Understanding the American Criminal Justice System: The Consensus and Conflict Models

The criminal justice system can be defined as the collaboration of all the operating law enforcement agencies that are involved in performing criminal justice functions. The criminal justice departments which fall into this category are law enforcement agencies, courts and the department of corrections and its facilities.

So you may be wondering how does this all come together? Let's start with law enforcement agencies. Under law enforcement agencies there are the divisions of police departments, and any other operation that impacts the law enforcement operations.

The courts are apparent, but the department of corrections can be a wide array of services. Corrections entails halfway houses for offenders, city and county jails, prisons of various levels, probation and parole operations.

All of these operations fall into one type of system, the consensus model. The consensus model is a perspective in which the systems collaborative work together in a uniform manner that we call justice. Within the consensus model the collaborative parts are under the presumption that they must strive to work towards a common outcome or goal.

The consensus model is considered an analytical tool and not a real world tool per se. The reason that the consensus model exists is to merely provide an explanation to how the criminal justice system works. It is not an actual system that works within the criminal justice system; it is a theoretical concept which is used to provide understanding to the inner workings of the criminal justice system.

So if the consensus model is not a real system then why does it matter? It does because understanding the theoretical concepts of how the criminal justice system works is critical to comprehension of how things work within the bigger picture of the American justice system.

The conflict model is another perspective of views that believe that the conflict model represents a self serving system. This theory attests that within this self serving system, the collaborative agencies do not focus on one common goal as they do in the consensus model; they instead focus on self serving interests. The reason that this is considered the self serving system is because people involved within this theoretical model tend to focus on how they can improve their personal circumstances. This can range from pay to promotions or quality of job.

Due to the selfishness of this system, there is fragmentation. The fragmentation occurs because the self serving interests which are implied by those who are lacking consideration for the system. There is a significant amount of disparaging issues which makes this into a non-system as opposed to a system that works with other agencies in a collaborative manner.

Both models are of course theoretical, the consensus model suggests that the criminal justice systems should work with one another for the greater good. However the conflict model asserts that it is better to focus on the situations which are relevant to the individual as opposed to the larger degree of the criminal justice system.

The most important thing to understand is that while both of these are theories, we cannot ignore the truth that it is increasingly difficult for agencies to communicate and work together despite modern technology. This is an aspect of the system that needs a great deal of improvement and will not happen overnight, it will take the willingness of those within the criminal justice system to make the necessary changes.