Trust, Law, and Functionality in Criminal Justice

The overall question is how criminal justice systems maintain their functional systemic legal properties and at the same time reach out to the diverse groups of people and other legal subjects in a continuous effort to ensure the trustworthiness of the system, its main institutions, and their operations.

Any functional criminal justice system needs internally shared goal rationality, predictable norm enforcement, and well-managed processes to ensure an efficient handling of cases. However, equally important is a solid trust relationship with the public in general and with the people who come into contact with the system specifically. Without trust many conflicts of criminal nature would never be brought to the attention of the criminal justice system, but would be dealt with in other and competing systems of governance (e.g. local community, faith-based institutions, private organisations, political arrangements, social groups), and the criminal justice system would loose the most important resource for its functionality: cases, people, conflicts, and solutions, which the system uses to enforce norms and principles in an effort to structure social life.

It is well documented in social psychology that public perceptions of social belonging and identity, as well as public perceptions of procedural justice are important drivers of public trust (Tyler, Hough, Jackson, Bradford). Predictability, rational goal attainment, and efficiency do not do it alone. We also know from sociology and from political science that trust relationships between system and citizen come in many shapes, each with different limitations and possibilities, and we know that trust relationships in reality exist in dynamic dialogues between system and the public. This means that trust is also a product of the responsive efforts that a system continuously carries out to ensure a necessary trust relationship. It is best described as a continuous trust dialogue. In effect, we need not only ask what drives the public to trust but also how the legal system and its institutions can and do respond to the shared and diverse identities and values of people and other legal subjects.

Previous research on trust and criminal justice has predominantly looked into drivers of public perceptions of trust. The present research project shifts the focus to the legal framework of the criminal justice system. Relying on recent autopoietic systems theory, the project looks at how the criminal justice system and its institutions, through the framework of law, participate in this dialogue of trust. For this purpose, selected low trust situations are identified in two contrastingly different jurisdictions. The plan is to study how criminal justice systems react to low trust situations in efforts to (re-)establish trust in the public (if at all). One jurisdiction is a low trust country, the other a high trust country:

• Ethiopia. Case studies of the formal legal system and its intersystemic communication with local informal legal arenas in the area of criminal justice in Addis Ababa.

• Norway. Case studies of the formal legal system and its intersystemic communication with selected arenas of low trust in Bergen.

In countries with very low trust (Ethiopia) the challenge to secure and maintain public trust is generic and the system has to find general solutions. In countries with high trust, the challenges rather revolve around more isolated arenas of regulation and enforcement, in which specific groups of people, institutions, or networks, resist the formal legal system for resolving conflicts. Examples include cultural and ethnic minority groups, socio-economically stigmatised groups, and financial and transnational centres of commerce and investment.