Abstract
This chapter aims to question the legitimacy of criminal justice systems in Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries after their transition to capitalism and democracy. Issues of legitimacy are addressed through critical assessment of trends in crime and crime policy, criminal law reforms, imprisonment, and trust in legal and criminal justice institutions. The introductory section concerns the vast socioeconomic changes introduced with the transition processes in the CEE countries. Besides the transition to a more democratic political regime, non-transparent privatization, the rise of unemployment, extended inequalities accompanied with the lure of consumerism, and other acquirements of transition marked the daybreak of a new era in the second half of the 1980s. Changes in social and value systems also reflected in the trends in crime and criminal justice policies. Their content and legitimacy of the latter will be examined in the second section of the chapter. With increased crime rates, intensified media attention, and rising levels of public fear of crime, criminal justice policies yielded to the populist neoliberal and neoconservative law-and-order solutions for crime, with harsher penalties, lower standards of substantive and procedural rights in criminal justice process, wider powers of the formal social control agencies, and increased numbers of imprisoned population. These processes pushed the criminal justice systems of transition countries towards greater repression and lower levels of legitimacy, and this trend received new impetus after 2008, when the region was affected by the global economic and financial crisis. Two decades after transition, one can argue that the CEE countries experienced the transformation from an illegitimate communist criminal justice system into a democratic model of criminal justice pestered by the crisis of legitimacy.
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Notes
- 1.
Despite the fact that former socialist states are often analyzed and described as a homogenous group, there were numerous differences between them (Šelih, 2012: 5). Following its break from the Soviet influence in 1948, Yugoslav socialism chose its own path. It differed with respect to the workers’ ownership of companies, the openness of Yugoslavia’s borders to the West, the state-supported labor emigration to Western European countries, and the cooperation of its academics and scientists with the West. It also distinguished itself in terms of its key foreign policy aspect, since Yugoslavia, together with some other countries, tried to overcome the bipolar division of the World and was one of the initiators of the Non-Aligned Movement. Yugoslavia’s reliance on the Eastern block was equal to its integration with the Western block. Despite the differences, however, the common characteristics of these countries should not be overlooked: they all had a single-party system and were characterized by restrictions and violations of political and civil rights, restrictions with respect to private property, and a closed internal market.
- 2.
Transition countries of Central and Eastern Europe, which are closely examined in this paper, include Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia. These countries have been members of the European Union since 2004 or 2007.
- 3.
Data related to the Gini coefficient, i.e., the coefficient of internal (in-)equality with respect to the disposable income (and not in terms of wealth, where the divide is supposedly even greater), show that former socialist states very swiftly joined the group of countries with the highest level of internal inequality in the industrially developed world. In 2012, as many as 7 former socialist states were among the 13 EU member states where the inequality coefficient is higher than 0.300: Latvia (0.359), Bulgaria (0.336), Romania (0.332), Estonia (0.325), Lithuania (0.320), Poland (0.309), and Croatia (0.305). The group of countries where the coefficient amounts to up to 0.250—which is also the average value of Scandinavian countries (Sweden, Finland, Norway, and Iceland)—includes only two former socialist countries—Slovenia (0.237) and the Czech Republic (0.249)—while the group of countries where the coefficient ranges between 0.250 and 0.300 includes Slovakia (0.253) and Hungary (0.269) (Eurostat, 2013b).
- 4.
Perhaps this explains why the highest number of labor migrants to the UK in the last decade arrived exactly from EEC countries (Poland, Slovakia, and Lithuania) (UK Border Agency, 2008).
- 5.
For a comprehensive illustration of the entrapment of people from former post-communist societies in the web of consumerism and its hypnotic power, see, for example, the documentary film, Český sen (Czech Dream), made by students of the Czech Film Academy in 2004.
- 6.
The analysis of crime-related data and comparison of long-term crime rate trends in former socialist regimes raise several questions. The most obvious problem is related to the dubious quality of official statistical data on crime. In former authoritarian regimes, the monitoring and analyzing of this “universal and normal” social phenomenon (Durkheim, 1895/1982) was, at least in the core of pro-Soviet countries, considered a residue of the former capitalist society and a foreign object in socialism/communism. In some countries, the official data were filtered and distorted in different ways (see Gruszczyńska & Heiskanen, 2012: 85; Šelih, 2012: 8). In order to avoid these difficulties, we focus on crime trends observed in former socialist states in the period after transition.
- 7.
In comparison with some old EU member states, the rates of crime per 100,000 inhabitants in post-socialist countries are much lower: Romania 1.364; Sweden 1.467; Slovakia 1.756; Bulgaria 1.944; Lithuania 2.121; Latvia 2.273; the Czech Republic 2.983; Poland 3.016; Estonia 3607; Slovenia 4.372; Hungary 4.465; Italy 4.344; Spain 4.996; Austria 6.397; the Netherlands 7.195; Germany 7.253; Finland 8.066; Denmark 8.511; and Belgium 9.689 (calculated on the basis of Eurostat (2013c) data).
- 8.
Various authors provide different explanations for the growth of homicides and other highly violent crime rates in post-communist countries (see Dobryninas & Sakalauskas, 2011; Keresezi & Lévay, 2008; Salla, Ceccato, & Ahven, 2012). Karstedt (2003) links them to the absence of democratic culture and civil society combined with intensified pressure of neoliberal policies. We believe that the attempts to find explanations for the trends related to violent crime cannot be isolated from the analysis of changes in society, changes in the structure and numbers of other types of crime, as well as other negative social phenomena (e.g., lower social security and social rights, the position of socially marginalized groups). We agree with Šelih (2012: 27), who recalls that the scope of changes in CEE countries after the period of transition was extremely extensive and touched upon every segment of society, which is why changes in crime trends cannot be explained only from a single theoretical perspective.
- 9.
According to the Transparency International (2013) data, the Corruption Perception Index in post-communist states is 1.5–1.9 times lower than in the best placed Northern and Western European states. One must not forget, however, that in comparison with numerous former socialist states (e.g., Croatia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia), some “older” democracies and traditional capitalist states (e.g., Greece, Italy) hold a lower position on this scale.
- 10.
It seems from today’s perspective that the human rights agenda in the CEE countries gathered strength at the very moment when it was already losing its power in Western democracies (Šelih, 2012: 29).
- 11.
While the importance of crime was played down in the socialist and early transition period, this was no longer the case during the mid-1990s. Šelih (2012) notes that in the second half of the 1990s, politicians, in general, and some, in particular, discovered that the slogan of “law and order” was a good tool for gaining votes—election strategies were designed and won on the basis of a principle that a politician promising to be “tough on crime” will get more support by the voters. The general punitive wave that began sweeping across Europe from the West slowly reached the CEE countries, too.
- 12.
Stimulated by the terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001, Western democracies experienced a tremendous turning point in their attitudes towards crime policy and justice. As crime and security issues started to dominate a large part of public debates in these countries, neoliberal and neoconservative “law-and-order” solutions to crime problems were adopted, which have increased the degree of punitiveness and lowered human rights standards that were taken for granted for decades.
- 13.
During the 1980s, imprisonment accounted for 32 % of all sentences on average. After 1990, the role of imprisonment decreased significantly, and imprisonment accounted for only 12.2 % of all sentences by 1997. Despite a slight reversal of this trend at the end of the 1990s, custodial sentences constituted 16.5 % of all sanctions over that decade (Krajewski, 2004).
- 14.
Lappi-Seppälä (2011) examined the association between the use of imprisonment and the impact of the following three welfare indicators: the fairness of income distribution measured by the Gini index, the level of social protection measured by public investments in welfare (both as a percentage of gross domestic product and as EURO per capita), and the general index of welfare and prosperity (published by the Legatum Institute).
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Flander, B., Ručman, A.B. (2015). Lost in Transition: Criminal Justice Reforms and the Crises of Legitimacy in Central and Eastern Europe. In: Meško, G., Tankebe, J. (eds) Trust and Legitimacy in Criminal Justice. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-09813-5_6
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