עתירות אסירים - הערכת יעילות ההליך המשפטי

Correctional management in democratic states involves two major roles: Securing inmates’ rights and ensuring fairness and ethical decision making. Prisoner’s petition is one of the tools that allows judicial systems the review of correctional officers’ decisions. The literature that examined this issue showed that, while the number of prisoner’s petitions increases, the courts tends to avoid deep examinations of officials’ decision making, and therefore, reluctant to overrule their decisions and grant petitions. This article examines the efficiency of prisoner’s petition in the Israeli penal system. For this purpose, 500 prisoner’s petitions were randomly selected from the entire petitions that were submitted during 2012. For each petition, the research compared the formal decision (the legal decision) with the remedy that the prisoner was granted by the court (the actual benefit). The findings indicate that prisoner’s petition is an efficient tool for prisoners. Although the formal data showed that the courts granted only 4.8% of the petitions, the analysis of the cases revealed that in 60% of the petitions, the prisoners granted the intended remedy or other positive remedy. These findings lead to three conclusions: First, prisoner’s petition is an efficient tool to balance state’s power and allows prisoners to improve their conditions in prison. Second, the high rate of granted remedies reflects a reality of ordinary prisoners’ right violation across the Israeli prison system. Third, the democratic goal of ensuring fairness and ethical decision making in prisons must lead to a policy that remove all organizational barriers from submission of prisoner’s petition.