Lost in transition: Criminal justice reforms and the crises of legitimacy in central and Eastern Europe

Abstract

This chapter aims to question the legitimacy of criminal justice systems in Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries after their transition to capitalism and democracy. Issues of legitimacy are addressed through critical assessment of trends in crime and crime policy, criminal law reforms, imprisonment, and trust in legal and criminal justice institutions. The introductory section concerns the vast socioeconomic changes introduced with the transition processes in the CEE countries. Besides the transition to a more democratic political regime, non–transparent privatization, the rise of unemployment, extended inequalities accompanied with the lure of consumerism, and other acquirements of transition marked the daybreak of a new era in the second half of the 1980s. Changes in social and value systems also reflected in the trends in crime and criminal justice policies. Their content and legitimacy of the latter will be examined in the second section of the chapter. With increased crime rates, intensified media attention, and rising levels of public fear of crime, criminal justice policies yielded to the populist neoliberal and neoconservative law-and-order solutions for crime, with harsher penalties, lower standards of substantive and procedural rights in criminal justice process, wider powers of the formal social control agencies, and increased numbers of imprisoned population. These processes pushed the criminal justice systems of transition countries towards greater repression and lower levels of legitimacy, and this trend received new impetus after 2008, when the region was affected by the global economic and financial crisis. Two decades after transition, one can argue that the CEE countries experienced the transformation from an illegitimate communist criminal justice system into a democratic model of criminal justice pestered by the crisis of legitimacy.