Over at JOTWELL, my colleague
Jonathan Simon (Berkeley Law) has posted an admiring
review of
"The Idea of 'The Criminal Justice System,'" by
Sara Mayeux (Vanderbilt). The article is forthcoming in the
American Journal of Criminal Law (2018). Here are the first two paragraphs:
Do you want to reform the criminal justice system? Maybe with new evidence-based practices? Or maybe you doubt the word ‘justice’ is appropriate and you would like to shrink the criminal system more generally? Good luck, because, to paraphrase an old anarchist poster from London that used to hang on my wall in high school, “whoever you voted for, the system got in.” In short, almost all of us return repetitively to the idea, the metaphor really, that the criminal process is or at least can aspire to be a system. It may be time, in the aftermath of mass incarceration, to not only reform, and shrink American crime control institutions (or the carceral state if you prefer), but to (use a horrible malapropism, forgive me George Orwell) de-systematize it.
Mayeux’s enlightening essay provides us a genealogy of the rise of system thinking over criminal justice thinking. The idea that all things natural and artificial can usefully be thought of as systems (and creation a complete system) goes back to the Enlightenment at least. Modern sociology, in its mid-century rise to national prominence, promoted the idea of a social system, inside of which functioned numerous sub-systems. After the war systems theory took off in the operations research wing of engineering where, spurred by the tremendous numbers of bombs dropped and planes built and destroyed during World War II (Mayeux skips these details), the idea of breaking down processes into their essential elements and studying their flow and interaction took hold. This thinking seeded in business schools in the 1950s and came back to government with Robert MacNamara in the 1960s.
Read on
here.
