Informal Structure In The Criminal Justice System

There are formal policies and structures in every criminal justice and/or law enforcement agency. However, it seems for many agencies deciding whether or not to follow these practices coms as an option and informal practices are a better use. Within police, courts, and correction law enforcement agencies there have been a set of informal rules and group processes that one is cultured into that undermine the formal policies, some for legit reasons ranging from time management, too much discretion, and other culture identities. They all have deterrence, time-management, coupling, and other informal policies and rules. People do things in the criminal justice system because of time limits or time restrictions as well as depending on who is in …show more content…
Informal sanctions include political influence. Whoever the judge is sort of depicts how other workers and the sentencing structure will be done. For example in S and G they give the differences in the two different outcomes of two different judges. And how the judge believed and his style depicted how everyone else in the courthouse would work. For instance under Phillips there was less aggression and higher convicts and ore prison. However, with Steele there are more aggression and lower convictions, which shows how these are not formal process, because if they were they would be the same for every case, not rather different under different judges. Courts are also given autonomy until a high profile case comes along, which is another informal structure, because no one really knows what is going on in the system until that …show more content…
Discretion occurs in how things are ran, for example parole officers in the system are given almost completely autonomy to do the their jobs however the want and many work as little as possible. It is easy to do because no one is ever watching them. However, there are formal polices that are set into place for these officers to do something specific, but they are set in place by DC officials and then supervisors of the department are the ones to translate the policy to their officers, but they still let their officers do what they want because they believe that they know how to get things done and no one is watching them so it doesn’t really matter anyway. This type of autonomy and discretion lets the corrections system do what it wants because there is a similar case with prison and jails, considering they are closed off to the public so how they are ran is a secret to many. Discretion and autonomy are not the only types of informal sanctions in prison