ABSTRACT
The criminal justice chain is often perceived as being inefficient, among others due to barriers and disconnections between the organisations involved in this chain. It thus seems suitable to apply a supply chain perspective in order to improve the efficiency and effectiveness in this chain.This chapter sets out to explore contingencies effecting the improvement of criminal justice chain performance by means of a case study inThe Netherlands.The findings provide insight into how factors that are central to operations and supply chain management (the management of customers, processes, and professionals and organisations) challenge the applicability of supply chain logic in the context of the criminal justice system. In many developed countries, public services are seemingly under attack.There
are numerous complaints about inadequate systems, poor delivery and often the public is concerned about the quality, timeliness and adequacy of the government as a service provider. Public systems performance is also of interest to governments themselves, as they are aiming to reduce expenses.Overall,many governments have been criticised for years of spending on structure and infrastructure of their systems that has not led to long-term gains in either productivity or effectiveness (Osborne, Radnor,Vidal and Kinder, 2014; Karwan and Markland, 2006). Within the public services, some specific service types such as the legal system are
getting extra attention because - perceived - mistakes are seen as a sign of injustice and inadequacy.Thus, improving both effectiveness and efficiency of these services is a clear objective for governments (Carmona and Grönlund, 2003). Improvement initiatives have been started in legal services in, among others, England andWales (Iannacci, 2014; Radnor and Bucci, 2010), Portugal (Martins and Carvalho, 2013), Finland (Pekkanen and Niemi, 2013; Pekkanen, 2011), the US and Italy (Steelman and Fabri, 2008).These initiatives largely centred around the application of lean within one organisation active in the legal system (mainly courts), aiming to eliminate waste. Despite these initiatives,most governments still struggle to achieve sustainable, long-lasting improvements in the legal system as a whole. Legal services, among which criminal law enforcement, are produced in a chain
of public service providers.To enforce criminal law, the police, public prosecution,
the court system and execution services (prisons, community service organisations, etc.) are working together in a more or less sequential manner, thus forming a chain of interdependent organisations.Together, they have the aim to come to a fair and impartial judgment for each suspected offender of the law. InThe Netherlands, as in some other European countries, other overall improvement aims of the chain are to process more cases successfully, bring suspects to court more quickly and punish delinquents more effectively (Dutch Ministry of Security and Justice, 2013).This requires the parties in the chain to work more closely together and tune their respective activities and information requirements. Given the aims of the criminal justice chain concerning quality, speed and costs, supply chain management (SCM) practices could be of great use.The field of SCM is focused on bringing about an evenly distributed and controlled stream of activities that transforms ‘raw materials’ into the final ‘product’ that meets the needs of the customer in terms of quality, costs and timeliness. However, most parties in this public service chain are not used to think along the lines of SCM. Karwan and Markland (2006) argued that, in general, public performance
improvements are unlikely to be realised without a clear understanding of how public processes work, how they are affected by both internal and external as well as organisational and sectorial developments, and what other operational considerations are at stake.That implies that just transferring insights from product based supply chains (SCs) to the criminal justice chain might not help.This is in line with the contextual dependencies as introduced by Sousa andVoss (2008): when aiming for quality improvement in SCs the organisational context as well as the differences between different types of organisations need to be taken into account.We thus need to know what elements and factors are unique to the criminal justice chain in order to improve supply chain performance. While there is a managerial and public interest in improving the criminal justice
chain there is also reason to believe that this is an interesting avenue for research due to the specific, sometimes conflicting aims of the criminal justice supply chain. In criminal law enforcement, streamlining the supply chain might collide with aims that are perceived as being important, such as doing justice, thoroughness of investigations, and independence and autonomy of professionals and institutions involved. Attributes of criminal justice services and resulting operational and performance considerations at stake have been studied within organisations involved. These studies resulted in insights concerning the optimisation of individual parts of the criminal justice chain, primarily the improvement of performance in courts (Martins and Carvalho, 2013; Pekkanen and Niemi, 2013; Pekkanen, 2011; Hines, Martins and Beale, 2008). However, to the best of our knowledge no such research has been conducted in supply chains involving multiple public organisations. So, no attention has been given to the criminal justice chain. As a consequence we lack knowledge about what characterises the criminal justice chain from a SCM perspective as well as about the implications of these characteristics for the application of SC principles, and their possible effects on performance.Therefore our main research question is:
Which context factors define the criminal justice supply chain and to what extent do these factors collide or align with principles that aim to improve supply chain performance?
