The development of the private sector of the criminal justice system

TLDR: The role of private police in the criminal justice system is discussed in this paper, where it is shown that private police have been heavily involved in the performance of these functions since the establishment of the Pinkerton Agency in the 1850s.

Abstract: One of the more interesting questions that political scientists are likely to overlook in their analyses of public policy, the delivery of services, etc., is the continually changing mix of public and private provision of such policies and services. Present concern with the criminal justice system, in general, and the police in particular, is no exception. Political scientists are interested in questions of police organization, public accountability of police activity, implications of greater involvement in local police activity by state and federal agencies, professionalization of local police officers, etc. But we have tended to concentrate on the political-governmental provision of police services and to ignore both the traditional and the contemporary role of private police as a very important part of the total panoply of police activities in American society. We have overlooked private police in part because the private police themselves have not operated in the full light of publicity and in part because we have assumed, erroneously no doubt, that their functions were somehow different from, and therefore irrelevant to, the kinds of concerns related to the public provision of police services. If one takes a standard definition of police functions, e.g., O. W. Wilson (1963: 22-27), crime prevention, crime repression, criminal apprehension, and the regulation of non-criminal behavior and social welfare functions (including traffic control, intervention in domestic squabbles, handling of drunks, etc.), it is clear that private police have been heavily involved in the performance of these functions since, at least, the establishment of the Pinkerton Agency in the 1850s. Certainly private police are involved in significant ways in the performance of these functions today. We do not really know how many of the reported crimes listed as solved by police departments may in fact have been solved by private police who have turned evidence and in some cases the suspect over to the public police.