1. Introduction

The process of democratisation in Latin America involved the need to reform several institutional arrangements inherited from the authoritarian regimes. Across the region, the usual candidate for reform was the judicial system. The effects of these reforms have been mainly analysed in terms of their significance to other reforms, such as political or economic ones, but barely on the effects they had on social behaviour or in general institutional trust, being one of the reasons the lack of tools to measure these phenomena. Using the concepts of democratisation, procedural justice and crime surveys, this chapter proposes that crime surveys can be efficient tools to assess the effects that judicial reforms have on citizenry.