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.


Copyright 1993