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ABSTRACT
This study examined a variety of potential correlates and influences impacting productivity at 94 government-funded American crime laboratories. The study was premised particularly on the hypotheses that variables such as work backlog, lab accreditation, and managerial expectations have an associative relationship with productivity or lack of productivity in crime laboratories. The results of this study, which relied on regression analysis, suggest that productivity indeed does have a positive relationship with lab accreditation and managerial expectations, and has a negative relationship with a climbing backlog of cases. Possible implications for crime lab management and funding (questions of public policy) and for motivation in public sector work places in general (a question of organization theory) are considered.
VARIABLE INFLUENCES ON DNA CRIME LABORATORY PRODUCTIVITY
With a quick glance at a TV Guide, one can quickly see a growing pop-cultural interest in science as a crime fighting tool and as a critical element in any modern fictional crime story. Whether one tunes into CSI Miami, CSI Las Vegas, NCIS, or any number of other popular crime dramas on television, the primacy of forensic evidence collected at the crime scene is quickly established as a key element leading toward the conclusion of the storyline.
The public's enamored relationship with forensic evidence as a crime fighting tool has arguably had a very real, even potent, impact on matters beyond the Nielson Ratings; the public's romance with forensic science, say some, has influenced the very dispensing of justice in the United States.
The -CSI Effect" refers to the theory that the prevalence of forensic science's exaggerated utility in crime dramas on television, the cinema, and novels, has influenced real jurors and their verdicts when they trade their living room couch for the jury box. The theory suggests that jurors who have been educated on the utility of forensic science through popular culture outlets place an unrealistic expectation on prosecutors to produce forensic evidence at trial. Many anecdotal stories have emerged from criminal justice practitioners-and particularly prosecutors-who recount occasions in which perfectly solid cases relying on eyewitness testimony, strong circumstantial evidence, and even confessions were lost because jurors wondered -Where's the DNA?".
Stevens (2009) found in a survey of over 400 prosecutors that prosecutors indeed do believe the CSI...