Conference papers

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  Career Mobility in Criminal Justice: An Exploratory Study of Alaskan Police and Corrections Executives

  John E. Angell

  This paper provides exploratory research into the career patterns of Alaska police and correctional executives in order to assess career mobility patterns and the variables which may have had a significant influence on success. Basic data for the paper is from biographical descriptions of 78 people who have served during the past ten years in top executive positions of Alaska's police and correctional agencies, including the commissioner of the Alaska Department of Public Safety, police chiefs of the 25 largest municipal police agencies in Alaska, superintendents of Alaska correctional institutions, and directors and assistant directors within the Alaska Division of Corrections.

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  Reply Paper to ‘Multicultural Law-Related Education in the Humanities’ by Dr. Carlos E. Cortes

  Conn N/A

  Multi-ethnic (or bicultural) legal education is a superior way to teach law as a social process within an everchanging American legal culture. By stepping out of one's own legal tradition or culture and into another's, it is possible to see how law really operates without blinders of ethnocentricity. Ethnic minority students can use their own legal tradition as a basis for contrast and comparison with American legal culture. Elementary school is the best place to explore the values which underlie legal traditions. Teachers must discover differences and refrain from indoctrination. Curriculum that is bicultural should focus upon common problems, borne out of relationships, and common approaches to problem solving. A team approach in curriculum development has produced instructional material which treats common problems comparatively where more than one legal tradition operates.

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  Directions for Change in Police Organizations

  John E. Angell

  Three situations serve to hamper police effectiveness under traditional police organizational arrangements First, police operations are based on an assumption that police are primarily in the "criminal apprehension" business. This concept of the police role serves to constrain many police activities that offer potential for satisfying client needs and contributing to crime prevention. Second, police managers rely almost exclusively on the tenets of Bureaucratic Theory, as promulgated by Max Weber (1947), for arranging and managing police organizations. This reliance contributes to problems in the police and community relationship, coordination and direction of police operations, and (3) motivation of police employees. Third, police agencies are basically organized as self-contained operations which are automous from other units of government. This independence reduces the potential for optimum utilization of police services. This paper elaborates on these three situations and their implications, and makes proposals about the directions that the author believes police organizational changes should take.

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  Increasing Police Utility through Organizational Design

  John E. Angell

  Research by social scientists over the past decade provides strong evidence that American policies concerning police organizational designs have served in many instances to restrict the social usefulness, or utility, of local police operations. Substantial changes in police organizational designs are unlikely to occur unless policymakers have relatively comprehensive and complete models. To satisfy policy officials, a model must be (1) easily understood by laypersons, (2) logically related to definitions of problems acceptable to policymakers, (3) sufficiently defined to provide guidelines for systemic, incremental changes, and (4) adequate to facilitate simple, but accurate, assessment of the impact of changes consistent with the model. This paper is in pursuit of such an alternative model for improving police utility.

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  The Extralegal Forum and Legal Power: The Dynamics of the Relationship — Other Pipelines

  Conn N/A

  Diverse groups — e.g., Brazilian squatters, Navajos, village Eskimos and Indians — look to special forums to resolve disputes outside the formal legal system. These forums are employed because they accept disputes as defined by their clients and offer remedies based upon these conceptualizations. Formal agents of the law in their environments cannot do this. When these forums are extralegal (without formal legal authority to act) and are located in an environment where the formal legal process has the theoretical capacity to intervene in the disputes, they must tap into authentic lines of power to maintain their credibility with their constituents. Legal power is not usually formally delegated without defined limits upon its use. Because extralegal forums often must be free from the constraints of particular norms and processes, in order to correctly define and remedy disputes, extralegal forums seek borrowed power through special relationships with formal agents of legal power. Then they reapply it to meet the needs of their constituents. This paper describes the ways to study these relationships and their likely impact upon an informal forum. The author suggests a way of viewing extralegal dispute resolution in a given community against the larger matrix of relationships between the formal and informal legal process. He draws upon his field work in Brazilian squatter colonies, Navajo Indian communities, and rural Athabascan and Eskimo villages in Alaska.