Case Attrition
Definition
The cumulative reduction in the number of criminal matters as they pass from offence committed through reporting, recording, charging, and trial to conviction. High attrition means that the conviction count is much smaller than the true crime volume.
- Stages tracked
- Offence, reporting, recording, charging, trial, conviction
- Effect
- Conviction count understates true crime volume
- Driver
- Cumulative loss of cases at each stage
- Field
- Criminal justice statistics, prosecution studies
Common questions
Why does high case attrition matter for how crime statistics are interpreted?+
Because so many cases drop out before conviction, conviction figures alone understate offending and can mislead policy decisions, so analysts also track earlier-stage figures like reports and charges to get a fuller picture of case flow.
At which stage does attrition typically cause the largest single drop?+
This varies by crime type and jurisdiction, but under-reporting to police and the decision not to charge after investigation are commonly cited as major attrition points, well before a case ever reaches trial.
Related terms
- Case Management System
- Software used by a court, prosecutor's office, or police force to record, schedule, and track the status of individual cases from filing...
- Courtroom Workgroup
- The informal cooperative relationship among judges, prosecutors, and defence lawyers who regularly interact in the same court. First described by James Eisenstein...
- Criminal Justice Funnel
- The narrowing sequence of stages, from reported offence through investigation, prosecution, adjudication, and sentencing, at each of which a case can be...
- E-Courts
- The Supreme Court e-Committee's project that computerised case filing, cause lists, and case status across district and high courts, and now underpins...
- Evidential Test
- The threshold question that asks whether there is sufficient admissible evidence to give a realistic or reasonable prospect of conviction. It is...
- Inter-Agency Coordination
- The set of formal and informal arrangements by which police, prosecution, courts, and corrections share information, align timelines, and hand off responsibility...
- Nolle Prosequi
- A formal decision by the prosecution to discontinue proceedings against a defendant, often recorded as an entry in the court record. It...
- Plea Bargain
- An agreement between prosecution and defence in which the defendant pleads guilty, typically in exchange for a reduced charge, a sentencing concession,...
- Prosecutorial Discretion
- The power of a public prosecutor to decide whether to charge a suspect, what charges to bring, and on what terms to...
- Silo Effect
- The tendency of an agency to optimise its own internal process and metrics without a mandate to track how its output is...
Explained in these topics
- Coordination Among Criminal Justice Agencies (UGC-NET Unit II)The loss of cases from the criminal justice process, which coordination failure at a handoff can add to on top of ordinary evidentiary and discretionary filter...
- Prosecution, Courts, and Case Attrition