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Justice Systems Workshop
Measuring the Performance of Criminal Justice Systems
People and
governments around the world are asking more of criminal justice systems
today than ever before. Officials
expect modern techniques of policing, prosecution, and rehabilitation
to reduce crime and the fear of crime. Advances in technologies of surveillance,
less-lethal weaponry, and forensic science are raising public expectations
of accuracy and professionalism. Yet crime must be reduced, human rights
respected, and technical capacity raised all within budgets that are as
tight as ever.
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Justice and Development Across Legal Traditions
The Justice
Systems Workshop is building measurement tools that take account of levels
of trust, data reliability, and resources available for statistical analysis.
The Workshop strives to ensure that its indicators respect the distinct
legal traditions and political contexts, the particular blend of formal
and informal justice institutions at work, and the particular threats
to public safety in each project location. At the same time, the Workshop
will help participating governments align their systems with international
human rights norms and meet professional standards in law enforcement
and adjudication.
To bridge that gap between local conditions and global standards, the
Workshop organizes its empirical analyses around functions
rather than institutions. For example, the Workshop assembling
management information tools to guide the use of arrest powers without
regard to whether arrests are made by one police agency, multiple agencies
at different levels of government, or a blend of state, private, and customary
"police."
By focusing initially on functions, the Workshop will facilitate the sharing
of experience and the development of comparable performance indicators
across legal traditions. Then, by mapping these functions onto particular
institutions within individual countries, the Workshop will develop measurement
tools that are practically useful to participating government officials.
Benchmarking
Safety and Justice
The fragmentation
of the safety and justice sector is commonplace, with police, prosecution,
punishment, legal aid, and victim assistance managed in most countries
by separate institutions. This fragmentation frequently leads institutional
managers to measure their performance against that of their counterparts
in other countries, but this can sometimes be a mistake because justice
systems themselves differ so markedly. For example, the levels of arrest
for minor offenses that seem to reduce serious crime in New York may be
ineffective and even counterproductive in Moscow, Tokyo, or Sao Paulo.
To avoid this mistake, the Justice Systems Workshop first measures how
closely the activities of each institution are aligned with others in
the same system. It is then possible to compare the degree of alignment
among countries, rather than the performance of any single function.
To carry
out the analysis in each participating country, the Program employs a
doctoral student or post-doctoral fellow fluent in the national language
and familiar with the justice system. In addition, the Program staff (led
by Professor Christopher Stone
and Senior Research Fellow Todd
Foglesong) identifies scholars across the University with expertise
on related issues in each participating country, creating a Harvard reference
group for each. The Workshop uses this capacity to collect and analyze
data from participating countries, producing confidential briefing memos
for national officials as well as working papers published on the Workshop's
web site. By analyzing common issues across multiple participating countries
and by developing common performance indicators for use in multiple countries,
the Workshop can focus the talents of multiple researchers and the insights
of multiple scholars and practitioners on a single problem.
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