Making the prosecution : professional socialization of prosecutors in Taiwan
Keywords: Law.

What is the very first thing a new leader of a prosecutor's office does? For Kim Ogg, a newly-elected Harris County, Texas, District Attorney in November 2016, it was to send 37 veteran prosecutors packing as she prepared to assume office. Ogg said that the firings were part of her vision for a "culture change" at the DA's office. While some of the prosecutors were fired because of prosecutorial misconduct, the decisions impacted mostly management level positions. The affected individuals were prosecutors who made decisions about how cases were to be prosecuted instead of directly going to trial and working with judges, defense attorneys, and juries. In an office that had about 300 prosecutors on staff, this decision affected nearly 10 percent of the force. A driving factor that pushed such a "culture change" was to abolish the so-called "win-at-all-costs" mentality or "conviction psychology." According to Ogg, "[b]ecause the district attorney's job is to be the guardian of justice and to seek justice over convictions, I pledged that we would not have a win-at-all-costs mentality, that we would prize fairness and transparency and equality." Ogg said, "I want individuals who, through their past actions and their professionalism, embody those very ideas. That's who I'm seeking to fill these positions." American prosecutors' offices often emphasize the importance of the hiring process. Many supervising prosecutors in the United States I spoke with stressed to me how important the hiring process is to their management strategies. They said that if you hire good people in the beginning, you do not have to hover over their shoulders. Such a notion assumes that because you have hired good people, you do not have to socialize them rigorously or supervise them strictly. When progressive prosecutors take office and seek to put forth their reform agendas, the first thing they think of doing is to replace old-timers—especially management-rank prosecutors—with fresh recruits, in order to overcome perceived bias and stagnation. Translating reform visions to the day-to-day practices in a prosecutor's office is never an easy task. Of all the challenges prosecutors face, perhaps none is more significant than promoting cultural change. When the need for reform is urgent, the leaders of prosecutors' offices cannot wait for the natural maturation process of their line prosecutors. Hiring new prosecutors that share the same reform visions is one way to ensure the fit between an office and its prosecutors. However, the hiring mechanism is not a panacea. Hiring new or additional prosecutors generally means seeking approval from other governmental officials. Replacement can often only effectively reach management-rank prosecutors. Large-scale dismissals of current members may harm office morale and even trigger a backlash. Most of the time, leaders of prosecutors' offices are stuck with their existing members. Against this backdrop, how can a single study of Taiwanese prosecutors help illuminate matters and possibly lead to new opportunities for American prosecutors? By way of at least a partial, short answer, the management technique to "teach old dogs new tricks" turns out to be worth exploring. That is, given all the diverse and complex topics involved in contemporary prosecutorial reforms, post-entry socialization of prosecutors—and not only neophytes but also older, more experienced individuals at various levels of seniority—becomes essential. A well-managed socialization process can ensure that prosecutors acquire requisite knowledge and skills and the vital sense of prosecutorial identity, as well as internalize new norms. Unfortunately, since the American prosecutorial system has long been focused solely on the hiring process for new prosecutors, very little effort has been put into trying to understand the socialization mechanism and how it influences the long-term framing and trajectory of individual prosecutor's careers. Taiwan, meanwhile, can actually serve as an excellent case study for the model of professional socialization of prosecutors. The current project, accordingly, examines a system where socialization has long been considered as the primary, if not the only, tool for organizational management in prosecutors' offices. One of the distinctive features of Taiwanese prosecution is its "hiring mechanism." The entry into a prosecutor's office is a "one-sided selection process" in which novice prosecutors choose the places where they want to work, while the hiring offices do not usually have any ability to review and select (or reject) individuals. Once a candidate makes the determination regarding which prosecutor's office to join, it is often not revocable. As long as candidates receive high enough grades from the Judicial Academy in Taiwan, they then can enter and work in any office they prefer. As a result, it is very likely that a prosecutor's office will receive at least some people that do not fit in with its organizational culture. As for those Judicial Academy candidates who do not have high enough grades to join their preferred offices, they are forced to select from any less desirable, "leftover" posts. Such a selection process in Taiwan inevitably forces the prosecutorial offices to create more robust post-entry management systems in order to match their needs with the available prosecutors. In this sense, post-entry socialization is the essential managerial technique for the Taiwanese prosecution to ensure that individual prosecutors acquire the knowledge, value, and skills necessary to assume and fulfill their roles as prosecutors. This project examines the types of socialization mechanisms developed in Taiwan's prosecution. My goal is to provide an analytical framework to understand different forms of bureaucratic controls within prosecutors' offices. The process of professional socialization among prosecutors is an interpretive one in which they develop and re-conceptualize their professional identity and legal consciousness in ways that are compatible with office culture and the overall working environment. In every stage of their career, prosecutors come to hold the characteristic attitudes regarding what often appear to be the unstated aspects of their work. Prosecutors pay close attention to what their supervisors observe, ask about, remark on, measure, control, and reward. They also learn by listening as their senior colleagues teach or even serve actively as role models. Through constant interactions with police, supervisors, and their colleagues, the job-related attitudes of prosecutors begin to approximate those of their more seasoned colleagues. Yet, from time to time, the system can fail to make a good prosecutor, in which case the responsible managing prosecutor may consider such an individual to be a troublemaker or deviant. Current literature on prosecutors mostly focuses on the goals and achievements of the specified objectives of the prosecutorial organization. The actual complexity of formal and informal processes situated within the organization is mostly neglected. Instead of focusing on formal organizational structures and demands, my project seeks to draw inferences from the day-to-day interactions of its members. In fact, the formation of occupational culture is explicable as a response to the organizational demands and the everyday working environment of prosecutors. Taiwan demonstrates a unique case for the study of prosecutors. The diversity within Taiwanese prosecutorial offices and their as yet unexplored power dynamics indicate that we still know very little about this particular manifestation of the legal profession. This project is my attempt to fill in the void at least somewhat. Knowing who Taiwanese prosecutors are, what they want, and how they socialize into the profession, can help us understand not only the nature of prosecutorial power but also the question of what we should expect from prosecutors. Ultimately, I hope the findings of my project can provide some suggestions for future studies of management in prosecutors' offices and also how we can cultivate a better, next generation of prosecutors and, in that way, eventually assist in the promotion of a better legal profession.