Confidence in the criminal justice system: Does experience count?

Public confidence in the Criminal Justice System has been found to be relatively low compared to public confidence in many other institutions. This lack of confidence has been attributed, in part, to low public understanding of how the courts work. Greater experience with the justice system is often suggested as a way to increase confidence in its fairness, efficiency and effectiveness. In this article, therefore, we first explore the difficulties of assessing attitudes towards the Criminal Justice System and then, distinguishing between four types of experience, we use a multivariate model controlling for socio-demographic characteristics to map the effect of experience on evaluations of the fairness, efficiency and effectiveness of the criminal courts. Experience is found to have only a marginal effect on these evaluations.

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