Public Confidence In Criminal Justice System Essay

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In many western democratic countries, maintaining public confidence in judicial administration is regarded as a critical issue across the whole of government, especially in the criminal justice system. The judiciary consists of many organizations, such as police, the courts, prison service and correlations, that is centrally concerned with controlling crime and protecting community by the exercise of power (Snowball & Jones, 2012). However, a system fails to command public trust may also fail to establish its legitimacy and function effectively (Hough & Roberts, 2004 cited in Jones et al., 2008). For witnesses or victims, they might not report crimes to polices if they feel that their report will not be acted upon or solved quickly. Accordingly, …show more content…

Prior research
It is indicated by Roberts (et al., 2003) that most research discussed public confidence through social attitudes of sentencing, while sentencing appropriately is only one of the public expectation. Publics also expect the government to deal with their matters expeditiously and reduce the crime rate and prevent re-offending.

Australian studies
It is indicated by Gelb (2011) that little research examines the problem of confidence in the courts in Australia. The Australian Survey of Social Attitudes becomes the main national source of information, which is a biennial survey that asks respondents their confidence levels they have in ‘the police’ and ‘the courts’. The first study was conducted in 2003 by Indermaur and Roberts (2005). They found that 70 per cent of respondents reported that they had ‘a great deal’ …show more content…

Since police, criminal courts and prisons are the three main organizations in the criminal justice system, the average level of these three could be seem as the confidence in the system. In the figure, it is clear that the mean number of the level of confidence in police, criminal courts and prisons are all above ‘2’ and under ‘3’, which means most people feel between ‘quite a lot of confidence’ and ‘not very much confidence’ in the criminal justice system.
Table 2 provides the distribution of participants’ responses about the level confidence in the criminal justice system. Responses to first questions about the confidence level in police to respond quickly to crime were 45.58 per cent of participants feel ‘quite a lot of confidence’, and a large proportion of respondents about 58.5 per cent and 39.83 per cent feel ‘not very much confidence’ in both criminal courts to deal with matters quickly and prison to form of punishment. By combining the frequency of level of confidence in police, criminal courts and prison, more than half of the participants (56.85%) reported ‘not very much confidence’ or even ‘not at all’ on the average

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