Crime Control Model

Background

Packer's models were developed in response to heightened public anxiety about increasing crime in the 1960s and the perception that a liberal Supreme Court was fueling the crisis by seeking to impose the Due Process Model on state criminal justice systems largely functioning under the Crime Control Model. In less than a decade, the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Warren effectively moved the American criminal justice system in the direction of the rights of the accused. In 1961 it imposed the exclusionary rule on states (Mapp v. Ohio) banning such practices as the use of unconstitutionally seized evidence at trials and the use of involuntary confessions. In addition, the Warren Court circumscribed questionable police practices legitimized by crime control values, such as baseless stop-and-frisks, arrests, electronic surveillance, coerced testimony, denial of access to counsel, wiretapping, and entrapment. The Supreme Court decisions created a more judicialized process that in seeking to ensure the rights of the accused allowed defendants to challenge the process at every step, thus slowing it down, and even allowed the guilty, in some cases, to be set free.

Packer developed his models in response to a spate of new laws in the 1960s that he felt attempted to legislate the criminal process without taking into account the pragmatics (the “Is”) of how the criminal process actually operated or how new laws and practices would affect the goal of crime control. “These prescriptions about how the process ought to operate do not automatically become part of the patterns of official behavior in the criminal process,” he observed. “Is and Ought share an increasingly uneasy coexistence. Doubts are stirred about the kind of criminal process we want to have” (Packer 1968: 150).

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