Sage Journals: Discover world-class research

Abstract

A primary responsibility of organizational leaders in large metropolitan areas is to find the right balance between becoming more efficient while remaining highly effective, and these aspects of municipal governance are no less true in the City of Dallas, Texas. Among responsibility for law enforcement, an important job component of its police officers is to arrest and transport prisoners to jail. However, book-in procedures are unnecessarily time consuming due in part to the medical screening process. To examine this process, data were collected over a 90-day period from the Dallas County (Texas) jail. Findings from the current study indicate that adjustments to prisoner transfer times and changes to the staffing of medical personnel could significantly reduce jail wait times for officers. The current study utilizes organizational process theory and general systems theory to explain various relationships found within the Dallas County jail’s medical evaluation system. Finally, several policy recommendations are suggested.

Keywords

medical screening jail efficiency policing negative binomial regression

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Allison

G. T.

(1969). Conceptual models and the Cuban missile crisis. The American Political Science Review, 63, 689–718.

Allison

P. D.

(2001). Missing data (Vol. 127). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

American Correctional Association. (2014). Jail screening assessment tool. Washington, DC: Author.

Barton

(2013). Flow charts of jail procedures. Oakland, CA: Community Oriented Correctional Health Services.

Begier

E. M.

Bennani

Forgione

Punsalang

Hanna

D. B.

Herrera

Parvez

(2010). Undiagnosed HIV infection among New York City jail entrants, 2006: Results of a blinded serosurvey. Journal of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndromes, 54, 93–101.

Bernard

T. J.

Paoline

E. A.

Pare

(2005). General systems theory and criminal justice. Journal of Criminal Justice, 33, 203–211.

Carter

D. L.

(1985). Hispanic perception of police performance: An empirical assessment. Journal of Criminal Justice, 13, 487–500.

Charles

L. E.

Burchfiel

C. M.

Fekedulegn

Vila

Hartley

T. A.

Slaven

… Violanti

J. M.

(2007). Shift work and sleep: The Buffalo Police health study. Policing, 30, 215–227.

Cook

(2012). Managing medical liability begins at the front door. Sheriff, 64, 6–8.

10.

Cooper

J. A.

Worrall

J. L.

(2012). Theorizing criminal justice evaluation and research. Criminal Justice Review, 37, 384–397.

11.

Davis

P. S.

Pett

T. L.

(2002). Measuring organizational efficiency and effectiveness. Journal of Management Research, 2, 87–98.

12.

Donahue

A. K.

Miller

J. M.

(2005). Citizen preferences and paying for police. Journal of Urban Affairs, 27, 419–435.

13.

Estelle v. Gamble , 429 U.S. 97 (1976).

14.

Forbes. (2009). In pictures: America’s biggest jails. Retrieved from http://www.forbes.com/2009/07/10/jails-houston-recession-business-beltway-jails_slide_9.html

15.

Gerber

Hopkins

D. J.

(2011). When mayors matters: Estimating the impact of mayoral partisanship on city policy. American Journal of Political Science, 55, 326–339.

16.

Glaze

L. E.

James

D. J.

(2006). Mental health problems of prison and jail inmates. Washington, DC: United States Bureau of Justice Statistics.

17.

Glaze

L. E.

Kaeble

(2013). Correctional populations in the United States, 2013. Washington, DC: United States Bureau of Justice Statistics.

18.

Gomm v. DeLand , 729 F. Supp. 767, 778 (D. Utah 1990).

19.

Hickman

Fricas

Strom

K. J.

Pope

M. W.

(2011). Mapping police stress. Police Quarterly, 14, 227–250.

20.

Hinds

Murphy

(2007). Public satisfaction with police: Using procedural justice to improve police legitimacy. Australian & New Zealand Journal of Criminology, 40, 27–42.

21.

Huber

P. J.

(1981). Robust statistics. New York, NY: John Wiley and Sons.

22.

Johnson

R. R.

Klahm

C. F.

Maddox

H. G.

(2015). An exploratory analysis of time lapses in serving arrest warrants a focal concerns and disproportionate contact approach. Criminal Justice Review, 40, 470–487.

23.

Kast

F. E.

Rosenzweig

J. E.

(1972). General systems theory: Applications for organization and management. Academy of Management Journal, 15, 447–465.

24.

Kelley

T. M.

(2005). Mental health and prospective police professionals. Policing: An International Journal of Police Strategies & Management, 28, 6–29.

25.

Kettl

D. F.

(2014). The politics of the administrative process (5th ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: CQ Press.

26.

LeBeau

J. L.

Corcoran

W. T.

(1990). Changes in calls for police service with changes in routine activities and the arrival and passage of weather fronts. Journal of Quantitative Criminology, 6, 269–291.

27.

Long

S. J.

Freese

(2014). Regression models for categorical dependent variables using Stata. Bryan, TX: Stata Press.

28.

Magner

Johnson

G. G.

(1995). Municipal officials’ reactions to justice in Budgetary Resource Allocation. Public Administration Quarterly, 18, 439–456.

29.

Martin

M. K.

Katsampes

, & National Institute of Corrections (U.S.). (2007). Sheriff’s guide to effective jail operations. Washington, DC: National Institute of Corrections.

30.

Maruschak

L. M.

Berzofsky

Unangst

(2015). Medical problems of state and federal prisoners and jail inmates (Special report NCJ248491). Washington, DC: United States Department of Justice.

31.

Mazerolle

Antrobus

Bennett

Tyler

T. R.

(2013). Shaping citizen perceptions of police legitimacy: A randomized field trial of procedural justice. Criminology, 51, 33–63.

32.

McCarty

W. P.

Ren

Zhao

J. S.

(2012). Determinants of police strength in large U.S. cities during the 1990s: A fixed-effects panel analysis. Crime & Delinquency, 58, 397–424.

33.

Minton

T. D.

Golinelli

(2013). Jail inmates at midyear—Statistical table. Washington, DC: United States Bureau of Justice Statistics.

34.

Nunn

(2001). Cities, space, and the new world of urban law enforcement technologies. Journal of Urban Affairs, 23, 259–278.

35.

Percy

S. L.

(1980). Response time and citizen evaluation of police. Journal of Police Science and Administration, 8, 75–86.

36.

Piquero

A. R.

Shepherd

J. P.

Farrington

D. P.

(2011). Impact of offending trajectories on health: Disability, hospitalisation and death in middle-aged men in the Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development. Criminal Behaviour and Mental Health, 21, 189–201.

37.

Polakowski

Hartley

R. E.

Bates

(2008). Treating the tough cases in juvenile drug court individual and organizational practices leading to success or failure. Criminal Justice Review, 33, 379–404.

38.

Rose

S. J.

Lebel

T. P.

Begun

A. L.

Fuhrmann

(2014). Looking out from the inside: Incarcerated women’s perceived barriers to treatment of substance use. Journal of Offender Rehabilitation, 53, 300–316.

39.

Sandy

J. P.

Devine

D. A.

(1978). Four stress factors unique to rural patrol. The Police Chief, 45, 42–44.

40.

Scheyett

Vaughn

Taylor

Parish

(2009). Are we there yet? Screening processes for intellectual and developmental disabilities in jail settings. Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities, 47, 13–23.

41.

Schmitt

Warner

Gupta

(2010). The high budgetary cost of incarceration. Washington, DC: Center for Economic and Policy Research.

42.

Schreyögg

Sydow

(2011). Organizational path dependence: A process view. Organization Studies, 32, 321–336.

43.

Skogan

W. G.

(1976). Efficiency and effectiveness in big-city police departments. Public Administration Review, 36, 278–286.

44.

Skogan

W. G.

(2005). Citizen satisfaction with police encounters. Police Quarterly, 8, 298–321.

45.

Steadman

H. J.

Scott

J. E.

Osher

Agnese

T. K.

Robins

P. C.

(2005). Validation of the brief jail mental health screen. Psychiatric Services, 56, 816–822.

46.

Stroshine Chandek

(1999). Race, expectations and evaluations of police performance: An empirical assessment. Policing, 22, 675–695.

47.

Sunshine

Tyler

T. R.

(2003). The role of procedural justice and legitimacy in shaping public support for policing. Law & Society Review, 37, 513–548.

48.

Terrill

Paoline

E. A.

(2007). Nonarrest decision making in police–citizen encounters. Police Quarterly, 10, 308–331.

49.

Tillyer

Hartley

R. D.

(2010). Driving racial profiling research forward: Learning lessons from sentencing research. Journal of Criminal Justice, 38, 657–665.

50.

Trestman

R. L.

Ford

Zhang

Wiesbrock

(2007). Current and lifetime psychiatric illness among inmates not identified as acutely mentally ill at intake in Connecticut’s jail. Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry & the Law, 35, 490–500.

51.

Vila

Morrison

G. B.

Kenney

D. J.

(2002). Improving shift schedule and work-hour policies and practices to increase police officer performance, health, and safety. Police Quarterly, 5, 4–24.

52.

Violanti

J. M.

Aron

(1994). Ranking police stressors. Psychological Reports, 75, 824–826.

53.

von Hippel

P. T.

(2013). Should a normal imputation model be modified to impute skewed variables? Sociological Methods & Research, 42, 105–138.

54.

White

M. D.

Saunders

Fisher

Mellow

(2012). Exploring inmate reentry in a local jail setting: Implication for outreach, service use and recidivism. Crime & Delinquency, 58, 124–146.

55.

Wolfe

S. E.

Piquero

A. R.

(2011). Organizational justice and police misconduct. Criminal Justice and Behavior, 38, 332–353.

56.

Zhao

Ren

Lovrich

N. P.

(2010). Budgetary support for police services in U.S. municipalities: Comparing political culture, socioeconomic characteristics and incrementalism as rival explanations for budget share allocation to police. Journal of Criminal Justice, 38, 266–275.

Costs of Policing

Abstract

Keywords

Get full access to this article

References