Auditing Criminal Justice

Abstract

The idea of a criminal justice audit is to draw together data about cases, costs, people and decisions in order to be able to document the use of criminal justice by different people, the activities of all the people and agencies involved in the delivery of criminal justice and the resources being devoted to it. It should provide a snapshot view of criminal justice for a particular area for one period of time, from which it is possible to display the progress of cases through the stages of criminal justice, the key decision points, the costs to different agencies and parties, and the use being made of public criminal justice provision. It should, for example, allow one to see how much, on average, it costs to provide support to victims per victim during the reporting and investigative stage, how much it costs per offender to caution him or her, how much it costs to keep one offender in prison on remand (not per day, but per average remand period). It is only by comparing the use of resources in this way that one can see the effective priorities of our criminal justice system — where it spends its money. It is then possible to compare the amount spent on offenders of different types with the amount spent on victims, or to look at the extent to which each agency contributes to each stage of criminal justice, or to focus on the kind of work which is being done within criminal justice.