Comparative Analysis of the Criminal Justice Systems’ Effectiveness in the Countries of Former USSR and Eastern Europe

In this paper, a comparative analysis of the effectiveness of the police, courts and prisons of the countries of the former USSR and Eastern Europe is conducted. A consolidated empirical database of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, the World Economic Forum, the Institute of Public Opinion Gallup, and others was used. In this work, the effectiveness is assessed with the help of 10 indicators, which can be divided into two groups: 1) indicators of the usage of material resources of the criminal justice system; and 2) the evaluation of the work of police, courts and prisons by the population. Using the principal component method, based on the above-mentioned indicator groups, an integral indicator of the effectiveness of criminal justice is calculated for 57 countries, of which 18 are countries of the former USSR and Eastern Europe. Further, the obtained integral indicator along with some socio-economic indicators and data on the level of crime is included in the criteria of hierarchical clustering by the Ward method for 45 countries, of which 14 countries are countries of the former USSR and Eastern Europe. As a result, four clusters of countries with different levels of effectiveness of criminal justice systems, crime levels, the degree of development and corruption of the economy were obtained. The results obtained allow us to formulate the tasks of carrying out further research. The construction of an integral performance indicator allows us to use regression analysis methods, to study the causal relationship of the work of the law enforcement system with the economy and political processes. This will require both deepening the theoretical work and developing the research methodology, attracting additional data for a more complete and adequate description of the studied links.