This blog is part of a series on reimagining the criminal legal system and our communities. Read the first blog in the series, Towards the Abolitionist Imagination.
“The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas as in escaping from the old ones.”
– John Maynard Keynes
The demands for true, transformative change to the criminal legal system are nothing new. The Kerner Report, a product from the 1968 National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, went into great detail regarding the “aggressive patrol practices” of police and provided numerous recommendations to reform policing practices. Kenneth Clark, a Black psychologist testifying before the Commission, noted that the Kerner Report reminded him of previous reports produced after riots in 1919, 1935, and 1943, and said, “It is a kind of Alice in Wonderland—with the same moving picture reshown over and over again, the same analysis, the same recommendations, and the same inaction.”[1]
As police shootings, aggressive policing practices, inequitable sentencing, disparate probation revocation rates, protests, and riots continue into 2023, there have now been well over 100 years of federal analysis, report writing, recommendations, program development, and program implementation addressing aspects of racial injustice. But none have truly addressed the institutional and systemic racism at the root of the problems and grievances. All of these reforms continue to be sensitive to the personalities and priorities of people in power. One case in point: The Kerner Report itself was shelved as politicians prioritized the public opinion of the dominant white culture at that time rather than following the robust and well-researched set of recommendations issued by the Commission. The Nixon administration would soon introduce a “tough on crime” political platform and incite the “War on Drugs,” which continues to disproportionately impact people of color today.
Work to reform the criminal legal system has largely ignored the body of research on public bureaucracy and organizational literature that helps explain the resistance to change that we have observed across many criminal legal agencies. The failure of “community policing” initiatives and the slow uptake of restorative justice practices are just two examples of how the ossified structures of bureaucracy can snuff out promising reforms. Researchers have noted that in regard to community policing, reformers have been “naïve regarding the extent of cultural and structural shifts” necessary to achieve changes in criminal legal organizations.[2]
The study of bureaucracy provides us a helpful but challenging reality that “bureaucratic agencies are sufficiently ossified that they require abolishment. This lack of responsiveness to constituency demands, whether it be from elected officials, citizens, or pressure groups, is attributable to bureaucratic inertia that occurs within the organizational setting.”[3] As stated previously, we have observed over 100 years of criminal legal system bureaucracies failing to respond to grievances from the community and failing to gain any momentum towards lasting, positive changes that produce racial equity. Consistently, the research affirms that public bureaucracies simply persist because the dominant culture wants them to (“blessed with favorable environments”), not because the optimal outcomes are produced.[4]
One body of work that has incorporated contemporary organizational literature into a model for reform posits that agencies must move from bureaucratic, to post-bureaucratic, to restorative organizational models.[5] Understanding the bureaucratic nature of criminal legal agencies can be a critical first step to recognizing necessary changes: They are authoritarian, centralized, hierarchical, having multiple levels in the division of labor, rules-driven, and focused on gathering resources. These facts contribute to their challenges: Slow decision-making, slow uptake of new technologies or models, difficulty fostering buy-in across multiple levels of staff, and deeply seated agency culture mindsets. Post-bureaucratic organizations move from a focus on gathering resources to producing and delivering valuable, effective services. Hierarchy begins to flatten as staff and the community begin to have a role in providing input into service development and delivery. There is less emphasis on enforcing rules as an environment for accountability is fostered. However, there is the potential for even more good as agencies move into a restorative organization model. Some critical characterizations of restorative organizations include , decentralization and shared leadership to allow community control of programming and resources; a focus on outcomes; participatory decision-making involving communities, victims, and people convicted of offenses; and dialogue.
These ideas take me back to a time when I attended a community meeting hosted by a large police department. While the pretense was one of “hearing from the community,” the police agency’s programming was a presentation of data and reasons why the agency had such a large presence in the community, a presentation of their services and why it was up to the community members to understand and comply with their programming, and a Q&A session where community members asked for clarification. There was really no opportunity for input they could provide in the programming. But, if this agency were a restorative organization, I could see meetings where the police department and community discuss how they would like to review and interpret data together. They would explore and plan for seed money, training, and technical assistance to support the community in taking back some of the responsibilities that had been assumed by the police agency years ago. They would acknowledge community volunteers to act as “problem solvers for issues the community should resolve” and recognize the police agency’s limitations in fulfilling this kind of role.
A critical layer to this work is commitment to and urgency in achieving racial justice. While moving to restorative organizational models would hopefully foster such commitment and urgency, the reality is that the pervasive systemic and structural racism that exists could derail progress. There has to be a movement within criminal legal spaces to recognize and cherish the humanity of all individuals accused or convicted of a crime; of communities with myriad cultures, histories, and traditions; of individuals, each with their own identities and abilities. Ruth Wilson Gilmore reminds us, “Where life is precious, life is precious.” May we put into policy and action the belief that life truly is precious. It’s time to do the hard work of letting go of old ideas and tapping into the joy of creating and supporting our beloved community.
[1] Wilentz, S. (Ed.) (2016. The Kerner report: The National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
[2] Skogan, W. (1998). Crime and the racial fears of White Americans. In D. Karp (Ed.), Community justice: An emerging field. London: Rowman & Littlefield.
[3] Krause, G. & Meier, K. J. (Eds.). (2003). Politics, policy, and organizations: Frontiers in the scientific study of bureaucracy. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.
[4] Kaufman, H. (1991). Time, change, and organizations: Natural selection in a perilous environment, 2nd edition. Chatham, NJ: Chatham House Publishers, Inc.
[5] McLeod, C. (2003). Toward a restorative organization: transforming police bureaucracies. Police Practice and Research: An International Journal, 4(4): 361-377.