Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-4rdpn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-05T09:22:03.287Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Networks among Elites in a Local Criminal Justice System

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

John P. Heinz  and
Peter M. Manikas
Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Core share and HTML view are not available for this content. However, as you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

This structural analysis of the relationships among participants in a criminal justice system, viewed in its political context, pursues John Hagan's suggestion that criminal justice theory adopt a “structural-contextual approach.” Drawing on data from a survey of 211 criminal justice administrators, interest group leaders, and news reporters in Cook County, Illinois, we examine networks of contact among the various governmental elites and private groups, using smallest space analyses to depict the patterns of relationships. Although the literature suggests that the police and the judiciary are often closely entwined with local political elites, we conclude that the judiciary is a relatively distinct or autonomous set in the Chicago context. The police, however, are found near the political elites. The news media are strongly oriented toward enforcement agencies rather than toward the judiciary or corrections, and the public and private organizations representing less powerful constituencies, such as minorities, juveniles, and the mentally ill, are found on the periphery. Contrary to some suggestions in the literature, government officials are not found in the center of these networks. Rather, the core of the structure is hollow, indicating an absence of central brokers or mediators.

Type
Criminal Justice Networks
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 26 , Issue 4 , 1992 , pp. 831 - 861
Copyright
Copyright © 1992 by The Law and Society Association

Footnotes

The data presented here were gathered in the course of a larger research project. Our co-investigators on that project were Jack C. Doppelt and Mindy S. Trossman, and we gratefully acknowledge their substantial contributions to this work. We are also grateful for the support of the American Bar Foundation, the Center for Urban Affairs and Policy Research of Northwestern University, and the Criminal Justice Project of Cook County. Skillful assistance was provided in the data collection and analysis phases, respectively, by Lisa Anne Gurr and Peter Birkeland. We are also indebted to Shari S. Diamond, Roberto Fernandez, James B. Haddad, Herbert Jacob, Edward O. Laumann, Robert H. Salisbury, Susan Shapiro, Wesley G. Skogan, Jerold S. Solovy, Charles Tittle, and several anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on various versions of the manuscript.

References

Austin, James, McVey, Aaron, & Hester, Tom (1991) Cook County Sheriff's Department Inmate Population Projections, 1991–2000. San Francisco: National Council on Crime & Delinquency.Google Scholar
Becker, Howard S. (1963) Outsiders: Studies in the Sociology of Deviance. New York: Free Press.Google Scholar
Berk, Richard A., Brackman, Harold, & Lesser, Selma L. (1977) A Measure of Justice: An Empirical Study of Changes in the California Penal Code, 1955–1971. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Bishop, Yvonne M. M., Fienberg, Stephen E., & Holland, Paul W. (1975) Discrete Multivariate Analysis: Theory and Practice. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Blau, Peter M., & Scott, W. Richard (1962) Formal Organizations: A Comparative Approach. San Francisco: Chandler.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Christensen, Jon, Schmidt, Janet, & Henderson, Joel (1982) “The Selling of the Police: Media, Ideology, and Crime Control,” 6 Contemporary Crises 227.Google Scholar
Criminal Justice Project of Cook County (1990) Criminal Justice Policymaking: Boundaries and Borderlands. Final Report of the Criminal Justice Project. Evanston, IL: Northwestern Univ. Center for Urban Affairs & Policy Research.Google Scholar
Doppelt, Jack C., & Manikas, Peter M. (1990) “Mass Media and Criminal Justice Decision Making,” in Surette, R., ed., The Media and Criminal Justice Policy. Springfield, IL.: Charles C. Thomas, Inc.Google Scholar
Duster, Troy (1970) The Legislation of Morality: Law, Drugs and Moral Judgement. New York: Free Press.Google Scholar
Eisenstein, James, Flemming, Roy B., & Nardulli, Peter F. (1988) The Contours of Justice: Communities and Their Courts. Boston: Little, Brown.Google Scholar
Eisenstein, James, & Jacob, Herbert (1977) Felony Justice: An Organizational Analysis of Criminal Courts. Boston: Little, Brown.Google Scholar
Fishman, Mark (1978) “Crime Waves as Ideology,” 25 Social Problems 531.Google Scholar
Freed, Daniel J. (1970) “The Nonsystem of Criminal Justice,” in Campbell, J. S., Sahid, J. R., & Stang, D. P., eds., Law and Order Reconsidered: Report of the Task Force on Law and Law Enforcement to the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence. New York: Praeger Publishers.Google Scholar
Galanter, Marc (1974) “Why the ‘Haves’ Come Out Ahead: Speculations on the Limits of Legal Change,” 9 Law & Society Rev. 95.Google Scholar
Galliher, John F., & Walker, Allynn (1977) “The Puzzle of the Social Origins of the Marihuana Tax Act of 1937,” 24 Social Problems 367.Google Scholar
Gove, Samuel K., & Masotti, Louis H., eds. (1982) After Daley: Chicago Politics in Transition. Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
Gusfield, Joseph R. (1963) Symbolic Crusade: Status Politics and the American Temperance Movement. Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
Guterbock, Thomas M. (1980) Machine Politics in Transition: Party and Community in Chicago. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Guttman, Louis (1968) “A General Nonmetric Technique for Finding the Smallest Coordinate Space for a Configuration of Points,” 33 Psychometrika 469.Google Scholar
Hagan, John (1980) “The Legislation of Crime and Delinquency: A Review of Theory, Method, and Research,” 14 Law & Society Rev. 603.Google Scholar
Hagan, John (1989) “Why Is There So Little Criminal Justice Theory? Neglected Macro- and Micro-Level Links between Organization and Power,” 26 J. of Research in Crime & Delinquency 116.Google Scholar
Heinz, Anne M. (1982) Legislative Responses to Crime. Washington, DC: National Institute of Justice.Google Scholar
Heinz, John P., & Laumann, Edward O. (1982) Chicago Lawyers: The Social Structure of the Bar. New York: Russell Sage Foundation; Chicago: American Bar Foundation.Google Scholar
Heinz, John P., Gettleman, Robert W., & Seeskin, Morris A. (1969) “Legislative Politics and the Criminal Law,” 64 Northwestern Univ. Law Rev. 277.Google Scholar
Heinz, John P., Laumann, Edward O., Salisbury, Robert H., & Nelson, Robert L. (1990) “Inner Circles or Hollow Cores? Elite Networks in National Policy Systems,” 52 J. of Politics 356.Google Scholar
Heinz, John P., Laumann, Edward O., Nelson, Robert L., & Salisbury, Robert H. (in press 1993) The Hollow Core: Private Interests in National Policy Making. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Holli, Melvin G., Green, Paul M. (1984) The Making of the Mayor: Chicago, 1983. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Ferdmans Publishing Co.Google Scholar
Illinois Criminal Justice Information Authority (1990) Trends and Issues 90: Criminal and Juvenile Justice in Illinois. Chicago: Criminal Justice Information Authority.Google Scholar
Jacob, Herbert (1984) The Frustration of Policy: Responses to Crime by American Cities. Boston: Little, Brown.Google Scholar
Jacob, Herbert, & Lineberry, Robert L. (1982) Governmental Responses to Crime: Crime on Urban Agendas. Washington, DC: National Institute of Justice.Google Scholar
Kleppner, Paul (1985) Chicago Divided: The Making of a Black Mayor. DeKalb: Northern Illinois Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Kruskal, J. B. (1964) “Multidimensional Scaling by Optimizing Goodness of Fit to a Nonmetric Hypothesis,” 29 Psychometrika 1.Google Scholar
Laumann, Edward O. (1966) Prestige and Association in an Urban Community. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill.Google Scholar
Laumann, Edward O. (1973) Bonds of Pluralism: The Form and Substance of Urban Social Networks. New York: John Wiley & Sons.Google Scholar
Laumann, Edward O., & Knoke, David (1987) The Organizational State: Social Change in National Policy Domains. Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press.Google Scholar
Laumann, Edward O., and Heinz, John P., with Nelson, Robert L. and Salisbury, Robert H. (1985) “Washington Lawyers and Others: The Structure of Washington Representation,” 37 Stanford Law Rev. 465.Google Scholar
Lipsky, Michael (1980) Street Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of the Individual Public Service. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.Google Scholar
Manikas, Peter M., Trossman, Mindy S., & Doppelt, Jack (1989) Crime and Criminal Justice in Cook County. Chicago: Criminal Justice Project of Cook County & Center for Urban Affairs and Policy Research, Northwestern University.Google Scholar
Marin, Bernd, & Mayntz, Renate, eds. (1991) Policy Networks: Empirical Evidence and Theoretical Considerations. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.Google Scholar
McFarland, David D., & Brown, Daniel J. (1973) “Social Distance as a Metric: A Systematic Introduction to Smallest Space Analysis,” in Laumann 1973.Google Scholar
McIntyre, Lisa J. (1987) The Public Defender: The Practice of Law in the Shadows of Repute. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Meyer, John W., & Rowan, Brian (1977) “Institutionalized Organizations: Formal Structure as Myth and Ceremony,” 83 American J. of Sociology 340.Google Scholar
Moore, Gwen (1979) “The Structure of a National Elite Network,” 44 American Sociological Rev. 673.Google Scholar
Nelson, Deborah (1992) “How Kids Cases Clog the Courts,” Chicago Sun-Times, 23 March 1992, p. 1, cols 1–3.Google Scholar
Nelson, Robert L., & Heinz, John P., with Laumann, Edward O. & Salisbury, Robert H. (1988) “Lawyers and the Structure of Influence in Washington,” 22 Law & Society Rev. 237.Google Scholar
Nie, Norman H., Verba, Sidney, & Petrocik, John R. (1976) The Changing American Voter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Odegard, Peter H. (1928) Pressure Politics. New York: Columbia Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Platt, Anthony (1969) The Child Savers: The Invention of Delinquency. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Polsby, Nelson W. (1980) Community Power and Political Theory. 2d ed. New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Powell, Michael (1979) “Anatomy of a Counter-Bar Association: The Chicago Council of Lawyers,” 1979 American Bar Foundation Research J. 501.Google Scholar
Raveh, Adi, & Landau, Simha F. (1986) “Smallest Space Analysis vs. the Method of Principal Components: Another Look at Ahamad's Analysis of Crimes,” 2 J. of Quantitative Criminology 279.Google Scholar
Roby, Pamela A. (1969) “Politics and Criminal Law: Revision of the New York State Penal Law on Prostitution,” 17 Social Problems 83.Google Scholar
Salisbury, Robert H., Heinz, John P., Laumann, Edward O., & Nelson, Robert L. (1987) “Who Works with Whom? Interest Group Alliances and Opposition,” 81 American Political Science Rev. 1217.Google Scholar
Schiller, Stephen A., & Manikas, Peter M. (1987) “Criminal Courts and Local Legal Culture,” 36 De Paul Law Rev. 305.Google Scholar
Special Commission on the Administration of Justice in Cook County (1985) Report on Judicial Selection. Chicago: the Commission.Google Scholar
Special Commission on the Administration of Justice in Cook County (1988) Final Report. Chicago: the Commission.Google Scholar
State of Illinois, Bureau of the Budget (1987) Illinois Population Trends from 1980 to 2025. Springfield, IL: Bureau of the Budget, State of Illinois.Google Scholar
Sutherland, Edwin H. (1950) “The Diffusion of Sexual Psychopath Laws,” 56 American J. of Sociology 142.Google Scholar
Useem, Michael (1984) The Inner Circle: Large Corporations and the Rise of Business Political Activity in the U.S. and U.K. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Weick, Karl E. (1976) “Educational Organizations as Loosely Coupled Systems,” 21 Administrative Science Q. 1.Google Scholar
Welsh, Wayne N., & Pontell, Henry N. (1991) “Counties in Court: Interorganizational Adaptations to Jail Litigation in California,” 25 Law & Society Rev. 73.Google Scholar
Wilson, James Q. (1989) Bureaucracy: What Government Agencies Do and Why They Do It. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Zajac, Edward J. (1988) “Interlocking Directorates as an Interorganizational Strategy: A Test of Critical Assumptions,” 31 Academy of Management J. 428.Google Scholar