General systems theory and criminal justice

Criminal justice agencies are organized sequentially — “output” from one agency is “input” to the next — but most scholars argue that criminal justice is not a system in a theoretical sense. In this article, it is argued that general systems theory (GST) reveals important insights into criminal justice structures and functions. Specifically, it is argued that the criminal justice system processes “cases” rather than people, and that the common goal of criminal justice processing is to “close cases so that they stay closed.” It also is argued that processing capacity progressively declines, in that at each system point the subsequent agency cannot input as many cases as the previous agency can output. Each agency therefore experiences “backward pressure” to close cases in order to reduce input to the next agency. Overall, this article highlights that criminal justice agents and agencies are best understood as operating in the context of the larger whole, thus it is concluded that criminal justice is a system in the sense of general systems theory.     

WASHINGTON,DU BOIS AND PLESSY V. FERGUSON

Law and Philosophy -     

The race may be close but my horse is going to win: Wish fulfillment in the 1980 presidential election

Using data from the 1980 U.S. presidential election, we investigate the extent to which voter expectations about candidate electoral success and margin of victory are subject to systematic biases. In particular, we examine the extent to which candidate supporters overestimate their choice's likelihood of success. After finding a rather dramatic bias in the direction of wishful thinking, we review alternative explanations of this phenomenon, including a model based on nonrandom contact networks and one based on preference-related differences in expectations about exogenous variables that could affect the election outcome.