Just integrating or integrating justice? Understanding integration mechanisms in criminal justice supply chains

The seamless and effective exchange of information across criminal justice organizations is crucial for valuable criminal law enforcement. Governments and criminal justice organizations aim to reach this by applying supply chain management mechanisms, known to reach shared goals, improved collaboration, and streamlined activities across organizations. At the same time, they face challenges in dealing with political performance aims and interactions defined by laws and regulations. Relatively little is known about the use of supply chain management in criminal justice. This thesis aims to expand understanding by analyzing the application, design and evolution of integration mechanisms across criminal justice organizations. This involves three empirical studies, a national study, cross-country comparison and longitudinal case study relying on numerous interviews, documents, field visits and observations. These empirical studies focused on the interactions between the police, public prosecution service, and court as core organizations involved in the detection, investigation, and jurisdiction of high-impact crimes.

We find well-known integration mechanisms in criminal justice chains, that complement laws, procedures and regulations but also serve an additional purpose: dealing with tensions stemming from the specific goal setting and stakeholders. Based on a country comparison, we find two approaches to build digital criminal justice chains based on choices regarding service strategy and performance. Finally, it appears that digital evolution in criminal justice chains is unpredictable and non-linear. Taken together, this thesis contributes to the fields of supply chain management, service operations management and public management and provides managerial insights to politicians, policymakers and public managers.