Chapter 6: The Criminal Justice System

Chapter 6

• Key Terms:
  • Bargaining: An approach to decision making and a model articulated by Charles Lindblom; involves incrementalism to analyze policy decision.
  • Bureaucratic Politics Model: A model suggested by graham Allison; views policy decisions as the result of a game and the push-pull of bureaucratic actors.
  • Contracting out: Refers to having work performed outside an agency’s own permanent staff of employees; a major means of privatization and an attempt to reduce the size of the public sector.
  • Decision Making: The process of choosing on curse of action from among the choices available.
  • ExComm: The National Security Council Executive Committee, which managed the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 during the Kennedy Administration.
  • Externality: The cost generated by one person or organization that is passed on to another or to society at large.
  • Incremental Approach: Decision-making model in which a serious limited, successive comparisons among a narrow range of options through continual incremental adjustments determining the outcome of the decision.
  • Mixed Scanning: A model of decision making suggested by Amitai Etzioni; sees decision as the results of fundamental and nonfundamental choices that embody aspects of the rational model and the bargaining model of decision making.
  • Negative Externality: An effect on decision making that imposes social costs on the community, such as air and water pollution by private-sector industry.
  • Participative Model: A decision-making model that assumes participation by all who will be affected by it, thereby ensuring their participation in the process; the rationality of the decision depends on their inclusion.
  • Pervasive Ambiguity: A decision situation with so much uncertainty that the assumptions of the rational model do not apply; an assumption of the garbage-can model of decision making.
  • Privatization: The sale of government services and operations to the private sector.
  • Public Choice Decision-Making Model: A view of decision that assumes that (1) the self-interest of government officials causes inefficient programs and (2) the simple solution is to turn over as many public programs as possible to the private sector.
  • Satisfice: Herbert Simon’s distinctive term for an organizational decision that does not maximize, but only satisfies, or suffices, or (combined) satisfies.
  • Sunk Costs: Certain irrecoverable costs associated with prior commitments of resources to pursue a policy; they raise the stakes in decision making.