CRIMINAL JUSTICE MONITOR

How are the police, courts and prisons performing?

It is the purpose of the criminal justice system to combat, prevent and reduce crime. It does this by processing cases and offenders speedily and effectively and handing down appropriate sentences (punishment) to those convicted of an offence.

Measuring the performance of the South African criminal justice system (CJS) is possible based on available statistics. This measurement will become more accurate once the relevant government departments have completed the process of setting standardised, publicly-available measures against which their performance can be measured.

The figures below suggest that the criminal justice system is not performing optimally. Only a small percentage of the crimes reported to the police result in anyone being convicted, but this is true in most countries.

It is also true that each stage of the criminal justice process does a lot more than simply deliver convictions, so it is necessary to look at performance indicators for each of the three departments.

To understand performance, we need to first consider the budget, capacity and workload with which each department must contend. The ISS’ criminal justice monitoring service is working with the police, courts and prisons to come up with performance indicators which take these factors into consideration.