Measuring the performance of national criminal justice systems

We argue that the emergence of the nation‐state has produced a common structure of criminal justice systems across all nations, thus making it feasible to validly compare criminal justice system performance cross‐nationally. Based upon a theoretical framework derived from the literature on criminal justice performance measures, we introduce an index of national criminal justice system performance. The index measures the performance of national criminal justice systems in three areas: equity, effectiveness, and efficiency. A variety of indices has been used to rank nations in other areas, such as corruption, human rights, human development, political freedom, and informatization. Ours represents the first effort to compare quantitatively the performance of national criminal justice systems. Data for the index are derived from the Fourth and Fifth United Nations Surveys of Crime Trends and Operations of Criminal Justice Systems and from Charles Humana's World Human Rights Guide (3rd edition, 1992). Although the creation of a valid and reliable index is threatened by the potential for ethnocentricism and other forms of bias, we believe it is possible to minimize, though not eliminate, this risk. An unbiased assessment of criminal justice performance could be a useful tool for holding nations accountable for the decisions they make concerning their criminal justice systems and therefore may have valuable implications for international domestic and foreign policy.