RESEARCH

The New Justice
by Christopher Stone

ON A SCALE WITHOUT PRECEDENT for more than a century, we are retooling the world’s machinery of justice. From Boston to Beijing, Belfast to Buenos Aires, governments on every continent are creating new institutions and rules of criminal procedure that promise greater public safety, higher reliability in the determination of guilt, more sensitive treatment of crime victims, increased efficiency, and stronger protection of human rights. But the new machinery is largely untested, and it is possible that the new justice could be less just than the old.

Here in the United States, it can be hard to see the scope of this trend because criminal justice is such a local matter. A Bostonian might easily miss the larger patterns behind local news stories about new roles for judges in domestic violence cases, a police chief’s plan to create a civilian complaint review board, or the governor’s proposal for a “scientific” death penalty law. Yet each of these local developments connects with wider movements that are not only national but global.

By studying innovations in a broader context we see, for example, that when judges in Dorchester pay more attention to the victims of domestic violence, they are contributing to a global trend toward the expansion of victims’ rights. Moreover, this and other U.S. innovations to help crime victims would be strengthened by measuring their results against those of comparable projects elsewhere — projects like the successful “No Witness, No Justice” initiative of the Crown Prosecution Service for England and Wales and the ambitious work of the new victims unit within Chile’s Ministerio Publico.

Examining the retooled machinery of justice in a global context can also give legislators, national officials, and local practitioners access to a wider array of experience, allowing everyone to avoid old mistakes and benchmark their achievements. For example, when Boston Police Chief Kathleen O’Toole recently announced her intention to create a permanent citizen review board to scrutinize a wide range of civilian complaints against the police, she explained that she had already begun to gather information about police review boards in other U.S. cities. But O’Toole’s background as a member of the Patten Commission on Policing in Northern Ireland in the late 1990s gives her an even wider frame of reference. It was the Patten Commission that recommended the creation of the Police Ombudsman for Northern Ireland, now one of the leading international examples of police accountability mechanisms. Because of O’Toole’s familiarity with European, Canadian, and even South African institutions of this kind, Boston has a good chance to help shape a new world standard for police oversight.

In other parts of the world, the retooling of criminal justice is drawing on practices — such as oral testimony in court and prosecutorial supervision of police — long familiar in the United States. As a result, procuracies in Russia and Eastern Europe are quickly coming to resemble Western prosecution services, and courtrooms in China are making room for witness stands.

Other changes portend political shifts that could eventually make themselves felt in the United States. England, for example, has begun to cut back on the right to a jury trial, while prosecutors in Chile, South Africa, China, and much of the European Union are experimenting with new forms of plea bargaining that aspire to protect the interests of victims as well as offenders. The effects of those innovations, as well as the public support they attract, deserve close attention from officials and practitioners in the United States.

Ours is not the first era of transnational criminal justice retooling. In the 19th century, both the British and the Napoleonic empires installed new machinery of justice in the territories they occupied. The two archetypes of criminal procedure those empires left behind — adversarial and inquisitorial — have divided the world’s criminal justice systems ever since. But where those imperial projects of criminal justice reform followed patterns of military conquest, today’s retooling is driven forward by the more diffuse forces of globalization: individual entrepreneurs, multinational corporations, bilateral and multilateral aid, professional exchanges, and cultural diffusion. It is a pattern of globalization familiar in manufacturing, entertainment, and finance, but a new phenomenon in the justice sector.

Herein lies the danger. Serving so many diffuse interests, the new justice responds to no single point of control through which we can ensure our societies become more just, not less so. We do not yet know if the new justice will increase public safety or merely the personal power of certain officials. We do not know if it will restrain or expand the use of the death penalty in the United States. Or in China. We do not know if it will exacerbate patterns of inequality or strengthen forces that are reducing poverty.

Fortunately, these are empirical questions. We must start by defining measurable standards toward which reformers can strive, describing the reforms from the perspective of marginalized groups, and analyzing impact, positive and negative. Scholars and researchers will not lead this global movement toward a new justice, but our participation can define its direction, content, and value.

Christopher Stone is a professor of the practice of criminal justice and director of the Program in Criminal Justice Policy/Management at the Kennedy School.