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After the Arrest: The Charging Decision in Prairie City

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2024

David W. Neubauer
David W. Neubauer*
Affiliation:
University of New Orleans
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Extract

The police have taken a suspect into custody and booked him. After the arrest, what next? At first glance, this rather simple question seems to imply an equally simple answer - the arrestee will be formally charged with a crime. Inattention to post-arrest proceedings has reinforced the assumption that judicial proceedings follow an arrest. But being booked in the police station is not the same as being charged in court. Despite the swelling of interest in the police and their use of the arrest power, there has been relatively little interest in or concern with what happens to the suspect after the arrest.

Type
Research Article
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 8 , Issue 3 , Spring 1974 , pp. 495 - 518
Copyright
Copyright © The Law and Society Association, 1974.

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Footnotes

AUTHOR'S NOTE: I wish to thank the following people for their helpful critiques of an earlier version of this paper. In particular, Stuart Nagel, David Bordua, Stephen Douglas, and Fred Coombs of the University of Illinois and Thomas Henderson of Georgia State University heard out my ideas and made helpful suggestions. I also wish to acknowledge financial assistance from the Department of Political Science at the University of Illinois, which helped to defray the costs of the field research, and the computing centers of the University of Illinois and the University of Florida for providing computer funds. Finally, I gratefully acknowledge the research support of the Social Sciences Institute of the University of Florida.