Estimates of the impact of personal health care services on the health levels of definite populations range widely. Whatever the figure derived, it is often surprising to discover what little effect such services have on the conditions of health. Rene Dubos offers no numerical estimate but phrases the point in this way:

The last few years have witnessed a resurgence of interest among social scientists in the possible effects of negative sanctions in producing conformity to norms. During the first half of this century deterrence ideas were often the object of debate and research. Debate, however, was usually conducted on an ideological level, and the extant research generally suggested that punishment was of minor importance as a behavioral influence (Ball, 1955; Tappan, 1960: 243-255). As a result, many social scientists came to regard the question as either theoretically uninteresting or as empirically non-problematic.

In the rapidly expanding literature on the police, one question has been treated with increasing frequency in the past few years: How can the police be encouraged to become more responsive to the publics they serve? Many writers contend that in order for change to take place, it will be necessary to alter those conditions which affect the type of individual who becomes a policeman, either by modifying recruitment procedures, the training process, or the schedule of compensation (President's Commission, 1967a: 20). Others have questioned whether such strategies will work unless they are accompanied by basic social and organizational changes, redefining the role of the police officer and his relationship to the community (President's Commission, 1967a: 149).

Despite the scholarly and popular interest in the administration of criminal justice, there are few theoretical discussions of the process. Consequently, this paper is an attempt to develop an explicit theoretical framework by which the practices in the administration can be depicted and explained. In it I characterize the criminal justice system in terms of the theory of large-scale organizations, and then examine some of the tasks of administration in terms of established concepts and criteria supplied by this perspective. Following Etzioni, by organization I mean “social units devoted primarily to the attainment of specific goals” (1961). In this case the formal task of the criminal justice system is to process arrests, determine guilt or innocence, and in the case of guilt to specify an appropriate sanction. The major actors in the organization include the defendant, prosecutor, defense counsel, judge, arresting officer, court clerk, and to varying degrees, other persons such as witnesses, additional policemen, clerks, parole officers, court psychiatrists and social workers, and the defendants' families and friends. A system of the administration of justice, whether it is adversarial or inquisitorial, entails the key elements of organization: institutionalized interaction of a large number of actors whose roles are highly defined, who are required to follow highly defined rules and who share a responsibility in a common goal — that of processing arrests.

An important intersection of the disciplines of law and social science is the social setting of law enforcement. The point of application of the law is almost completely social, with the exception of the totally automated justice of parking violations (Skolnick, 1966). The social factors in the enforcement encounter which produce the official definition of crime have been discussed in studies of police discretion (Skolnick, 1966; Cicourel, 1968), police/suspect interaction (Piliavin and Briar, 1964; Wertham and Piliavin, 1967; Black and Reiss, 1970), and the influence of complainants' wishes and demeanor on police action (Black, 1970). A second social setting that greatly influences the extent of law enforcement and the resultant official crime rate is the setting of victimization. This setting occurs prior to the enforcement encounter and is quite distinct from it except in cases of police observation of crime. The setting of victimization has received relatively little research attention. Questions pertaining to the perception of victimization and the subsequent decision by the victim on ways to handle the situation have not been systematically addressed. The goal of this study is to decribe why, and under what conditions, victims decide to invoke formal sanctioning procedures in response to criminal victimization.

In 1963 and 1964, New Zealand and Great Britain adopted the first modern crime compensation programs. These programs compensate for injury and death caused by a criminal attack upon an innocent victim. Although the reception given to these programs has been quite favorable and there have been additional adoptions by other jurisdictions, the total number of program adoptions remains small. New Jersey's adoption in October, 1971, brought the total number of program adoptions in the United States to six (New York Times, October 25, 1971: 28c). In addition, Nevada and New York City have adopted partial compensation programs called “citizenship” or “Good Samaritan” programs that compensate only those injuries or deaths incurred while assisting law enforcement officers or while attempting to prevent the commission of a crime or in trying to apprehend a criminal. This means that six general crime compensation programs have been adopted in the United States during the past six years. These program adoptions have been by California, New York, Maryland, Hawaii, Massachusetts, and New Jersey.

This paper is about the administration of justice in drunk driving cases. It is the second in a series (Little, 1971a) stemming from an intensive study of law enforcement and judicial systems in operation. The data reported here were obtained in 1970 and 1971 in a study carried out in the State of Vermont with the purpose of learning about how justice is administered in DWI cases in the context of a known legal framework. The method of the study was to obtain representative samples of DWI offenders and violators of other serious motor vehicle offenses, and trace what happened to them with the police, in the courts and with licensing agencies. The complete chronicle of what happened to each offender was carefully scrutinized, beginning with the time of arrest and ending when the case had been disposed of. The earlier paper contained a number of preliminary descriptive statistics, and this one follows up that background with more detailed analysis.