Andrew Torre

SOCIALLY OPTIMAL CRIMINAL COURT WAITING TIMES: A PARTIAL INVESTIGATION

Criminal courts provide a forum for conducting prosecutions with a guilty plea or a trial. Since queues are used as the basis for rationing scarce court facilities delays are inevitable, however courts are invariably criticised as being inefficient as a consequence. This focus on court delay defined as the time elapsing between the listing of the case in the court list and its final disposition is misleading. Rather, attention should be drawn to the considerably longer period between the initiation of proceedings and the conclusion of the case. In the case of defendants not granted bail, this pre-trial delay confers both costs and benefits on society and this observation can be used to ascertain socially optimal pre-trial waits.

Reconsidering the effectiveness of an asset confiscation scheme

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to suggest how the effectiveness of an asset confiscation scheme might be evaluated by focussing on the currently operating Victorian model in Australia. For illustrative purposes, the offence of trafficking a commercial quantity of cannabis has been chosen. This is a topical and important issue, given two recent reports by the Victorian Auditor-General lamenting the absence of a suitable framework for evaluating the scheme’s performance. Because these programs provide important supplementary punishment tools, it is desirable that methodologies to gauge their efficacy be developed. Design/methodology/approach The approach to evaluating effectiveness is a mixture of criminological and economic theory coupled with some basic empirics. Utilising insights from the theories of valuing the social losses of crime and that of penalties provides a backdrop against which actual values of confiscated assets can be compared with ideal ones. Findings Comparison of actual and ideal values reveals a very considerable gap between the two, which suggests that the scheme is being underutilised relative to its maximum potential. The value of seized assets is well below the ideal order of magnitude. Even though the data on which this finding is based are sparse, the framework can be replicated as better statistics on the scheme’s operations become available. Originality/value The suggested methodology builds on and adds to current knowledge of evaluation techniques for legal system programs. Hopefully, it will provide stakeholders with yet another lens through which to view the operation of an asset confiscation scheme, and provide an impetus for collecting better quality data.

Court delays and the defendant behaviour: an economic analysis

Court delays are consistently criticised as being inimical to social welfare. However, the theoretical basis for this assertion is not well established in the law and economics literature. As a first step, very little is known about the impact of court delay on the defendants optimal plea decision. If the defendant is rational in the sense of inter temporally optimising, court delay may increase or decrease the probability of a trial depending on the defendants bail status. Some empirical support for this theoretical proposition is found using data on plea behaviour for a selection of cases heard in NSW Australia.