Vol. 3 No. 12 (December, 1993) pp. 133-135
SPEEDY DISPOSITION: MONETARY INCENTIVES AND POLICY REFORM IN
CRIMINAL JUSTICE by Thomas W. Church and Milton Heumann. Albany,
New York: State University of New York Press, 1992. 171 pp.
Reviewed by Michael Musheno, School of Justice Studies, Arizona
State University
In January of 1984, a chief executive, surrounded by his top
prosecutors, proclaims that the "American competitive
system" will be turned loose to streamline criminal case
processing. Under severe court pressure and stung politically by
an earlier court order requiring a massive release of detainees,
he announces a monetary incentive program to speed case
processing and meet a set of efficiency goals for the criminal
justice system.
The chief executive officer is not Ronald Reagan and Ed Meese is
not among the top prosecutors on the podium. Instead, the
proclamation was issued by Mayor Ed Koch who was surrounded by
four of the five district attorneys of New York City's boroughs.
The monograph by Thomas Church and Milton Heuman is a multi-case
study of an attempt to bring the ideology and policy practices of
the Reagan Revolution to bear on the criminal justice budgetary
politics of New York City. Specifically, it is a very readable
study of: (1) how New York City Office of Management and Budget
(OMB) came to adopt a competitive monetary incentive program to
speed case disposition among the boroughs; (2) the effectiveness
of the program; and (3) how the top officials of the district
attorneys' (DAs) offices and courts responded to and implemented
the mandates of the program.
To contextualize their analysis of OMB's monetary incentive
program, they identify practitioner incentives as one of the
three, fundamental factors that scholars of the criminal courts
point to as driving the day-to-day actions of prosecutors,
judges, defense lawyers, and other court personnel. Much of the
first chapter is devoted to what is known about the use of
monetary incentive schemes in the public sector. They conclude
correctly that policy inquiry lags behind the use of monetary
incentives to affect reform and that this gap is most apparent in
the criminal justice sphere. They promise to close this gap,
particularly to develop theoretical propositions about the the
conditions under which they might be employed optimally.
In this first chapter, they also reveal the epistemology
underlying their inquiry. Specifically, they point to the
ideological underpinnings of monetary incentive programs. That
is, they recognize that monetary incentives rest on assumptions
that humans are narrowly self interested, and that this base
motivation extends to all spheres of life, including one's
engagement in political life. Further, they recognize that calls
for more use of monetary incentives in the public sector are
based on claims of its moral superiority or its fit with human
nature. They promise to stay away from the ideology or natural
laws of monetary incentives and instead, investigate the
empirical postulate -- "that incentive schemes are more
effective in attaining the goals of public policy" (p. 7).
In essence, they argue that they can suspend their own beliefs
about monetary incentives in analyzing this postulate, and that
the behaviors of their subjects are independent of the ideas and
beliefs they have about the use of market tools in the public
sector. Therefore, their project is rooted in the traditions of
positivist, behavioral inquiry of law and public policy.
What, then, are their findings about the effectiveness of the
Speedy Disposition Program (SDP)? Chapter 3 reports program
results. SPD was designed to affect a reduction in the number of
long-term detainee cases and the number of old pending felony
cases. Regarding citywide impact, the program failed based on
these measures. However, Church and Heumann show that the
aggregate city figures obscure important interborough variation.
Specifically, Manhattan and the Bronx did considerably better in
the first year of the project (1984) and consequently, received
financial awards. In the second year (1985),
Page 134 follows:
Manhattan sustained its positive performance, although at
somewhat of a diminished level, and was awarded over $1 million.
Chapters 4 and 5 rely on the authors extensive interviews with
top officials in OMB, the DAs' offices, and the judiciary to
understand why SDP was quite successful in Manhattan, partially
successful in the Bronx, and ineffective in the other boroughs.
In these chapters, they begin to hone their theoretical
propositions, focusing on notions of motivation and capacity.
They ask whether the monetary incentives served to motivate the
top administrators of the DA's offices to use their power to
affect change, and whether the offices had the technical and
managerial capacity to follow through, assuming the political
will was generated by the monetary incentives. They conclude that
only Manhattan had both the motivation and capacity to put the
incentives to work.
Their use of these dimensions to explain differences the boroughs
is the least convincing with regard to the Bronx. The Bronx was
highly successful in the first year and yet, the DA's central
office demonstrated little motivation to push the program.
Moreover, the Bronx interviews point to the motivations of the
administrative judge whose courts received none of the financial
awards associated with SDP. We are given no clear sense of what
motivated the judge to make the program work in the first year.
Nor do we know why the Bronx DA failed to be motivated even after
a substantial first year award to the DA's office.
In addition, one facet of the Manhattan story is downplayed by
the authors in the later chapters. It was the Manhattan DA's
office that first proposed that OMB focus on pretrial delay,
requesting $725,000 to achieve backlog reduction (see p.26). The
motivation existed in the Manhattan DA's Office independent of
the monetary incentive program whereas other offices,
particularly the Brooklyn DA's Office, had put forward other
reform initiatives that OMB declined to support. The borough that
was most successful in achieving the centrally-prescribed reform
was the initiator of the reform under study and those that were
least successful saw their own initiatives ignored by OMB.
For scholars who see policy initiatives in the area of human
services as having the best chance to succeed when they bubble up
from the bottom, there are other stories to tell based on the
data presented in the book. Centralized policy reforms, even when
given incentives to succeed, are no more likely to be implemented
effectively than those that are imposed on criminal justice
agencies. Interests and motivations are far more complex than
what is presupposed by market tools. Rather than focusing first
on a theory of policy tools, we need to know much more about what
motivates people in political life, and how the organizational
cultures of public agencies shape and are shaped by the
complexity of peoples' motivations to engage in public service.
Rather than assuming that belief and behavior are distinct
processes, we should pursue our inquiry of policy reform with the
recognition that what we believe and what we do are highly
interconnected (see Paris and Reynolds, 1983; Trubek and Esser,
1989).
Clearly, narrow self interest is at work in the public sector.
Civil servants do utilize their discretion to make work easier.
At the same time, civil servants are sometimes willing to put
their careers on the line when they believe in integrity of their
policy practices. For example, despite the Reagan
administration's use of every available tool to reduce clean air
enforcement practices within the federal Environmental Protection
Agency, line personnel increased enforcement rates above the
numbers they generated during the years of the Carter
administration (Wood, 1988).
As strict behaviorists, the authors avoid the task of
investigating the normative beliefs and fundamental motivations
of criminal justice civil servants. At the same time, they lend
the legitimacy of "objective" social science inquiry to
the invasion of market-value ideology into the public sphere.
This is most evident in the conclusions of Chapter 4 (pp. 76-77)
and the final chapter of the monograph. Here, they point out that
based on
Page 135 follows:
measures of efficiency and cost-benefit, the monetary incentive
program is a failure. But they do not call into question market
assumptions about what motivates human and organizational change,
nor do they introduce any criticism of the expansion of market
values into the public sphere (see Lane, 1986; Walzer, 1983).
Rather, they argue that SPD and the introduction of market values
into case processing was good in political terms because it shook
up the routine of criminal justice budgetary politics in New York
City.
Despite their disclaimers and indeed because of the
epistemological bent of the study, they end up embracing market
ideology and encouraging the extension of "the invisible
hand" into the public sphere. Even though the "social
good" of market tools is disembodied from its empirical
determinants at the end of the monograph, Church and Heumann
point future scholarship in the direction of refining their
theoretical propositions about how to make market incentives the
engine of criminal justice reform. For one, I urge scholars to
step back and investigate first what norms and values actually
motivate public employees to distribute their time and
consequently, social burdens and benefits the way they do. If
this line of inquiry is pursued, we may find social justice norms
as well as market norms at work in the public sector (see
Musheno, 1986). And, we may not fall into the ontological trap
that presumes humans are, BY NATURE, narrowly self interested
(see Mansbridge, 1990).
REFERENCES
Lane, Robert E (1986). Market Justice, Political Justice.
AMERICAN POLITICAL SCIENCE REVIEW, 80: 383-402.
Mansbridge, Jane J. (1990). The Rise and Fall of Self-Interest in
the Explanation of Political Life. In Jane Mansbridge, ed.,
BEYOND SELF INTEREST. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Musheno, Michael C. (1986). The Justice Motive in the Social
Policy Process: Searching for Normative Rules of Distribution.
POLICY STUDIES REVIEW, 5: 697-704.
Paris, David C. and James F. Reynolds (1983). THE LOGIC OF POLICY
INQUIRY. New York: Longman.
Trubek, David M. and John Esser (1989). "Critical
Empiricism" in American Legal Studies: Paradox, Program, or
Pandora's Box? LAW AND SOCIAL INQUIRY, 14: 3-52.
Walzer, Michael (1983). SPHERES OF JUSTICE. New York: Basic
Books.
Wood, B. David (1988). Principals, Bureaucrats and Responsiveness
in Clean Air Enforcements. AMERICAN POLITICAL SCIENCE REVIEW, 82:
213-236.