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How Does the Criminal Justice System Operate from an Empirical Point of View? An Analysis of the Netherlands Case

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Abstract

This study analyzes how the Dutch criminal justice system works from an abstract and a practical perspective. Using data collected through quantitative (police and prosecution databases) and qualitative (interviewing of key participants familiar with the databases and observation of some ongoing trials) procedures, it identifies the main features of this system as well as the main problems that researchers might have when working with data recorded by the police and the prosecution service. This is a methodological paper that intends to contribute with the data analysis research in this field.

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Notes

  1. This was an important issue because the Netherlands, like many other countries, does not have an integrated system allowing an offender to be tracked from the commission of the offence through release from prison. Hence, estimates of case processing are always based on aggregate information (Bijleveld and Smit 2005: 170) since each of the agencies has a database that covers only a part of the work of the criminal justice system. Thus, to show an empirical portrait of the lines that a crime can follow through the Dutch criminal justice system, I had to deal with different data produced from different perspectives by each organization (Kalidien et al. 2009). And, to do this properly, it is important to talk to the people who record these numbers as well as the people who manage this information.

  2. This movie deals with the topic of violence against women in some Islamic societies, telling the stories, using visual shock tactics, of four abused Muslim women.

  3. This is not a criminal law although it has this meaning according to common sense. All these infractions are handled by administrative procedures as well as administrative agencies, instead of courts.

  4. This remark is also important to this research since the empirical portrait that will be constructed in the following section will be based only on the crime statistics. I decided to do that because, according to the data gathered through the qualitative methods, this information is more reliable than the information regarding the infractions and the minor traffic offences.

  5. Although this new traffic law took out the criminal responsibility of a high number of traffic offences, by the end of 2006 many judges and lawyers were complaining that the criminal justice system had become overheated (Tonry and Bijleveld 2007: 01).

  6. After the act concerning extrajudicial punishment by the public prosecutor service, which entered into effect on February 1st, 2008 (Kessler and Keulen 2008: 145).

  7. For more details regarding the supervision of police work by the public prosecutor, see Tak (2003: 27).

  8. Although the CBS has a section regarding the number of offences registered as minor traffic offences (called mulder facts) and as infractions and the respective decisions after the police phase, since it does not have this first piece of information (number of traffic offences and infractions recorded by the police), I decided to work with the category that has all parts of the information that we need to address our research question.

  9. According to the interviewers, the major offences comprise five main categories of crimes which are the following: 1) violent crimes like murder, homicide, rape, threat, assault, and violent theft; 2) property crimes like fraud, embezzlement, and theft; 3) destruction (including crimes against public order); 4) traffic crimes like drunken driving and hit-and-run cases and 5) drugs cases. Therefore, when the word crime is used, it is referring to these categories.

  10. According to Tonry and Bijleveld (2007: 22), because of that, victimization surveys tend to be understood as more reliable information because they are not distorted by officials recording decisions and because often they are based on large samples. However, they do not measure one of the most serious crimes, homicide and do not report data for another type, rape. What they do measure is heavily biased toward less serious crime. Thus, since I am working with crime statistics, I decided not to take this source of information into consideration in this study.

  11. Thus, as pointed out by Smit (2010), the police have three numbers to identify a crime: the case-id, the victim-id and offender-id.

  12. According to Smit et al. (2004), although other countries have the same kind of problems in the reliability of the police data, this is an issue that most of the researchers in this field hardly ever point out as a problem. It means that these statistics, most of the time, are analyzed under the assumption that they do not have any problem, which can lead to some biased conclusions.

  13. According to Smit et al. (2004), besides the fact that usually the percentage of crimes that result in a suspect identified is called crimes cleared, some of the research developed in this field has used the name detection rates. They understand that the police work is more related to the detection of the criminal than to the clearance of the crime. For example: once there is a confession, it is possible to prosecute the case: the suspect was detected but, maybe, the circumstances of the case were not cleared.

  14. There are two ways of applying this definition when it comes to actually calculating rates for a specific year. The first method is to take recorded crimes for one year as the starting point and then look at the subset of these crimes consisting of crimes solved. The second method is taking all crimes that are solved in one year as a starting point, without looking at the registration year and dividing these by all crimes recorded in that year. It is to be expected that the first method will result in a lower detection rate, since cases solved in the “next” year will not be taken into account for this calculation. Nonetheless, in practice the differences between the two methods are very small (Smit et al. 2004: 227). For this study, the detection rate was calculated according to the second method.

  15. Because of the different units of analysis and because of the different count units used by the police and by the public prosecution service, the following figures are going to be based on the prosecution database (OMdata), since this is the organization that records the cases that are forwarded to the prosecutor by the police as well as the cases that are forwarded to the courts by the public prosecutor. This database records also the type of disposal that the case receives by the public prosecutor as well as by the courts. In other words: this operational database contains information on all prosecuted cases and sentences by courts of first instance. However, this information maintained by the Board of Prosecution Service regards only the first instance, since it does not record the sentences passed in appeal (Bijleveld and Smit 2005).

  16. The public prosecutor service did not publish the numbers for 1991 and 1992.

  17. A criminal case can be dismissed by the Public Prosecutor. Dismissals may be either technical or discretionary (CBS 2010).

  18. Prosecution by the police or Public Prosecutor can be converted into a fine if certain conditions are met (CBS 2010).

  19. According to Kalidien (2010), what happens in practice in this situation is that the cases that can be joined are handled together in a court session. In Dutch this is “voeging ad informandum” and “voeging ter berechting”. In the first instance, a case is added for information, in the second instance a case is added that can also count for a charge. It means that the public prosecutor can join the charges. All charges are taken into account when the sentence is pronounced but they are not separately dealt with in court. The public prosecutor can also ask for a transfer, which means that the case will be transferred to a Public Prosecutor in a different district.

  20. Transfer to a Public Prosecutor in a different district (CBS 2010).

  21. Until 2000 disposals in relation to the tit-for-tat policy are added to the category “Other disposals by the Public Prosecutor”. From 2001, onward they are added to the category “Transactions” (CBS 2010).

  22. According to Kalidien (2010), regarding the “Wet OM afdoening”, which was introduced in February 2008 and enables the Public Prosecutor to impose a sanction without interference of the court, the WODC does not have figures available about this yet.

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Acknowledgments

This research was funded by the Coimbra Group and was carried out at the department of criminal law and criminology at the University of Groningen from December, 2009 to March, 2010.

I would like to thank Dr. Berend Keulen from Department of Criminal Law and Criminology at the University of Groningen for his supervision of my work.

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Correspondence to Ludmila Mendonça Lopes Ribeiro.

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Ribeiro, L.M.L. How Does the Criminal Justice System Operate from an Empirical Point of View? An Analysis of the Netherlands Case. Eur J Crim Policy Res 17, 267–284 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10610-010-9131-x

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