Having overcome the complex process of appointing a tenured National Prosecutor, the stage of decision-making and implementation of new policies for the Public Ministry now begins. Undoubtedly, one of the variables will be given by concrete measures to improve the relationship between the Prosecutor’s Office and social and state actors to strengthen the response to crime.
This has been called “community criminal prosecution” and for several decades it has a history and good practices at the regional and international level that can be considered for the reality and current challenges in terms of criminal prosecution in Chile.
The intention of this note is to propose three specific actions that allow us to open a path of greater dialogue and integration of the community in the work of prosecutors, promoting instances of learning and cooperation that strengthen conflict management.
Increase knowledge of the social phenomena that explain crimes. To make decisions connected with the problems of the people who come to the Prosecutor’s Office, it is necessary to know the environment in which they occur. Much of criminality is understood from the social regularity in which context it occurs; and for this reason, the Prosecutor’s Office could implement a program that allows prosecutors to know the contexts of the users of the institution, such as women victims of gender violence, people with problematic drug use, migrants or people with disabilities, among others. This has been called “justice in a social context” and implies generating meeting spaces between certain sectors of the community affected by crime and the operators in charge of exercising criminal prosecution.
Improve the quality of alternative responses to lockdown. By proposing precautionary measures other than pretrial detention or alternative exits, the Office of the Prosecutor General could benefit from institutions or social actors with whom to generate alliances for the execution of such measures. That is, to identify strategic partners who, in addition to contributing to the reparation of the damage, can be guarantors of supervision in the fulfillment of the agreements. These are two very problematic areas at present and on which no new approaches have been generated.
Participatory construction of the policy of criminal prosecution. Although the strategic decisions of the Office of the Prosecutor are the responsibility of the institutional authorities, this does not imply that society is excluded in its drafting process. Therefore, the Public Ministry could generate instances of listening and conversation with the communities at the national, regional and local levels, to know their priorities and on that basis to be able to elaborate the policy that articulates all the work of the Prosecutor’s Office. This does not imply falling into criminal demagoguery but rather considering that the information that communities can share can contribute to the effectiveness of the work of the Public Prosecutor’s Office.
A policy of community criminal prosecution is not limited to this set of ideas. Clearly, this is a first exercise to twist the inertia in which the National Prosecutor’s Office has entered in recent years and which requires concrete and effective measures. In this fourth administration of the Public Ministry, its density and transformation towards a new institutionality is at stake.
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