The Criminal Justice Sector Assessment Rating Tool (CJSART) is
designed to assist policy makers and program managers to prioritize and
administer host-nation criminal justice sectors needing assistance. Once
the assistance programs are underway, the CJSART is a systematic tool
designed to measure progress and accomplishments against
standardized benchmarks. Used in its entirety, the CJSART holistically
examines a country’s laws, judicial institutions, law enforcement
organizations, border security, and corrections systems as well as a
country’s adherence to international rule of law standards such as
bilateral and multilateral treaties.
Policy makers have long understood the end-state goals of lowering crime
rates and providing access to justice, but the intermediate steps toward
reaching those goals were not well defined. The CJSART is the first USG
attempt to comprehensively identify the crucial components of a healthy
criminal justice system, assess them, and create a framework for
improving rule of law over the long term. The CJSART can be used to
increase efficiency, conserve finite foreign assistance resources, and help
to ensure that our efforts are cost-effective and transparent. The
components CJSART captures of healthy systems are international
principles, not U.S. practices. The framework in this tool takes into
consideration those components universally necessary for democratic
rule of law, while remaining sensitive to the customs, traditions, and
social structures of the world’s myriad forms of democracy and their
individual levels of development.
This Criminal Justice Sector Evaluation focuses its efforts on a subset of
the security sector: criminal justice systems. For the purposes of this
framework, a criminal justice system is comprised of the following
elements:
•
Laws – A nation’s Criminal Code and Criminal Procedure Code;
•
Judicial Institutions –Judges, the Public Prosecution Service, and the
Defense Bar (including both private attorneys and public defenders);
•
Law Enforcement – Policing, investigations, and forensics;
•
Border Security – Points of entry, Customs, and Security, whether land,
marine, or air;
•
Corrections System – Prison system and detention facilities, both pre
and post conviction confinement; and
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