Measuring Justice

Explores how performance measurement systems shape South African court and managerial prosecutors' understanding of accountability and their legal work practices.

Explores how South African court and managerial prosecutors engage with performance statistics, indicators and rankings at work; whether and how they affect operations, decision-making, the allocation of resources and their accountability, with the findings being of interest to those concerned with justice, accountability and state bureaucracy.Measuring Justice explores the ways in which South African court and managerial prosecutors deal with the quantification of social phenomena - such as justice, professional work or accountability - and address the radical simplifications of their inherent complexities, misrepresentations and editing as a consequence. While various studies show the concern of professionals about the damaging effects these quantitative forms of accountability have on the creativity, freedom and collaborative nature of expert systems, Mugler shows that the reactions and attitudes of these legal professionals differ substantially. Through careful scrutiny of the everyday work of prosecutors and how they reflect on the relationship between accountability, quantification and law, this book argues that actors who work daily with quantitative accountability measures develop a numerical reflexivity about the process.