Contextualizing the Criminal Justice Policy-Making Process

• Date: 01 September 2006
• Author: Karim Ismaili
• DOI: 10.1177/0887403405281559
• Published date: 01 September 2006
• Subject Matter: Articles

10.1177/0887403405281559Criminal Justice Policy ReviewIsmaili/ Criminal Justice Policy-Making Process

Contextualizing the Criminal

Justice Policy-Making Process

Karim Ismaili

St. John’s University, New York

This article is an attempt at improving the knowledge base on the criminal justice policy-

making process. As the criminological subfield of crime policy leads more criminolo-

gists to engage in policy analysis, understanding the policy-making environment in all of

its complexity becomes more central to criminology. This becomes an important step

toward theorizing the policy process. Toadvance this enterprise, policy-oriented crimi-

nologists might look to theoretical and conceptual frameworks that have established his-

tories in the political and policy sciences. This article presents a contextual approach to

examine the criminal justice policy-making environment and itsaccompanying process.

The principal benefit of this approach is its emphasis on addressing the complexity inher-

ent to policy contexts. For research on the policy process to advance, contextually sensi-

tivemethods of policy inquiry must be formulated and should illuminate the social reality

of criminal justice policy making through the accumulation of knowledge both of and in

the policy process.

Keywords: crime; policy; process; theory; context; HaroldLaswell

In 2002, British criminologists Trevor Jones and Tim Newburn lamented that “we

still know very little about how penal policy comes to be the way it is” (p. 179).

According to Jones and Newburn, this lack of knowledge can be attributed to two fac-

tors. First, criminologists have tended to focus their empirical research on the effects

of policies rather than on their origins. And second, political science, the discipline

most often engaged in studies of the policy process, has largely neglected the field of

crime control. The observation that the criminal justice policy-making process has

been neglected is not a new one. Indeed this same knowledge gap was identified

in 1981 by the Canadian political scientist Peter Solomon. In that article, Solomon

argued that it was important for researchers to study the policy process in criminal jus-

tice to facilitate an understanding of how the political process negotiates change, to

explore the constraints the process places on the translation of ideas and analysis into

action, to describe the degree to which various actors influence the movement of crim-

inal justice proposals through the policy process, and ultimately, to provide insight

255

Criminal Justice

Policy Review

Volume 17 Number 3

September 2006 255-269

© 2006 Sage Publications

10.1177/0887403405281559

http://cjp.sagepub.com

hosted at

http://online.sagepub.com

Author’s Note: A version of this article was presented at the annual meeting of the AmericanSociety of

Criminology,November 19, 2004, Nashville, Tennessee. The author wishes to thank the reviewers at CJPR

for their comments on an earlier draft of this work.