The Process is the Punishment: Handling Cases in a Lower Criminal Court

4. Supportive Figures

CHAPTER 4 Supportive Figures Introduction The court is a large and diffuse institution with a high degree of specialization and division of labor. Whenever a person is arrested , a dozen or so people besides the judge, prosecutor, and defense attorney are likely to shape the proceedings and affect the outcome. While the due process and plea bargain models focus on these three figures, the Pretrial Process Model emphasizes the decisions of a host of other, less visible people: bail commissioners, bondsmen, counselors, screeners, clerks, stenographers , sheriffs, investigators, and secretaries. These people decide on pretrial release, supply information to prosecutors, judges, and defense attorneys, and often dispense advice to arrestees which is unquestioningly followed. They facilitate the smooth functioning of an otherwise confusing and chaotic court. In short, these officials administer small doses of justice in their own right. Consequently, it is important to know who these people are and what they do. Although most of the dozen or so people in these auxiliary positions might be characterized as functionaries or viewed simply as clerks-and some, like the bail bondsmen, are not even court officials-all occupy strategic positions in the court and significantly affect its processes. Several of them serve in 94 SUPPORTIVE FIGURES "intake" positions, so that they define issues and label defendants for all those who subsequently handle them. Others have limited discretion to dispense sanctions in ways that have significant consequences at later stages of the process. Because the process is so informal and depends so heavily on oral communications , decisions made by the principal actors in the processthe judge, prosecutor, and defense attorney-are based heavily on the impressions, information, and recommendations passed on by these people. The sanctions imposed on defendants, particularly those dispensed during the pretrial process, are heavily influenced by these people's initial impressions. In turn, their desire to tailor jobs to fit their own interests and to administer their own sense of rough justice determine how they handle their responsibilities. In order to understand the organization and informal process of sanctioning in the Court of Common Pleas, we must look at these people's formal duties and how they are organized, what informal powers they have assumed, and how they are recruited. These secondary officials can be grouped into three categories in more or less descending order of their importance to the principal participants in the criminal court system: those whose formal roles involve them in the early stages of pretrial release; those involved in the pretrial diversion programs; and those involved in the performance of auxiliary and administrative functions for the normal operation of the court and the officials in the primary workgroup. I qualified this ordering with "more or less" for two reasons. First, some whose formal powers may be severely limited or appear to be minimal and purely administrative can and often do exercise considerable informal powers that make them quite important. Conversely, some who appear to have considerable formal power exercise little if any actual power, and at times they are all but invisible in the process. Second, some of these officials are important only occasionally, when they exercise control over or decline to exercise control over certain types of cases that fall within their jurisdiction. 95 THE PROCESS IS THE PUNISHMENT Pretrial Release Specialists Bail Bondsmen Most discussions of criminal courts give only cursory attention to bail bondsmen, presumably because they are peripheral figures who operate on the fringes of the criminal justice system, passively waiting in the wings to bailout those whom the criminal courts send their way. This is not an accurate characterization of their functions. In fact, they are active participants in the criminal process; but they have become so much a part of the landscape and their functions have become so familiar and accepted that they are taken for granted, and because they are taken for granted they are ignored. Bondsmen help create norms, define operations, and structure alternatives in the court system. They do so because they want to perpetuate themselves, to remain in a low-risk, highreturn business. In order to maintain themselves they perform substantial and useful services for the court and actively work with legislatures. Because they are active in promoting their own interests, they share responsibility for perpetuating the bail bonding system, a system which in effect places unneeded fines on a substantial portion of the criminally accused, fines which are levied against those...