Causal conditions of criminal justice effectiveness in European Union, the United States, and Brazil

• In Event: Macro Approaches to Criminal Policy and Punishment

Abstract

The effectiveness of justice system acts as a deterrent to crime in that it helps increase the cost of committing crimes by increasing the likelihood that crimes will be detected and punished. An inefficient justice system opens the door to a sense of impunity that translates into more crime. Therefore, it is extremely important to understand what conditions contribute to greater or lesser effectiveness of the justice system. Thus, in this exploratory work, "fuzzy set" Qualitative Comparative Analysis is used to identify the necessary and sufficient conditions for high or low criminal justice effectiveness in the European Union, the United States and Brazil. The objective is to understand the single or combined influence of the following conditions on criminal justice effectiveness: (i) independence of the criminal justice system from interest groups; (ii) government transparency ("accountability"); (iii) degree of prevalence of crime and feeling of insecurity; (iv) social inequality.

Author

• José Neves Cruz, CIJ, Faculty of Law, Universidade do Porto