Formal and informal criminal justice agencies

Village school teachers were paid by the village or production brigade, although they are now paid by the government. As China develops, it has moved towards bureaucracy and formal control. In his conceptual comparison between Chinese and Western social and legal control, Xiaoming Chen believed that the two societies may represent the extremes on a continuum with respect to emphasis on informal versus formal control.

China has long relied on informal and moralistic control. In , Zhang and his associates published an article on the importance of Tiao-jie and Bang-jiao in crime prevention in China. The basic form of bang-jiao is neighborhood bang-jiao groups. If an offender is an ex-student, the head of the school where the youth was a student would also be a member of the bang-jiao group. Many members in both tiao-jie and bang-jiao groups are voluntary and unpaid but confirmed by the local government.

Their activities are usually organized or supported by the local government. Both tiao-jie and bang-jiao groups are semiformal control devices in Chinese society. In their test of the generability of social disorganization theory, Zhang et al. Zhang et al. Using survey data, Zhang et al. The Chinese government is centralized. The total society strategy is carried out not only by vertical connections but also by a horizontal mechanism.

In contrast, American control is decentralized and stresses professionalism. The cooperation between organizations is guided by laws and motivated by money. Law enforcement has been considered the responsibility of the criminal justice system and is more likely to rely on professionals Chen ; Jiang, Lambert et al.

The total society strategy is reflected in community policing. Chinese community policing is part of the comprehensive management and control approach. Chinese police have a tradition of working with local community and citizens, which is called mass-line policing. In , the Chinese Ministry of Public Security officially adopted and launched community policing as a strategy to fight rising crime in China.

Since then, all forms of community policing programs have flourished in the nation Wu et al.

Although the West and China both use community policing, they use it quite differently. For example, philosophically, American community policing places the police as the main social control institution with citizens providing help and exercising supervision Wong The total society strategy is also reflected in community corrections in China.

However, the office is required to and does work with the street-level government, police station, local court, other correctional systems, volunteers, and even a variety of business organizations. On the one hand, the local justice office is responsible for its higher levels of justice administrators. On the other hand, it is under the leadership of a street office in urban areas and of township level in rural areas. The office obtains support from this dual leadership system and thus is able to effectively work with other organizations and volunteers. It is worth noting that, since Chinese government is centralized and community corrections are a top-down program, local governmental agencies and criminal justice organs are also required to do their best to lead and support the local justice office to implement community corrections.

The answer to the question of what aspects of an individual need control reflects another Chinese characteristic in social and crime control. The Chinese believe that behavior is determined by thoughts. When comparing Chinese and Western control systems, Ren states that [The] most important distinction, perhaps, is the efforts of the Chinese state to control both the behavior and the minds of the people.

Social conformity in the Chinese vocabulary is not limited to behavioral conformity with the rule of law but always moralistically identifies with the officially endorsed beliefs of social standards and behavioral norms. In the West, although it is commonly believed that basic values are behind attitudes and attitudes affect behavior, thoughts or values cannot be controlled.

Thus, in reforming offenders, Western societies can only work to change their attitudes and then their behavior.

The fatherly control method is the integrative use of sentiment and reason. This method is also applied to reform offenders Li Based on his more than year experience in China and in-depth interviews of Chinese citizens, Shaw considered the fatherly control method as a significant difference between China and the U.

He observed that Chinese leaders in organizations sometimes use public and personal sentiments to criticize their subordinates to such an extent that they burst out crying. Another way to look at the criminological concept with Chinese characteristics is the balance among sentiment, reason or morality , and law. Although these two societies have different political systems — a one-party ruling system in the PRC and a multi-party ruling system in Taiwan — both are in transition towards law-based formal control.

During the transition, how sentiment, morality, and law will be balanced is an interesting area to explore. Recently, Jeffrey Martin vividly described how policemen in Taiwan balance sentiment and law based on his participant observations. Contemporary Taiwan faces a contradictory situation. At the macro-institutional level, it has a clear and firm movement towards the rule of law.

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However, at the micro-institutional level, Taiwan still features interpersonal sentiment, which often engenders a marginalization of legal control. He uses a reason to pursue a balance between law and sentiment. In a society with a tradition of sentiment and morality-based informal control like the PRC and Taiwan, control theory may be quite different from a society with a tradition of law-based formal control such as the U. In Chinese society with differential and hierarchical associations, people are not equal; they are vertically positioned in their rankings in a family, an organization, or social status.

In this society, people are group-related rather than independent; they are horizontally differentiated based on sentimental feeling and intimacy. These features are different from the West where people are equal — at least in theory — and are independent individuals. Since people in Chinese society are not equal and independent, law is difficult to apply to each individual equally.

Jiang and Lambert proposed that China has dual groups or societies and dual legal cultures which can be called the two-group-two-legal-culture control model. In an inner-circle group or acquaintance society, group formation is primarily based on bloodline, sentimental feeling, and sometimes interest as well.

In this group, the primary control mechanism is sentiment and morality rather than legal control. China also has a group that can be called an outside world or stranger society. This is a theoretical group for comparison with the inner-circle group. In this group, members are strangers; group members do not have clear bloodline, sentimental connections, or interests. They may not have any direct interactions or have only infrequent interactions.

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Therefore, they do not have a high level of dependence in sentiment or interest. Law, along with universal morality, may be a more frequently used control mechanism for this group. China has long stressed informal control. Semiformal control is recognized by scholars as its distinctive feature. What exactly does semiformal control mean?

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In China, how can informal and semiformal control be measured? What are predictors of formal, semiformal, and informal control? Which form of the above social control or combinations of them is most effective in crime prevention? All these issues need further research. As noted before, Jiang et al. In their definition, control mechanism is an important criterion to distinguish between formal and informal social control.

What does semiformal social control mean? Based on publications by Huang , Chen , Zhang et al. These organizations are grass-rooted. They are government organized but also mass organizations.