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Intended for federal, state, and local policymakers in the area of criminal justice research and development, this report includes guidelines for improvement of the quality, relevance, and utilization of research results. In order to cover these issues, part two of this report focuses respectively on the needs of research and development policymakers who fund criminal justice research and development, researchers who conduct research and development, and practitioners who put research and development results into use. Guidelines and principles are proposed which should assist policymakers at all levels of government. However, some topics tend to be addressed more to the federal level, where major research and development decisions are often made. The first chapter of this part presents a detailed discussion of institutional support for criminal justice research and development. It describes the federal role in supporting this effort, focusing on who the agencies are, the extent of their involvement, and how the principal agencies are organized to manage their research and development programs. Recommendations regarding the research and development management activities of criminal justice funding agencies are included. Several important issues in the conduct of criminal justice research and development are examined in the second chapter. Among the topics discussed are constraints on research, ethical issues, research designs and methodologies, prerequisites for sound planning and project selection, ways of maintaining the confidentiality of data, and ways of making data more easily available for research and statistical purposes. The final chapter of this section discusses research and development utilization practices and the assumptions underlying current policies in this area. A criticism of these policies and recommendations for new strategies is presented. The final part of this report provides an analysis of the kinds of problems often encountered in research and development. Three general types of criminal justice research and development are discussed: technology (e.g., hardware) research, research on problems of criminal justice organizations (e.g., arrest, prosecution, sentencing, and parole), and research on new criminal justice problems. For each type of research and development, the relevant issues and recommendations are discussed. Most of these, however, still related to either the support or conduct of research and development. The report also attempts to provide concrete illustrative examples by raising the relevant issues in the context of crime prevention at commercial and residential sites (technology research), sentencing (research on problems of criminal justice organizations), and problems of the victim (research on new criminal justice problems)

The concept of rule of law in criminal process is based on the assumption that social differences can & should be screened out of criminal proceedings. Both propositions are questionable. Three principal approaches to the politics of criminal process are reviewed: conflict between crime control & due process; neo-Marxist theories of legal domination; & social reality theory. Inadequacies in all three are noted, leading to a three-dimensional theory of social segmentation by race/ethnicity, class, & role. This perspective is applied to police-citizen contact, plea bargaining, & formal trial, revealing complexities not captured in the usual analyses. Despite the value of the role of law framework in protecting freedom, an alternative framework of discretionary justice needs to be formulated to embody the actual concepts of legal personnel, giving decisionmakers authority to adapt rules & procedures to segmental variation. In The Rule of Law in Criminal Justice: An Innocent Convicted, Lief H. Carter & Loren P. Beth (University of Georgia, Athens) note the slippery use of the concept of rule of law by Scheingold, provide the conventional definition of this concept, & show how in its terms the criminal justice system may respond to the fact of cultural cleavage. So far as Scheingold's definition revolves around the notion of equality, it is misapplied. In Reaffirming the Verdict: A Reply to Professors Carter and Beth, Scheingold notes Carter's & Beth's substantial agreement with the proposed reforms, together with their assertion that these are needed to implement the rule of law. In fact, these proposals significantly revise the aim of the legal system from the formal equality implied by the concept of rule of law to substantial equality. 1 Figure. W. H. Stoddard.