Misconduct Routinization in Criminal Legal Organizations: An Explosive Cluster of Feedback Loops

The proposed model of official misconduct routinization essentially argues that specific stimuli (internal or external to criminal legal organizations) cause organizational leaders to make decisions that induce increasingly dramatic and frequent misconduct-conducive cognitions and behaviors in their subordinates. These cognitions and behaviors eventually permeate the entire organization, and the acts of misconduct become routine. The consequences of misconduct routinization include damage to the people who should benefit from the organization as well as the organization itself. Efforts should be made to disrupt these processes because they are damaging to the people who should benefit from criminal legal organizations as well as the legitimacy of the organizations themselves, and a loss of legitimacy for any organization could be detrimental or even fatal. To facilitate such efforts, I present an empirically supported method of disrupting misconduct routinization.