Constructing and validating an instrument for comparing national criminal justice policies

Abstract

The social exclusion generated by criminal justice policies adopted by some countries regarding certain individuals (offenders, ex-offenders, defendants, or suspects) places these individuals in worse individual and social conditions pursuant to their contact with penal institutions. Measuring social exclusion is useful for comparing different national crime control systems and for estimating how exclusionary a country is. However, raditional comparisons of criminal justice policies have focused on the level of punitiveness exerted by each national criminal justice system referring to the incarceration rate per 100.000 inhabitants. As pointed out by Díez-Ripollés y García-España (2019), constituting all comparisons around one indicator marginalises others with stronger measurement capacity. For this reason, an instrument of 39 indicators was created by the authors using expert judgments (Díez-Ripollés & García-España, 2019). This article discusses the development of the tool in detail and how its validity and reliability were established. To validate the instrument, we surveyed 99 international experts and applied Aiken V as the main statistical procedure. Our findings suggest this instrument is valid and reliable for international comparison.