Philippine E-Journals

Determining the Costs of Delayin the Philippine Criminal Justice System

Alvin Ang

Discipline: Social Science

 

Abstract:

Criminal justice systems are mostly concerned with dispensing justiceaccurately rather than the efficiency of the processes involved withinthe system. With such prioritization, delays become part of theprocess, which in turn can negatively affect the accused, accuser andsociety as a whole. While there is an implicit general awareness thatdelays have costs, there have been few attempts to actually estimatethem. However, without such an estimate, there will be a vagueunderstanding of how big or small its impact is on society.In this paper, I offer a framework for estimating such costs.Specifically, I consider the case of the Philippines. With thisframework, I have estimated the cost of delay to the PhilippineCriminal Justice System as approximately half of the budget allocatedto it for the year 1998. This gives us now a clear idea of why efficiency should be an equally important goal of the system as accurately dispensing justice.