Criminal Justice

While justice, like beauty, may be in the eye of the beholder, no durable economic or social system has improved its odds of survival by ignoring it. Surprisingly, while much has been said about economic ‘justice’ in the general economic literature, comparably little appears in the economic literature on crime, despite the common reference to the system of public law enforcement as the ‘criminal justice system’ (CJS). The definitions of justice or fairness offered in the philosophical and economic literature invariably involve some distributional objectives concerning the optimal distribution of income or other basic goods and rights, in addition to efficiency in the use of aggregate economic resources (see Sen 1987 for a survey). It may therefore be useful to start the discussion of justice in law enforcement by highlighting some of the special distributional characteristics of crime and the CJS (see Ehrlich 1982):(a) Illegal activity invariably involves involuntary, if not coercive, transfers of individual rights over physical or human assets between offenders and victims. These transfers are frequently also destructive or injurious to victims or third parties.