Interest Group Politics and the Reform of the Federal Criminal Code (From Political Science of Criminal Justice, P 41-55, 1983, Stuart Nagel et al, ed. - See NCJ-87705)

• NCJ Number: 87708
• Author(s): A P Melone; R Slagter
• Date Published: 1983
• Length: 15 pages
• Sale Source: Charles C. Thomas
• Language: English
• Country: United States of America

Annotation

This case study suggests that lay public support for Federal criminal code reform may be less vital than modest support from criminal justice professionals.

Abstract

Patterns of interest group articulation and aggregation were discerned through a listing of all groups and individuals offering testimony before Senate Judiciary Committees on the Brown Commission Report (1971). The position of each appearing group was noted and the testimony of each was coded as favorable, unfavorable, or noncommital on the proposed legislation. If in any instance a group or individual disagreed in any way with the legislation as proposed, their testimony was coded as unfavorable. Interest group representatives and individuals offering testimony were first analyzed as a whole and then grouped into two functional categories: criminal justice professionals and lay groups. The findings for the most attentive interest groups, those having recurrent interests, indicate that even among those stipulated as a working criminal justice elite support for criminal code reform was clearly insufficient. Even with compromise legislation, it became difficult to isolate one group from the other. Citizen, labor, business, law, and police all had reservations about specific code reforms, albeit usually for different reasons. The findings suggest it is more dificult to find consensus in a comprehensive systematic approach to the devising of a criminal code than in responding to the practical problems facing the nation in an ad hoc and pragmatic fashion -- the approach that has created the hodgepodge collection of loosely connected norms that currently constitute criminal law.