The Search for Criminal Justice Theory: Reflections on Kraska’s Theorizing Criminal Justice

Abstract

This essay discusses the role of theory, law, and legal institutions in criminal justice teaching and research. It combines personal reflections of the author’s experiences from the early days of academic criminal justice with a review and critique of Kraska’s Theorizing Criminal Justice: Eight Essential Orientations (Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, 2004). Kraska recapitulates a variety of theories prominent in the early days of criminal justice with others that significantly advance theoretical discourse in criminal justice. His text should stimulate the advance of criminal justice as a discipline by establishing the idea that a number of theoretical orientations are essential for understanding the norms and behaviors of criminal justice agents and agencies. Kraska’s (2004) schema, his positioning of law, and his fit of law and legal studies in criminal justice and criminal justice education are critiqued and comments are offered on the role of law and legal institutions in criminal justice education.

Notes

1. Given the nature of this essay I hope that readers will understand the use of the personal pronoun.

2. After this manuscript was submitted, Justice Quarterly published an article derived from and presenting the essential ideas of the book (Kraska 2006). This publication is recognition of the importance of Kraska’s thesis.

3. The importance of thinking about theory to the future health of academic criminal justice was underscored by an anonymous reviewer’s comment: “Criminal justice, while thriving in many ways, seems adrift intellectually.”

4. The main report was The Challenge of Crime in a Free Society (President’s Crime Commission 1967a). In addition, the Commission published nine task force reports and nine records of hearings. Citations are available in Siegel and Zalman (1991).

5. The major ABF publications in chronological order are: LaFave (1965); Newman (1966); Tiffany, McIntyre, and Rotenberg (1967); Dawson (1969); and Miller (1969).

6. SUNY‐Albany stands for the State University of New York at Albany, a designation that has been replaced by “University at Albany.”

7. Dating the origin of criminal justice as a discipline to Vollmer’s efforts at the University of California at Berkeley is misplaced because of the focus on police education rather than on the system as a whole. Criminology, which originated in the 19th century, was developing as a discipline in that era, but any claim to its being a criminal justice discipline was belied by its interest in correctional programming but not in other criminal justice system components. The fitful history of the association that would ultimately split into the American Society of Criminology and the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences suggests that up until the recent past criminologists were not interested in criminal justice as such (Morn 1980; Sorensen et al. 1994:150; Walker 1998:131–32).

8. This may be to the detriment of the general, liberal education of undergraduates in contemporary American universities, a large subject beyond the scope of this essay, but a matter of concern.

9. The discussion of other models of criminal justice education and variations on the two models sketched in this article are beyond the scope of my knowledge or the scope of this article, but are topics worth pursuing. An historian might pursue an oral history approach with teachers of my generation.

10. As odd as it may seem to those who know me, I introduced the class and first taught it.

11. The chapter outlines the nature, structure, and processes of the criminal justice system, the “basis of force” that distinguished criminal justice from all other governmental administrative endeavors, subsystems and routinization patterns, and five “major perspectives”: evidence sufficiency, consent, fairness and propriety of procedures, effectiveness and efficiency of CJ practices, and discretion.

12. The term criminal justician was coined by Richard Myren, the first dean of the SUNY‐Albany School of Criminal Justice, to distinguish criminal justice scholars from criminologists. Although used occasionally, the term has not really caught on.

13. The quality of Kraska’s text makes it far more than an anthology. In this regard it is reminiscent of Clinard and Quinney (1967), an anthology about criminal behavior whose text was of such excellence that a second edition (Clinard and Quinney 1973) was issued without the readings.

14. My suggestions would include adding a “history” orientation; substituting a reading by Philip Jenkins (1998) in Chapter 6, Criminal Justice as Socially Constructed Reality; reducing the length of Chapter 8, Criminal Justice as Oppression; and adding an excerpt from or discussion of Whitman (2003), which offers a serious challenge to the validity or comprehensiveness of Garland’s (2001) late modernity theory.

15. I’m not sure what to make of Kraska’s phrase “rational/legalism,” as opposed to “law” or “legal thinking.” This neologism might insulate Kraska from my critique below, which suggests that in some ways he misrepresents law.

16. Ernest van den Haag studied psychiatry at the Sorbonne before World War II and earned a Ph.D. in economics from New York University. Charles H. Logan, is a sociologist; John DiIulio Jr. is a political scientist.

17. For a recent text that takes such an approach in its own way see Skolnick, Feeley, and McCoy (2005).

18. An instructive analogy is the links and differences between political science and public administration instruction.

19. An exception is the Department of Justice, Law & Society at American University, with standard courses on constitutional law and criminal procedure and non‐standard courses on the Western legal tradition, deprivation of liberty, American legal culture, legal reasoning, law and morality, law and psychology, issues in civil justice, comparative legal systems, law and the social sciences, law and religion, and an advanced graduate seminar on the courts.

20. I was in residence from 1969 to 1971. The systems analysis and theory course taught by Leslie Wilkins introduced students to von Bertalanffy (1967, 1968), Buckley (1967), and Emery (1969). See Bernard et al. (2005).

21. The School of Criminal Justice at MSU had the state Supreme Court administrator in the late 1970s, Einar Bohlen, teach a seminar on court administration, which I attended. I decided to develop expertise in court administration by doing a sabbatical leave at the State Court Administrative Office, but those plans were sidetracked by a sentencing guidelines project.

22. The initiation of the journal Criminology & Public Policy by the American Society of Criminology is a notable example of the growing rapprochement of our disciplines.

23. This is axiomatic in research areas like deterrence and the effects of criminal punishment, and in problem‐oriented policing.