The Justice Snapshot is designed to accommodate a fast paced, risk-laden environment in which the criminal justice system has been severely eroded by conflict or disaster. Within a narrow time-frame (3 months), it engages with development partners and national authorities to produce a common evidence base for planning and costing early recovery in the justice system, while providing a monitoring and evaluation framework to measure progress.
Experience in Afghanistan, South Sudan and Somalia has shown that criminal justice data may be scattered but they exist. The Justice Snapshot combines data collection, surveys and practitioner interviews within an accessible and easy-to-update website that anchors system stabilization in reliable baseline data and encourages national institutions to invest in data collection to inform priorities for early recovery.
The data are collected for a 12 month period against an agreed cut-off date. In the Justice Snapshot South West State, the date is for the year up to 31 December 2018. For other FMS to follow, the data will be for the year up to 31 December 2019.
The Justice Snapshot sets in relief the wider security environment within which criminal justice operates. It depicts zones of control which could limit access to justice threats to justice actors, which constrain their ability to serve, as well as the internal displacement of people due to conflict or environmental hazard, which could place unmanageable case volume pressures on the system. It provides a roadmap to proactively addressing extra-legal conditions that could limit and otherwise frustrate efforts to rebuild a national justice system.
The Snapshot sets out the political economy of multi-systemic arbiters of criminal justice and where people turn within that economy for justice. It depicts the roles that traditional arbitration, state justice services, or military protocol play and when and how often people resort to one over another.
Most importantly, it leaves national authorities and development partners with greater analytical and monitoring capacity than when it began. By embedding the vast array of information that has been collected, analyzed, and visualized within a website, which automatically regenerates new visualizations as new data are updated, the Snapshot establishes an increasingly accurate repository of data to inform both justice policy and the strategic interventions needed going forward.
It provides context, bringing together information about geographic zones of control and security, violence against justice actors, and the movements of people, as well as choices a person makes about where to turn for justice. This informs responses to better bring justice to people, especially where armed groups or other authorities such as the military offer competing approaches to justice, including the provision of social services.
Data measure impact, compiling data from the most elemental level of individual police stations, courthouses, and prisons to identify weaknesses or gaps in personnel, infrastructure, and material resources. This enables state planners and development partners to assess and address highly strategic building, equipping, and training needs and to monitor and evaluate incremental progress over time so as to scale up what works and remedy what does not.
It is accessible, quick and transparent, applying a tried and tested methodology and using live, interactive, updatable visualizations to accentuate nuances in data, instead of a static report; while signaling discrepancies through data notes and making all source data available to users.
It is collaborative and transferable, engaging the justice institutions from the beginning in collecting and analyzing their own data to stabilize justice system operations and enabling national authorities to take over administration and update of the Snapshot following initial implementation.
It is objective and apolitical, generating a series of data-driven, accounts of the functioning of the justice system, ranging across security and migration to infrastructure/resources, case-flow and governance – and weaving them together to illustrate how the whole of a country’s criminal justice system is functioning, giving national authorities the tools to inform their interventions, rather than policy prescriptions.
The data are collected from each justice institution (police, prosecution, legal aid providers, judiciary, prison – and their line Ministries) with the consent of the principals of each institution and line Ministry. The data are owned by the respective institutions and are shared for purposes of combining them on one, shared, site.
The methodology applied in the Justice Snapshot itself derives from the Justice Audit. The Justice Audit is distinguished from the Justice Snapshot in that the former is designed to build upon a stable, peaceable national environment and serve as a health check of the criminal justice system. It engages with governments to embark jointly on a rigorous data collection, analysis and visualization process to better inform justice policy and reform.
As with the Justice Audit, the Justice Snapshot does not rank countries, nor score institutions. Instead, it enjoins justice institutions to present an empirical account of system resources, processes and practices that allow the data to speak directly to the stakeholder. The GJG and Justice Mapping have conducted Justice Audits at the invitations of the Malaysian and Bangladesh governments (see: https://www.governancejustice.org/justice-audit)
The data collected in the Justice Snapshot comprise a breakdown of each institution’s resources, infrastructure and governance structures – and track how cases and people make their way through the system. All data are, in so far as it is possible, disaggregated by age, gender and physical disability. And all data are anonymised and Personally Identifiable Information (PII) removed.
These administrative data are triangulated with surveys of justice practitioners (police and prison officers as well as judges and lawyers), court users (people coming to the courts for redress whether as defendants, victims, witnesses, or family members), elders and community perceptions.
The baseline data sets are collected by independent research teams and enumerators under the guidance and with the support of the Justice Snapshot Steering Committee (JSSC) – who are themselves representative of each justice institution and nominated by their principals. Once the data are collected, they are cleaned of obvious error. Any gaps in data are indicated ‘No Data’ unless the data show, for instance, 0 vehicles. Where the accuracy of data cannot be verified, it is indicated in the ‘Data Note’ box. The clean data are then submitted to the JSSC for validation so that those viewing know that the data presented is signed off by the institutions concerned.
The GJG ran a ‘Data Integrity Check’ in Baidoa to understand how data are generated at source, by each institution; what data fields are collected; how the data are stored (paper or computer); how and to whom they are communicated; and how often and in what format. The Data Check in Baidoa revealed that each institution has a register or ledger or book to note people and cases coming in to their institution (and leaving it), that the case numbers are low and that administrative training and equipment are poor.
Note: the data captured will never be 100% accurate. Gaps and error will occur especially on this first series of Justice Snapshots as those working on the frontline of the criminal justice system are not used to collecting data systematically and especially not on a disaggregated basis. However data collection and accuracy will improve over time and as systems are embedded within each institution.
The data are then organized and forwarded to Justice Mapping to upload on to the Justice Snapshot web application which is programmed and coded to visualize the data as they are updated. Both the Justice Audit and Justice Snapshot are designed to be living tools rather than one-off reports. The purpose is to capture data over time and identify trends and so monitor more closely what works (and so scale up) and what does not (and so recalibrate or jettison).
The data identify investment opportunities to sharpen budgetary allocations (and improve aid performance for ‘Better Aid’) and enhance early recovery of justice services. These investment opportunities are agreed in the final JSSC meeting with state level justice actors.
The engagement with key institutional actors at the outset is not just a courtesy. The methodology aims to maximize the participation of all actors and encourage them to invest in their own data collection better to inform policy for the sector as a whole and leverage more resources for their own institution. From the moment it is formed, the JSSC takes ownership of the process, and so is central to this approach.
In the course of the first series of Justice Snapshots, consultations will be held to identify ‘information management unit(s)’ or IMU, to update the data at Federal and State levels. An administration tool developed by Justice Mapping will be shared with the IMU to enable the unit to operate the web application and upload new data.
Following the first series of Justice Snapshots, each JSSC will encourage its institutions to collect disaggregated data, at regular intervals, using standard data sheets. These data will be reported in line with existing procedures up the chain – and to the IMU. Successive Justice Snapshots will be conducted at 1-2 year intervals to monitor change over time. The role of the GJG will be to provide backstopping and technical support as required.
The Justice Snapshot team is headed up by Justice (retired) Johann Kriegler (founding Justice of the Constitutional Court of South Africa) and is managed by Radha Nair.
Allison Elders conducted the research and literature review for the Library from her base in the Bluhm Legal Clinic at Northwestern University School of Law, Chicago, USA supported by special adviser to the team, Tom Geraghty.
The research teams comprise:
These three organisations are supported by practitioners in the GJG: Kathryn English, Adam Stapleton, Marcus Baltzer, David Morgan, Hania Farhan, Heather Goldsmith and a team of data analysts.
The information technology and data design team is directed by Eric Cadora, founder and director, Justice Mapping (USA). He is supported by:
All translations into Somali from English were undertaken by Abdoulkarim Hassan (qurusdoon@yahoo.com).