Within the Comparative Research Platform 2023 the Institute of Justice in Warsaw has just published OA its research findings as a collection of scientific papers , edited by Marcin Wielec, Paweł Sobczyk and Bartłomiej Oręziak. BCNet has been actively involved in the 2022 and 2023 Comparative Research Platforms, with Prof. Dr. Anna-Maria Getoš Kalac, Head of Balkan Criminology, contributing to said research collaboration a chapter on “The Obsession over Efficiency of Justice Systems: On Realities, perceptions, Deterrence and the Bliss of Ignorance”.
The chapter analyses the causes and consequences of our growing obsession over (measuring and upgrading) the efficiency of justice systems, with a special focus on criminal justice. In order to achieve this, the phenomenon of the efficiency-obsession, as detected in the domain of the ‘justice business’, is traced back to its actual disciplinary origins that have little (if anything) to do with legal sciences and its daily practice. Thus, at the very onset of the discourse fundamental questions on the matter are discussed: Why do we even care about whether and how efficient our justice systems are? Moreover, what exactly do we expect to gain in terms of knowledge, insight and understanding of justice systems by measuring their (presumable or perceivable) efficiency? To what extent is it even possible to measure any given justice system’s efficiency? How should we deal with the elements of space, time and culture when it comes to the (comparative) interpretation of such efficiency measurements?
Finally, are there perhaps more meaningful solutions to upgrading our justice systems than trying to increase clearance rates and/or decrease disposition times, the two most prominent indicators currently used to assess the efficiency of the judiciary? The booming ‘managerialisation’ of the ‘justice business’, which is clearly not a kind of market-driven private enterprise, but evidently a fully monopolised state power, has led to a growing influx in more or less meaningful attempts to measure and index the judiciary’s performance in order to evaluate and upgrade its efficiency. The ultimate justification for this efficiency-obsession is to produce the ‘justice-product’ with little or no waste of resources, based on the firm belief that justice systems’ efficiency remains one of the key pillars for upholding the rule of law and a determining factor of a fair trial. The question however arises whether we are indeed merely decreasing the per-unit costs of justice, or in fact committing consumer fraud by simply continuing to label the product as justice, while actually selling a different product that in terms of its quality may no longer be considered justice?
Head of BCNet on “The Obsession over Efficiency of Justice Systems”