Roles and Challenges in the Canadian Criminal Justice System

The Criminal Justice System and its agencies encounter challenges while trying to perform their daily activities. The system deals with laws involving criminal behaviour. It dwells on three major agencies: the police, courts, and the corrections. Each agency has its own specific and important roles to contribute to society. This paper will explain both the roles and challenges each agency unfortunately battles.

Police officers have a substantial amount of responsibilities that are required to be upheld on an everyday basis. They are said to be the “front-line soldiers” in the criminal justice system (Fleming, Ramcharan, Dowler, & de Lint, 2007, p. 2) meaning they’re the first in the government to have face-to-face communication with the potential offender. “To Protect & Serve” is a broad motto that sums up the duties of a good police officer. Their role begins when a report to the police is made, actions or suspicions of a crime is present, and/or following an investigation made by the law enforcement (Fleming, Ramcharan, Dowler, & de Lint, 2007, p. 2). Typical tasks officers are engaged in are: to preserve the peace, prevent crime, enforce the law, investigate crimes, lay charges, etc (Fleming, Ramcharan, Dowler, de Lint, 2007, p. 105) but there is more to what is generally mentioned by the public, online sources, articles, books, and even the police themselves. Officers not only conduct a criminal investigation, but they also decide whether or not to proceed with obtaining an arrest which is a serious step in the justice process (Fleming, Ramcharan, Dowler, & de Lint, 2007, p. 2 & 4). Authors of The Canadian Criminal Justice System (2007, p. 4) states that because it is impossible to convict every single person who has broken...

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...ire justice system (Reece, 2014). That includes juries, witnesses, prosecutors, and defence lawyers. In the Provincial Superior Court there's courts of appeals (Reece, 2014). Their role in the system is to go over the statutes and cases to make sure no errors were present in terms of fairness (Reece, 2014). The provincial appeal courts always contains 3-5 judges, no juries, and has private deliberations (Reece, 2014).

The Federal Court of Canada doesn't hear criminal court cases. They only hear the cases involving legal actions against the federal government and agencies (Reece, 2014). A few examples of cases that would be tried in a Federal Court would be any case that involves immigration issues, tax fraud, bank robberies, etc. There’s also the Federal Court of Appeal. Their role is to make sure that the federal law is interpreted at all times throughout Canada.