Structure of Criminal Justice

The formal structure of any criminal justice organization is the officially prescribed distribution of authority and task responsibility among its offices and officials. The authority of officials to decide, to act, or to delegate responsibility is prescribed in the structure, and there is often some further specification of the conditions or bases for action. Command and intelligence gathering structures specifying how new policies and procedures are to be communicated from the top to the bottom …

…boundary-spinning units and on various ways to integrate them with the rest of the organization. The traditional assumptions about reorganization have been that it changes the organizations internal process and thus is a suitable remedy for many kinds of management and program problems. In general, the examination of the program design literature alerts us to the alternative organizational structures and their limitations, and offer usable, analytic guides to the design of efficient and supportive structures.