CJSAP

Administration and Management in Criminal Justice

Chapter 3 Outline

1. Improving service delivery

a. Enhance productivity of agencies at lower cost

b. The system and its components must overcome two existing problems

i. Agencies deliver services with limited consideration of the actual consumer

ii. Agencies operate in isolation from one another

2. The importance of services

a. The United States economy is a service economy

b. The U.S. criminal justice systems employs millions of workers and spends tens of billions of dollars

3. What is a service?

a. Definition: “A service is an activity or series of activities of more or less intangible nature that normally, but not necessarily, takes place in interactions between customer and service employees and/or physical resources or goods and/or systems of the service provider, which are provided as solutions to customer problems” (Gronroos, 1990, as cited in Allen & Sawhney, 2010, p. 72)

b. Categorizing services by connection to goods

i. Services that come with purchased goods

ii. Services that facilitate the purchase of goods

iii. Services that are pure

c. Categorizing services according to profit motive (commercial v. non-commercial)

i. Business to consumer services (commercial)

ii. Business to business services (commercial)

iii. Public services (non-commercial)

iv. Not-for-profit services (non-commercial)

d. Characteristics of services

i. Customer involvement in the service process: dynamic demands of customer may shape service and perceptions of service quality

ii. Simultaneous production and consumption: both occur at the same time

iii. Perishability: services cannot be stored for later use

iv. Intangibility : services cannot be touched so quality assessments based on reputation

v. Heterogeneity: service delivery varies from customer to customer

4. Customer involvement in the criminal justice system

a. Who are the customers of the criminal justice system?

i. Victims: direct customers

ii. Public: indirect customers

iii. Offenders: indirect customers

b. Offender must be considered? Confusion may stem from three sources:

i. Criminal justice is a public service: others benefit from interaction with offenders; the consumer does not pay for service at time of production but at a different time via taxes.

ii. Criminal justice system has a monopoly on services: offender cannot go anywhere else

iii. Offender is non-cooperative: not participating voluntarily

c. Summary

i. Consider indirect and direct beneficiaries

ii. Acknowledge that customers may not pay at point of service

iii. In spite of monopoly status, must consider stakeholders, especially given amount of power

iv. Search for ways to make non-compliant customers compliant in order to solve problems

5. Service-Quality?

a. Measured by examining the level of services expected by a customer versus the level of services actually received (Referred to as Gap 5)

b. Five dimensions used to measure this gap

i. Reliability

ii. Responsiveness

iii. Assurance

iv. Tangibles

v. Empathy

c. Other service quality problems

i. Consumer expectation-management perception gap (Gap 1)

ii. Management perception-service quality specification gap (Gap 2)

iii. Service quality specifications-service delivery gap (Gap 3)

iv. Service delivery- external communications gap (Gap 4)

d. Assessing quality in criminal justice agencies

i. Content

ii. Process

iii. Structure

iv. Outcome

v. Impact