Competition is Better than Cooperation In the Relations Between Essay

Competition is Better than Cooperation In the Relations Between Criminal Justice Agencies - Essay Example Intervention in regard to criminal justice system refers to the process of preventing or reducing the incidence of crime, as well as acts that minimize the potential adverse consequences of convicted offenders in the society (Gough, 2010, p. 22). Similarly, supervision in the criminal justice system is defined as the process of overseeing the tasks and behaviours of the convicted offenders within the correction component of the criminal justice with the view of ensuring that the imposed sanctions yield the desired outcomes. Supervision in the criminal justice system has also been defined as the process of regulating and controlling behaviours of the convicted through restrictions or rules with the aim of ensuring that at the end they can become responsible persons who can easily re-integrate into the society without posing any serious public safety threats (Church, 1985, 456). Over the years, there has been raging debate on whether competition is better than cooperation in relations between criminal justice agencies. The persistent question has been which between competition and cooperation facilitates effective achievement of objectives of the criminal justice agencies, and ultimately those of the criminal justice system. This paper will seek to address this question by focusing on the intervention and supervision stages of the criminal justice process. It will show that indeed competition is better than cooperation in the relations between criminal justice agencies. Customarily, the criminal justice system has not been operating as a coordinated whole. Instead, criminal justice agencies have heavily been emphasizing on their core legislative independence and functions, as well as on their operational imperatives. This arrangement has been informed by a wide range of factors. The first factor is that the criminal justice agencies have differing goals, functions, purpose, and roles and as such no single agency handles the case throughout the entire system. Seco ndly, the system is defendant focused, case and incident-based, an arrangement that makes the agencies to operate separately in order not to deviate from this arrangement (Gough, 2010, p. 25). Thirdly, a range of procedural and legal constraints keep information that had been obtained before out of the court consideration. As such, information held by a particular criminal justice agency about an incident, victim, or defendant is progressively filtered as it moves through various agencies of the system. The other factor that has contributed to the criminal justice system not to work as a coordinated whole is the power dynamic within the criminal justice agencies hierarchy and their widely diverse professional culture (Gebo, et al, 2006, p. 425). The criminal justice system has been witnessing myriad of challenges especially in regard to law enforcement and corrections. In particular, the rise of the rate of crimes such as burglary cases and rape and overcrowding in the correctional facilities has been some of the main challenges facing the criminal just