Seven Models of the Criminal Process:

The criminal process is a compendious term that stands for all the complexes of activity that operate to bring the substantive law of crime to bear (or to avoid bringing it to bear) on people who are suspected of having committed crimes. The bringing of the substantive criminal law into action is effectuated through models of the criminal process which serve to provide a suitable way to cope with the difficulty of the criminal process. They are there to allow details to be simplified and common themes and trends to be highlighted. As pointed out by Kent Roach, those models present a hypothetical but coherent scheme for testing the evidence produced by decisions made by thousands of actors in the criminal process every day.A model in criminal perspective reflects what an examination of the constitutional and statutory provisions that govern the operation of the criminal process would produce. It is in effect the way analysis of the legal system has traditionally proceeded.