Criminal Justice Through Management: From Police, Prosecutors, Courts, and Prisons to a Modern Administrative Agency
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Date
2022-05-12
Authors
Rubin, Edward L.
Feeley, Malcolm M.
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
University of Oregon School of Law
Abstract
In 1941, responding to a wide-ranging effort to enact legislation that would constrain the operation of New Deal agencies, Franklin Roosevelt commissioned the Attorney General to produce a report on the role and importance of administrative governance. The report stated, “If administrative agencies did not exist in the Federal Government, Congress would be limited to a technique of legislation primarily designed to correct evils after they have arisen rather than to prevent them from arising. The criminal law, of course, operates in this after-the-event fashion.”
This familiar distinction would appear to leave our criminal law system mired in the premodern mindset this Report’s casual “of course” implies. It suggests that we continue to conceive of the system by which we combat crime as after-the-fact punishment of individual wrongdoers. Following the quoted language, the Attorney General’s Report continued: “Congress declares a given act to be a crime. The mere declaration may act as a deterrent. But if it fails to do so the courts can only punish the wrong-doer; they cannot wipe out or make good the wrong.”
Actually, it is generally recognized that punishing people after they have committed crimes is a second-best response. The preferable approach—and here we can add a more convincing “of course”—is to do what the Attorney General said that administrative agencies do in their assigned areas, prevent crime from occurring in the first place. Not only do we know this, but it has generally been the purpose of the Western World’s criminal justice systems since their inception.
Description
96 pages
Keywords
Criminal law, Administrative law, United States Congress
Citation
100 Or. L. Rev. 261