Indicators or Incentives? Some Thoughts on the Use of the Penal Response Rate for Measuring the Activity of Public Prosecutors’ Offices in France (1999–2010)

Abstract

From the 1990s, the French judicial system has been undergoing revolutionary internal changes that thoroughly altered its organisational structure and its way of processing justice argued penal cases, insisting especially on the productivity of prosecutors. The promoters of this “fast” brand of justice argued that this has led to a more efficient penal justice system. A closer look at the actual figures, however, reveals the prosecutors’ use of different tools—like dropped cases or change of label—in order to preserve themselves from bad results in this context of managerialisation and benchmarking. This chapter also puts the light on the transfer of innovation and its perverse effect, standardisation, from one jurisdiction to another.