This is a book about accountability. More specifically, it is about quantitative accountability and the National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) in South Africa. I am interested in how prosecutors, who have the power to call others to account for wrongdoing, are themselves held accountable Central to this study is the role played by recently introduced performance measurement systems in the way prosecutors are held accountable. I explore how these measurement systems shape and influence South African prosecutors’ understanding of accountability and their prosecutorial practices.I ask whether there are significant implications for legal work, as the language of ‘performance statistics’ ‘indicators’ ‘targets’, ‘rates’ and ‘rankings’ is becoming common parlance within the judicial system.

While numerical representations are gaining increasing importance for the demonstration of accountability in many government and non-government settings in the twenty-first century, the effects and consequences of this for our social, institutional and political life are relatively opaque.