IS THE HUMAN SERVICE MODEL POSSIBLE?
Commenting on the entire human relations movement in organizations, Charles Perrow (1986 :94–95) cynically states the fundamental problem in trying to “humanize” organizations:
· The search for authenticity and spontaneity should be never-ending, and if it must occur in the guise of better productivity in organizations, let it. The trainees will return refreshed to a world of hierarchies, conflict, authority, stupidity, and brilliance, but the hierarchies and the like probably will not fade away. Most organizations remain highly authoritarian systems; some even use T-groups to hide that essential fact.
For criminal justice administrators, citizens (the consumers of our products), and reformers, such organizational issues as decentralization, employee empowerment, and delegation are significant concerns today and into the future. Yet given the uncertain, conflicting, and multiple goals facing criminal justice organizations, it is not clear how such issues can become relevant to administrators. At the end of the day, criminal justice administrators have to show that adopting more human service principles actually improves their product. It is the product that is important. Polakowski, Hartley, and Bates (2008) argue that the number one predictor of success in a juvenile drug court is the quality of participant experiences in the program. In effect, we expect drug courts to assist people with their drug problems. When program participants feel that the experience is positive and assists them in moving away from a life of drugs and crime, they are more likely to succeed in the program. It is interesting that in this example, drug testing, residential treatment, sanction rate, severity of sanctions, and rewards (days off) made up the definition of the drug court program. How these aspects of the program were organized and delivered affected the outcome or product. As an example of an innovation in criminal justice, drug courts provide an opportunity for criminal justice administrators to organize and deliver their services differently and hopefully with a better outcome. This is a serious organizational issue.
Criminal justice administrators, as we have emphasized in this and other chapters, face many constraints and receive multiple expectations from their constituents, with finite resources. This forces goal ambiguity about their purpose and direction. Because of this, they adopt a structure and system of employee supervision that emphasizes what they can accomplish. More often than not, this means routinization, an overemphasis on employee control, and consistent policies and procedures. Such a structure reduces uncertainty and stabilizes all threats from the environment.
More important, humanistic attempts to reorganize the ways of doing business in criminal justice organizations require greater clarity of purposes (identifying the product), consensus on the purposes (agreement among competing interests about the product), and a well-defined technology or methodology to produce the product (how to make the product). Public service organizations, such as the criminal justice system, possess no such clarity about these issues.
Wilson (2000) argues that issues of accountability, equity, fiscal integrity, and efficiency serve as possible obstacles to innovation in public organizations. Although Wilson applies these concepts to an analysis of public organizations in general, we can apply them to employee supervision as well. Accountability centers on employee performance and issues of supervision and control. Equity focuses on fairness and treating similarly situated employees in the same way. Fiscal integrity means ensuring that public dollars are spent on the personnel and functions mandated to the organization. Finally, efficiency involves employing a sufficient number of employees, not too many nor too few, to accomplish the organization’s tasks within the prescribed level of resources.
Taken together, these concerns, along with conflicting goals and missions, serve as constraints on how employees are to be supervised. Police organizations, for example, that attempt to reorganize under a community policing philosophy would find enormous difficulties in trying to decentralize their structures while still being sensitive to public accountability, equity among officers, fiscal concerns about the appropriateness of deploying staff in such a way, and efficiency concerns. Would the creation of mini-stations in police organizations be cost effective? Would they allow accountability to be monitored? What about issues of exercising discretion and monitoring of discretionary acts among officers by supervisors?
Similar questions could be raised about correctional organizations. One state department of corrections lost a major judgment in court on the payment of overtime to probation and parole officers. The department responded bureaucratically and tightened procedures so that overtime was no longer possible for agents, even though it knew that officers required greater time and flexibility to complete tasks, such as home visits of offenders. While attempting to decentralize their decision making for agents, correctional officers were more concerned about the public impression that the department was not being efficient and lacked fiscal integrity in their operations.
These concerns overshadowed treatment and offender supervision issues. The net result was that services were cut back and the department became even more rigid. In addition, the department created mechanisms to control the time and workings of agents to the point where many agents complained that there was no professionalism in the job. Proponents of the humanistic model of employee supervision, consequently, need to address how concerns over accountability, equity, fiscal integrity, and efficiency would be handled outside the traditional structure of criminal justice organizations.