Goals and Missions of a Criminal Justice Agency

First, I am super excited to share that my absence resulted from my graduating with my Master’s degree! It was a wild ride, for sure. Thanks to a few individuals here on Medium, I decided to pursue my doctoral degree. Like before, I will be sharing my papers on which I got A’s, except I am expanding this to B’s as well because I need to be less hard on myself. After all, I am working hard to better myself, and I need to realize that B’s are just as important as A’s. Sharing knowledge is excellent, and I hope you all learn something from my assignments.

Goals and Missions of a Criminal Justice Agency

An agency’s mission statement sets the tone for its future and guides its operations. Employees are encouraged by mission statements to consider how their activities may affect the future of the agency’s performance and a productive workplace environment, whether that means in the office or out in public. Using mission statements, members of an organization can more effectively coordinate their behavior toward the same goals. Mission statements can be used to evaluate an organizational structure or establish guidelines and procedures (Indeed Editorial Team, 2022.)

Whereas goal statements are essential for success because they provide agencies or individuals with a fundamental starting point for planning their work and determining their success in the future. An agency’s objective is to produce the result specified in an objective that has been adequately created and documented. It describes the goal, duty, or action that must be carried out. (Bujak and Vecellio, 2015.)

Goals of Montana Department of Justice

The Montana Department of Justice’s goals is split into two subcategories: objectives and measurements for their two goals. Their first goal is to encourage a public policy that serves the needs of the people they serve. Their second is to support personnel in a productive, efficient, and diverse workplace. The objectives that they have published for their goal of encouraging a public policy that serves the needs of their community are:

To reduce the misuse and abuse of prescription drugs to lessen the risk to the public’s health and safety.

Make Montana’s highways safer by reducing the amount of recurrent DUI offenders and drunk driving.

To better protect customers, including seniors, and to help Montana’s farmers and ranchers, the Office of Consumer Protection should increase its services.

Eliminate the physical and sexual assault of children. When it does happen, improve how the victims are treated and the possibility that those responsible will be brought to justice (Montana Department of Justice, 2020.)

To achieve these goals, they by collaborating with the Prescription Drug Abuse Advisory Council to distinguish and support legislation and other initiatives to reduce abuse, such as the creation and implementation of a prescription drug registry that gives physicians and pharmacists access to their patients’ prescription histories for the riskiest prescription medications. As well as lessen the number of unneeded prescriptions in households that can be redirected to illicit uses, collaborate with local enforcement agencies, public health officials, and community organizations to maintain statewide prescription medication take-back days (Montana Department of Justice, 2020.)

For the second goal, they use the following objectives:

Promote the DOJ as a workplace.

Look for and secure reasonable pay.

Encourage dialogue and knowledge exchange.

Dedicate funds to ongoing employee development.

Encourage possibilities for rewarding employees (Montana Department of Justice, 2020.)

To do this, they analyze the finance requirements and implementation needs for the wage schedule, review performance management each year, and deal with any systemic problems that management and staff have found. They also track employee departures by reason code and keep track of systematic comparisons between DOJ average wages and salaries in the State of Montana and the neighborhood. Another measure they use is keeping a record of the time between posting jobs and when they are filled and data gathering about employee satisfaction. Lastly, they monitor training data in the system, check for compliance with training requirements, inform staff, and support teamwork and wellness initiatives (Montana Department of Justice, 2020.)

The mission of the Montana Department of Justice

The mission of Montana’s Department of Justice is to pursue initiatives and programs that aim to safeguard and advance the public’s interests, safety, and well-being through advocacy, leadership, education, regulation, and enforcement. To do so, they have set forth duties the agency must follow. These duties are:

Monitor customer protection laws and rules about dishonest and misleading commercial practices, and help Montanans make wise decisions through conducting public outreach.

Manage the crime survivor compensation plan and provide statewide guidance on matters involving victims of crime for the advantage of innocent civilians.

In criminal appeals, represent the state and its branches of the government in court.

Give the state, county, and municipal authorities, as well as their leaders, legal advice and services.

Enforce the state’s traffic regulations and register all cars.

Ensure that state fire safety laws are followed.

Aid neighborhood law enforcement in prosecuting offenders.

Oversee a statewide network of murder investigations and conduct scientific examinations of samples provided by prosecutors, coroners, and governmental authorities.

Maintain and make available criminal justice data to appropriate state, municipal, and other organizations (Montana Department of Justice, 2020.)

Conclusion

The Montana Department of Justice’s mission statement encourages the safety and interests of the communities they serve. They take every route they need to ensure this by ensuring that laws protect their communities from misleading commercial practices to enforcing traffic regulations. They’ve set goals to maintain public policies that serve their communities within their state and support their personnel. They have developed several procedures to reduce prescription drug misuse and abuse to protect the public. They make sure that they have encouraged possibilities for rewarding their employees as well as encouraging others to join the Department of Justice as a career choice so that they can continue to offer the utmost care for not just the communities but also the employees that they employ (Montana Department of Justice, 2020.)