Document Type : پژوهشی
Authors
Ferdowsi University of Mashhad
Abstract
One of the important goals of the governments is economic development with regard to which, policymakers of criminal justice system should evaluate all interventions which do not conflict with promoting economic prosperity. Criminal Justice policy makers support interests and goals to approve laws and programs in this Field and move towards them. In this regard, it is necessary to determine the extent of achieving the goal and measuring the costs incurred by the criminal justice system so far as to be selected the best way according to the supported interests and desired purposes. In other words, decision-makers in this field should always pass laws and run programs that can give these questions a convincing answer: Whether this law or program is effective in achieving the target? and is this program or law worth the intended purpose?
To understand this, it requires that the programs and laws be analyzed in order to determine their efficiency and compliance with the stated goals and their value. In this way, the judicial system is one of the steps to be taken into consideration and its costs need to be estimated. The costs of the judicial system have been measured in other countries.
Judicial system should accompany with the goal of economic development, with looking at philosophy of punishment and its functions, and consider evaluating its costs to create fields of development. Therefore, the present article measures the costs of the judicial system in drug offences (A look into Paragraph 6 of Article 8 Law Amending the Law on Narcotics) in Iran.
Methodology
Using an empirical method, in this research we have survey various types of judicial cost, their measures in comparison with budget and different methods to estimate them.
Different types of cost in judicial system could be categorized into various, occasionally overlapping groups. For example, one could have direct and indirect costs; variable, Fixed and Step-fixed costs; average and marginal costs. In addition, there are two general methods to evaluate the expenses; the first one is named the top-down procedure while the second is known as the bottom-up approach. The top-down approach is most commonly used. This method produces accurate estimates in fields whose budgetary costs can be easily aligned with workload or output. Analysts often prefer this procedure because the calculations are relatively simple if detailed budget data is available.
On the other hand, the bottom-up method is used to include all the costs related to a single unit by evaluating the direct cost of every interventions. Although, this approach requires detailed operational data, which is often not readily available, and the calculations are also more complex. Thus, this method needs more time and labor. However, it may provide a more accurate estimate of the resources being used.
Bottom-up formula:
Average time spent on unit output × Cost per hour = Average cost
In this research for estimating judicial system costs related to Paragraph 6 of Article 8 Law Amending the Law on Narcotics, data is collected through interviews at the supreme court in last year (2016) and to evaluate primitive costs of each case, data from Enghelab Court of Mashhad has been used as sample. Then, average cost was obtained using the above formula. Also with using the following equation, the total costs of these cases were obtained. Eventually, their ratio is measured by the budget.
Total cost =Number of cases × Average cost
Results and discussion
The cost of judicial system in each case under Paragraph 6 of Article 8 Law Amending the Law on Narcotics are:
Total salary and benefits of the administrative and judicial staff 47,049,280 Rials.
Total cost of renting office building 22,578,400 Rials.
Total cost of renting office equipments and supplies 2,649,020 Rials.
The cost of utilities12,600 Rials.
**total cost of a case 72,289,320 Rials.
The results of the research show that about 0.274 percent of judiciary budget is allocated to these cases. The results are very important because this percentage is only for a paragraph of an article from the list of crimes. In addition, it has been proven that capital punishment in drug offences is not working and has not achieved the desired goals. Furthermore, it has too many negative effects.
Conclusion
Economical analysis is usually based toward describing a situation that has failed to meet its defined goals and could not provided a specific outcome and then evaluate the costs; thus, it seeks a proposal to overcome the existing deficiencies. In this topic we have shown that capital punishment in drug offence is not providing its desired aims while it has too many negative effects. Thus, limiting the death penalty to organized groups and armed drug trafficking gangs can be introduced as an alternative strategy. The reason is that the punishment should not exceed what is sensible and necessary especially with regard to the losses and costs. It is worth noting that the consequential deterrence theory also confirms this.
With this explanation, if the death penalty is limited to organized groups and armed drug trafficking gangs, then we will expect an estimated 90% decrease in the cases leading to the capital punishment under Paragraph 6 of Article 8 Law Amending the Law on Narcotics. This huge reduction in death penalty could provide lower judicial system costs and also reduce the social costs in this area.
Perhaps, by considering other researches focused on this issue in a social way and measuring social costs of sentencing capital punishment in such cases, the benefits of the proposed strategy can be better evaluated.
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