Book Review: Out-of-Control Criminal Justice: The Systems Improvement Solution for More Safety, Justice, Accountability, and Efficiency

Abstract

D r. Daniel P. Mears crafted a compelling argument in his book Out-of-control criminal justice: The systems improvement solution for more safety, justice, accountability, and efficiency (2017) for the necessity of making fundamental structural changes in the American criminal justice system by taking a systems improvement solution approach. Daniel Mears, the Mark Stafford Professor of Criminology at Florida State University and a fellow of the American Society of Criminology, won the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences Outstanding Book Award in 2019 for this contribution to the field of criminal justice. He has written many articles, authored a book titled American criminal justice policy: An evaluation approach to increasing accountability and effectiveness (2010), and coauthored a book titled Prisoner reentry in the era of mass incarceration (2014). Mears has an extensive career in criminal justice research, making his book a worthy contribution to the field.Mears's (2017) main recommendation was adopting a systems approach to improve the criminal justice system, one that utilizes data, information, and empirical research to make criminal justice policy changes by examining the system as a whole. Other recommendations were that hierarchical evaluation is necessary to determine needs, theory, implementation, impact, and cost-efficiency; Mears inferred that these evaluations will help provide the foundations of a cost-efficient evidence-based system that addresses crime and justice policy. He reiterated that the systems approach, rather than a series of single policy evaluations, is vital for success, and emphasized a need for the research and policy-making processes to be linked. However, to ensure the effectiveness of these different types of evaluations, the systems analysis approach is critical because it allows all different parts of the system to work together cohesively. Content oveRviewIn his 304-page book, Mears laid out these arguments in seven chapters. The out-ofcontrol criminal justice system was described in Chapter 1, outlining the four goals of the criminal justice system as safety, justice, accountability, and efficiency. The book centered on the importance of these goals and how they can be used to improve America's criminal justice system by using a holistic rather than a piecemeal approach. Mears stated that the problem was the lack of empirical research at all levels of government, coupled with the fact that policymakers ignore research when making criminal justice policy decisions and 997528C JBXXX10.

How Universal Is Disproportionate Minority Contact? An Examination of Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Juvenile Justice Processing across Four States

“…In other words, much policy-oriented research takes for granted that "top-down" (e.g., "silver bullet") solutions will be most efficient once we have identified the source of a problem such as DMC. But perhaps top-down solutions are limited given the built-in variations in outcomes across courts when viewed as complex organizational systems inhabited by different actors (see Mears, 2017). Solutions that focus only at one level of analysis, for example, likely will have little appreciable impact on disparities that arise at other levels of analysis or occur more so at certain stages of processing.…”