Flawed Criminal Justice Policies Summary

Chapter One Summary

The first chapter of the book Flawed Criminal Justice Policies by Reddington and Bonham talks about the policy making process in the United States, who influences the policy, who are the stakeholders, and what are the end results of those policies placed in our society. According to the text there are plenty of bad and good policies placed in our lives, but looking more at the Criminal Justice we can recognize that the policies are mostly concerned about the victims of the crime, with its limitation, the crime is on the rise, we let out people from jails due to the insanity rule, as well as due to very light rules for the offenders that are drug or alcohol users that end up back in the society without proper help. Authors

of the book point out that the study of the public policy is being concentrated on the criminal justice versus the policies themselves.
It is important to implement good policies in our society and our criminal justice system, a good policies that have the rational problem solving approach, which includes four steps: it identifies the objective to be achieved by the policy, identify alternative courses of action, Predicts and evaluate all the potential consequences of each course of action and lastly those alternatives maximize the success in achieving the primary objective.

Public policy in the USA recently was influenced mostly by the politics, debated and evaluated by the ideology and the government, and politicians are mostly influenced by the media, that are not always right in terms of portraying the truth about certain situations. According to the text some of the public policies can develop from the public communities that are part of the political system, it allows the government to see the bigger spectrum of the issue and implement policy within the interest of stakeholders in that situation. Another important feature of the policy making process is the fact of who from the public interest is participating in the process and who is making the policy. Two models are presented in the book that determine the process of policy making; the elitist model which concludes that most of the policy is being conducted by small wealthy group that holds the biggest power in the government and the society. Recently US policy making process has moved from the elitist model to the populist model which includes the general public,

and allows the policy to include more stakeholders. Chapter one also talks about the evidence-based policy making process which helps to create more accurate policies due to its strict objective evidence. There are a lot of people working to reform current policies to make them more reliable and to make them help in improving performance, meet standards, and ensure professionalism (Criminal Justice). Information presented in chapter one is strictly related to the current situation in the country, as we can notice in recent year media is concentrated on showing every single case of police misconduct, without showing the good aspects of the police. There is a big move on implementing policies with the limiting the power of the police, which is strictly influenced by the media and relates to the populist model of policy making because it includes the general public as a stakeholder.