The criminal justice system is composed of police agencies, corrections agencies and courts that run on the national, state and local level. Police and corrections agencies are a part of the executive branch of government. Each agency can be described as a subsystem. The criminal justice system is designed to achieve the wider purpose we have called justice. The consensus model plays a big role in the justice system because it strives toward a common goal in that the movement of cases and people through the system is smooth due to cooperation between the various components of the system.
Corrections includes all government agencies, facilities, programs, procedures, personnel, and techniques concerned with the intake, custody, confinement, supervision, treatment and predisposition, investigation of alleged adjudicated adult offenders, youthful offenders, delinquents, and status offenders. Once an offender has been sentenced the corrections stage begins. Some offenders are sentenced to prison. Once in the correctional system, they are classified according to local procedures and are assigned to confinement facilities and treatment programs.
A jail is a confinement facility administrated by an agency of local government, typically a law enforcement agency, intended for adults but sometimes also containing juveniles, which holds persons detaining pending adjudication and or persons committed on sentences of a year or less.
Jails today receive individuals pending arrangement and hold them awaiting trial, conviction, or sentencing. They temporarily detain juveniles, the mentally ill and other pending transfers to appropriate facilities. Jails hold individuals for the military, for protective custody for contempt and for courts as witness, they transfer inmates to federal, .
state, or other authorities because of overcrowding in their own facilities.
Most jails are small many were built to house fifty or fewer inmates.