Paul Cullinane:
Head of Public Order and Safety
Branch
UK Centre for the Measurement
of Government Activity
Measuring the output of the Criminal
Justice System
Public Order and Safety
• Comprises:
– Fire services
– Civil and family courts
– The Criminal Justice System
The Criminal Justice System
• Criminal Justice System (CJS) comprises the
following services:
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Police
Courts and prosecution
Prison
Probation
Individual versus collective services
• Health and education are defined (within the
System National Accounts (SNA93)) as individual
services
• These are services where:
– It’s possible to observe the acquisition of the service by
an individual
– The recipient has agreed to the provision of the service
– It’s acquisition limits the availability of the service to
others
Collective services
• SNA93 defines Public Order and Safety as a
collective service
• SNA93 (ch9 para84) defines collective services as
those which:
– Are delivered simultaneously to all members of the
community
– Does not require the explicit agreement or active
participation of those receiving the service
– Have no rivalry in acquisition
Individual versus collective services
• For example an operation is given to a consenting
individual- therefore this is an individual service,
whereas:
• Police patrolling the streets provide protection to
the whole of the community: therefore this is a
collective service
The output of the Criminal Justice System
• For the purpose of this presentation, I will define
the output of the Criminal Justice System as:
– Crime prevention
– Bringing perpetrators to justice
– Administering sentences
Three basic approaches
1. Measure activities of individual sections of CJS
(by e.g. using separate CWAIs)
– Providing information on the different components of
the CJS
2. View the CJS as two separate stages
1. Bringing individuals to Justice
2. Administering sentences
N.B. This does not attempt measure those activities
directly related to crime prevention
3. Econometric approach
– Output relates to the effects on overall crime rates
The first approach
• Separately measure the output of the separate
agencies involved in delivering Criminal Justice:
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Police
Courts and prosecution
Prison
Probation
• Aggregate these components
Viewing the CJS as two discrete stages
•
Developed by the Home Office, Office for
Criminal Justice Reform, Department for
Constitutional Affairs, Crown Prosecution Service
(May 2005)
• Appreciates the interdependence of the agencies
involved in each stage:
1. The first stage recognises that the police, CPS and
Courts all work together to bring individuals to
justice.
2. The second stage recognises that Correctional
Services (mainly prison and probation) – now under the
National Offender Management System - are tasked to
administer the sentences imposed by the courts
Stage 1: What does ‘bringing individuals to
justice’ involve?
• Activities
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Recording the crime
Investigating a crime
Identifying and apprehending suspects
Preparing and administering court cases
• Output
– Completed court cases
• Recording and investigating crimes, identifying and
apprehending suspects, and preparing and administering
court cases are all intermediate inputs, where the output is
defined as a completed court case
• This involves the collaboration of:
– Police
– Prosecution and Court services
How do we produce the final output series
for ‘bringing offenders to justice’
• If we define the output as the number of court
cases:
– We can weight together the number of court cases using
the average cost of different types of case, where the
type of case is defined by the
• the type of crime (e.g. burglary, murder)
• and sanction imposed (e.g. community service, prison
sentence)
(These costs would include police (recording,
investigating a crime, identifying and apprehending
the suspect), prosecution (preparing evidence) and
court costs.)
Stage 2 National Offender Management
Scheme (NOMS): Administering sentences
• Prisons
– Number of prisoner nights
• Probation
– Number of supervision weeks
• Offender behaviour programmes:
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Programmes completed
Education awards
Resettlement interventions
Drug treatment and testing orders
• Justice and reparation
– Number of victims contacted
– Probation reports
Quality within the prison service
• There are two aspects to measuring the output of
an agency
– Quantity
– Quality
• For the prison service, as well as measuring the
quantity of the service being provided by e.g. No of
prisoner nights, we also need to measure the
quality of the service
• Two key areas that could be developed
– Protecting prisoners from harm
– overcrowding
Key message
• It is possible to view the work involved in bringing
offenders to justice (investigating and detecting crimes,
preparing cases, prosecuting and administering the courts)
can be viewed as the joint output of police, CPS and court
services, resulting in court cases.
• This approach recognises the interdependence between the
agencies involved
• Although, it will not provide you with separate measures of
output for the different agencies involved
• Does not attempt to measure activities directly related to
crime prevention