(Hagan, 1989).

We propose that criminal justice theories should be grouped or classified first on their dependent variables, and then according to their independent variables. This approach is essentially similar to Sherman's (1980) and Riksheim and Chermak's (1993) approach to classifying empirical police research, although much broader. As stated above, Sherman took police officers' individual behavior as the dependent variable. That general category included a number of more specific dependent variables: arrest, use of force, detection, and service. After grouping the theories on their dependent variables, Sherman grouped them on the basis of their independent variables: individual, situational, legal, organizational, and community. He reported research findings on the basis of independent variables, whereas Riksheim and Chermak, in their update of Sherman's review, reported findings on the basis of dependent variables.

We propose expanding this approach to the entire field of criminal justice. In our interpretation of the history of criminal justice, as described below, we suggest that there are three broad types of dependent variables; the first two encompass most of the theory and research in the field. The first type focuses on the individual behavior of criminal justice agents (e.g., the behavior of police officers, courtroom officials, correctional officers). The second focuses on the behavior of criminal justice organizations (e.g., the behavior of police departments, court organizations, correctional organizations). The third type of dependent variable focuses on the characteristics of the overall criminal justice system and its components (e.g., police killings, “get tough” sentencing, incarceration rates). This type operates at the aggregate level with theories and research that examine the relationship between societal-level characteristics and the rates and distributions of criminal justice system behaviors.

Each general type of dependent variable would include a variety of more specific dependent variables. And for each dependent variable, whether more general or more specific, a variety of independent variables would be expected to have at least some causal effect, especially because multivariate models now are used routinely in criminal justice research that incorporate different types of independent variables within one model. By categorizing all theory and research on the basis of the dependent variable, one can compare and contrast research on the basis of the perceived influence of various independent variables. This approach allows generalization and competitive testing of criminal justice theory and research ...