In criminal justice we trust? A decade of public opinion research in Belgium
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Like other modern-day democracies, Belgium has in the last quarter century introduced many changes in its system for justice administration, by undertaking judicial reforms and commissioning empirical research on public confidence. Following long years of fierce criticism of the police and the criminal justice system since the late 1980s, the turn of the century witnessed three quantitative surveys (the Justice Barometers) in 2002, 2007 and 2010. These were complemented by several qualitative studies in specific districts or with specific groups. Although many variables appear to exert some influence on public confidence, the one that emerges time and again is the degree of contact with the justice system and the ensuing negative perceptions that result from it. This contribution describes the most salient findings of this decade of public opinion research on the criminal justice system in Belgium and reflects on the implications for judicial policy-making.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".