Understanding Influence Across Justice Agencies: The Spread of 'Community Reforms' from Law Enforcement to Prosecutor Organizations.

摘要

Within the last few decades, police departments and prosecutors offices innovated with new policies and practices, particularly those stressing the community (i.e., community policing, community prosecution). Although organizational innovation has been empirically researched within the discipline of criminal justice, most of these studies focused on the police in isolation from the other components of the criminal justice system. These valuable studies have identified several factors that are associated with innovation including those both internal and external to organizations, but researchers have rarely considered the influence of the policies and practices of other criminal justice agencies. Police and prosecutors, even though interconnected and part of the same system, are studied individually and the cross-component effects of other agencies within the criminal justice system have not received much attention in the literature. This study explores the innovation of community prosecution using organizational predictors typically associated with innovation while also including measures of community policing within the jurisdiction of the prosecutors offices. Community policing practices of the agencies within the jurisdiction are potentially powerful influences on community prosecution. Using data from the 2001 and 2005 waves of the National Prosecutors Survey and the 2000 and 2003 waves of the Law Enforcement Management and Administrative Statistics survey, analyses show that community reforms are not connected across system components. Several possible explanations are offered to account for these findings.