Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy
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Home > Research & Publications > Measuring the Performance of Criminal Justice Systems > Indicators in Development: Safety and Justice > What's Your Problem?
What's Your Problem?
How can a police service encourage greater speed in investigation, without compromising quality?
The Bangladesh Police want to encourage greater speed in the investigation of homicide, but without compromising quality. The leadership is concerned about the amount of time it takes for investigations to be completed because of the negative effects delays can have on other parts of the criminal justice system as well as the experience of victims and their families. At the same time, investigators are reluctant to conclude cases quickly, fearing that the quality of their work and the outcomes at trial might suffer. Measuring speed in these conditions turns out not to be so simple and straightforward.
- Click here to find out how the Bangladesh Police are approaching the dilemma: How can a police service encourage greater speed in investigation, without compromising quality?
Do men feel safer than women in developing countries?
Victimization surveys are a common tool to measure people’s sense of safety in the Global North and are becoming more familiar in the Global South. What should governments and international development organizations to, though when these surveys reveal disparities between the sense of safety of women and men? Can the results of these surveys be analyzed across countries in order to identify what contributions can lead to meaningful improvements in the safety of women? Do these surveys need to be supplemented by administrative data and other sources of information and insight in order to find out what to do?
- Click here to find out if sense of safety improves at equal rates for men and women: Do men feel safer than women in developing countries?
How can measures of the length of stay in pretrial detention shape solutions to prison crowding?
Nigeria has spent more than a decade trying to 'decongest' its overcrowded prisons. Despite marked reductions in the total number of prison inmates in the first decade of this century, many prisons in the southern states of Nigeria, particularly those that house un-sentenced inmates, remain severely crowded, with people confined in dangerous and unhealthy conditions. In 2009 the Attorney General of Lagos State summoned experts to an inter-agency forum seeking fresh ideas and new measures to improve justice. Knowing that it would take a long time to introduce structural solutions to what he called 'practices and procedures that foster delay in criminal trial', he asked for help developing an indicator that could chart incremental progress in the short term. In 2010 a team from the Attorney General’s office, the CLEEN Foundation, and Harvard began developing a measure of the duration of pretrial detention by studying the records of inmates that leave prison each month.
- Click here to learn about the results as well as the method by which these indicators were designed, from the PCJ report, Prison Exit Samples as a Tool of Indicator Development.
- Return to the previous Questions About Indicators page
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