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Although police departments and prosecutor’s offices must closely collaborate, their organizational roles and networks, and the distinctive perspectives of their personnel, will inevitably and regularly lead to forceful dialogue and disruptive friction. Such friction can occasionally undermine thoughtful deliberation about public safety, the rule of law, and community values. Viewed more broadly, however, these interactions promote just such deliberation, which will become even healthier when the dialogue breaks out of the closed world of criminal justice bureaucracies and includes the public to which these bureaucracies are ultimately responsible. This chapter explores such organizational interactions and their value.
The history of the federal involvement in violent crime frequently is told as one of entrepreneurial or opportunistic action by presidential administrations and Congress. The problem with this story, however, is that it treats state and local governments as objects of federal initiatives, not as independent agents. Appreciating that state and local governments courted and benefited from the federal interest is important for understanding the past two decades, but also for understanding the institutional strains created by the absolute priority the feds have given to counterterrorism since September 11, 2001. Intergovernmental relations are at a crossroads. For two decades, the net costs of the federal interaction with state and local governments on crime have been absorbed nationally, with the benefits felt locally. The federal commitment to terrorism prevention and the roles federal authorities envision for state and local agencies portend a very different dynamic, with reduced federal funding for policing and an inherent tension between domestic intelligence collection and street crime enforcement, particularly in urban areas with a high proportion of immigrants.
INTRODUCTION At first blush, it seems odd for an American contributor to an international conference on sentencing to focus on "high end" federal white collar sentencing. After all, federal cases make up a relatively small part of the U.S. criminal justice system. (Between October 2005 and September 2006, about 1,132,290 people were sentenced for a felony in state courts,' and 73,009 in federal courts.) 2 Even within the federal system, white collar cases of all sorts are a relatively small part of a criminal docket dominated by immigration, drug, and gun cases, which together comprised nearly 73% of all federal cases in 2009." And the "crimes involving fraud, deceit, theft, embezzlement, insider trading, and other forms of deception" that accounted for 9.5% of 2009 cases includes a great many offenders and offenses of the middling sort. 4 Moreover, what is meant by "high end" anyway? Does a vague directional reference allow one to sidestep the longstanding scholarly debate about defining "white collar crime?" 5 The provisional answer is "yes," at least when broadly speaking of sentencing policy. One need not be either rigorous or comprehensive in defining the relevant class of cases to appreciate the outsized role that the
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