Human Relations in the Criminal Justice Organization - Essay Example

The police act not only at the call of duty, but also perform with a sense of mission. The former, known for its unity of command and delegation of duty, is addressed as the classical approach, and the latter, characterized by attitudes, feelings and beliefs, as the human relations approach (Greene, 2006). The human relations approach effectively breeds a sense of suspicion on one hand, and mission and a moral imperative, on the other (Reiner, 2002). For example, police officers rue the fact that they develop an attitude of suspicion that cannot be switched off as it is innate to the type of the work they do (Reiner, 2002).

The police come across two kinds of highly specialized communications; internal and external. Communication in police force can also be classified as formal and informal. The duty of the police calls for interplay of the two kinds of communication vertical (internal) and horizontal (external) with the external environment. The nature of administrative communication is strictly formal and involves a lot of paper work. The very formal nature of communication can, at times, become an impediment in the flow of information.

Through job design, the administrators try to increase the productivity of the workplace by creating a routine of work for an employee that checks dissatisfaction, monotony, and prevents employee alienation. Freeman (1999) uses the metaphor of ‘environment design’ to increase the extent and scope of job design. Job design helps to tone down the mundane reality of everyday policing, which is often boring, messy, petty, trivial and venal (Reiner, 2002, p 277). The ideal job design makes the police personnel generalists, adept at a range of activities, rather than specialists, trained in one or two disciplines.

According to Freeman (1999), the job design in a correction is influenced by the activities of staff,