By Samuel Walker
It's a truism that the management of felony justice comprises a chain of discretionary judgements through police, prosecutors, judges, and different officers. Taming the System is a historical past of the forty-year attempt to regulate the discretion. It examines the discretion challenge from the preliminary ''discovery'' of the phenomenon by means of the yankee Bar beginning within the Nineteen Fifties via to the newest review study on reform measures. of large price to students, reformers, and legal justice execs, this ebook methods the discretion challenge via a close exam of 4 selection issues: policing, bail atmosphere, plea bargaining, and sentencing. In a box which principally produces short-ranged ''evaluation research,'' this learn, in taking a much broader method, distinguishes among the function of administrative our bodies (the police) and evaluates the longer-term developments and the profitable reforms in felony justice heritage.
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Extra resources for Taming the System: The Control of Discretion in Criminal Justice, 1950-1990
Example text
Most cases get little if any detective work. 9 Decisions about whether to "found" a crime, to investigate, and to investigate vigorously can be influenced by police officer bias. 0 The investigation of suspected crimes involves a series of decisions about searches, seizures, and interrogations. 11 Field interrogations provoke great resentment among young black men. Warrantless searches are especially problematic, particularly in the case of narcotics and weapons possession cases. 13 In the event of an arrest, the arresting officer makes a decision about what charges to file.
Thus for many people, the question of the extent to which the Court has modified (some would say gutted) the 1961 Mapp decision, and might overturn it completely in the near future, is the beginning and the end of their thinking about controlling police discretion and police misconduct. Police Discretion 23 The discussion that follows takes a very different approach. First, it redirects our thinking to the broad range of discretionary decision points. Second, it operates on the assumption that the Supreme Court is not presently the primary instrument for either controlling police discretion or reducing police misconduct.
Controlling Police Discretion The Use of Deadly Force The control of deadly force is arguably the great success story in the long effort to control police discretion. It is the one decision point where we have persuasive evidence documenting a positive impact of new 26 Taming the System rules without any unintended and undesirable consequences. The number of people shot and killed by the police was reduced by at least 30 percent between the early 1970s and the late 1980s. 17 This is a substantial accomplishment, which advances fundamental principles of due process and equal protection and has saved many lives.
