NCJ Number
218027
Date Published
2007
Length
21 pages
Annotation
This overview of technology's features and impact with respect to offenders' crime commission, community crime prevention, and crime control by police, courts, and corrections focuses on each form of new technology while exploring key issues raised by both proponents and critics of the "technology revolution."
Abstract
This overview divides innovations in criminal justice technology into two broad categories: "hard" technology and "soft" technology. Innovations in "hard" technology include new materials, devices, and equipment that can be used in either committing crime or preventing and controlling it. Innovations in "soft" technology include new software programs, classification systems, crime analysis techniques, and data sharing/system integration techniques. These innovations also provide opportunities for both crime commission and crime control. A table lists the types of innovations in hard and soft technology that have impacted the areas of crime prevention, policing, the courts, institutional corrections, and community corrections. These are the technologies that will be discussed in subsequent chapters. Chapters on the new technology of crime are summarized in this introductory chapter, as are chapters on the new technology of criminal justice. The latter chapters are divided into those that pertain to the new technologies of crime prevention, policing, law and the courts, institutional corrections, and community corrections. This introductory chapter's concluding section summarizes Gary Marx's sociological perspective on the uses and misuses of technology. It is a perspective that influences the chapters of this book, i.e., that technology must find ways to reinforce moral performance at both the institutional and individual levels. 4 notes and 46 references