The World of Crime

Breaking the Silence on Problems of Security, Justice and Development Across the World

Jan Van Dijk

• Publisher: SAGE Publications, Inc
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9781412956796, 9781412956789
• eBook ISBN: 9781506320892
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

"This book is important for students who want to put domestic crime and justice issues and criminological theories in an international perspective....It is more than likely that this book will also interest all those who are professionally or privately interested in issues of crime, corruption, terrorism, law enforcement, criminal justice and sustainable development."

—Johnson Thomas, BUSINESS INDIA



In today?s interdependent world, governments must become more transparent about their crime and justice problems. The World of Crime: Breaking the Silence on Problems of Security, Justice and Development Across the World seeks to break the "conspiracy of silence" regarding statistical information on these sensitive issues. It subsequently analyzes the macro causes of crime such as rapid urbanization, economic inequality, gender discrimination, abuse of alcohol, and drugs and availability of guns. Furthermore, the book analyzes the impact of crime on individuals and societies. Using a wealth of statistical information, the author underlines the need of greater international efforts to tackle transnational problems of crime.

Key Features

• Presents 13 chapters, which are organized in 4 main parts, that cover measurement challenges, common crimes, emerging global crimes, criminal justice, and international perspectives on crime and justice
• Contains statistical data taken from 2005 International Crime Victim Surveys
• Includes high quality figures such as scatter plots, graphs, and maps
• Features summary reviews and figure footnotes at the ends of each chapter

Intended Audience: The book is intended as a supplementary text for introduction to criminology, criminal justice, and comparative justice courses and is also appropriate for those professionally interested in security, criminal justice and development.

PART I

The Challenge of Measuring Crime Internationally

1

The Need for Better Crime Diagnostics

The Uses of International Crime Statistics

Reliable cross-national information on crime patterns allows governments to see how their domestic crime problems compare with other relevant countries (e.g., neighbors) and regional and global averages. Such objective diagnosis can provide a useful antidote to prevailing conceptualizations of crime and criminal justice based on sensationalist, media-led notions. If comparative crime statistics are used properly, they can help to inform countercrime policies. Specifically, they provide a benchmark of crime control policies to identify which policies do better than others and areas that can be improved.

In our global village, crime problems are no longer a domestic concern. Many types of crime have international dimensions, and trends in crime and justice in different countries are increasingly interdependent. The international nature of markets for drugs, sexual services, and illicit firearms is generally recognized. Less well understood is the international nature of many other criminal markets such as that for stolen cars with an estimated half million stolen cars transported from developed to less developed countries annually. More and more criminal groups operate internationally through loose networks of partners in crime. Similar to legitimate businesses, criminal organizations tend to operate from an established home base. Criminal groups that are able to operate with near impunity in their home countries show a tendency to branch out internationally. The United States, for example, is confronted with violent gangs from the former Soviet Union and the Caribbean (International Crime Threat Assessment, 2000). Countries in the Caribbean are coping with serious criminality committed by career criminals deported by the United States and the United Kingdom in large numbers. The European Union is confronted with influxes of criminality from Eastern Europe, for example, human traffickers from Albania, Bulgaria, and Kosovo (EUROPOL, 2004). Southern Africa is struggling with an ongoing influx of Nigerian criminal networks (Shaw, 2003). At the global level, countries with dysfunctional justice systems provide safe havens for criminals to launder money, execute computer-facilitated scams, otherwise expand their criminal business, or plan terrorist attacks. In order to build lines of defense in appropriate places, national crime prevention requires reliable international intelligence on domestic crime across the world.

Information on the risk of crime and corruption must be considered by the international corporate world when deciding on where to invest and deploy human resources for profit. Information on governance is also key for policies aimed at sustainable development and poverty reduction. In the absence of reliable information on crime, decision makers of large corporations and funding agencies may make fundamentally wrong decisions. They may invest in countries where resources are covertly but systematically looted by well-camouflaged criminal elites. Or they may, conversely, abstain from investing in certain foreign countries or regions that have a bad reputation on false grounds.

At a more private level, international crime information is eminently relevant for all those who travel abroad for either business or pleasure. Travelers are especially vulnerable to all sorts of crime. Key considerations of potential travelers in selecting destinations are prices, cleanliness of accommodation, and safety. Just as foreign travelers are duly informed in travel guides about the threat of contagious diseases or the quality of swimming water, they would like to know more about the state of local crime. In the current situation, no reliable information on crime risks abroad is available to the common traveler (Pelton & Young, 2003).

International crime statistics serve several important public functions for governments, corporations, and individual citizens alike. In addition, such information provides the evidence base for testing assumptions on the macro causes of crime and on the macro long-term impact of countercrime policies. International statistical indicators belong to the empirical foundations of most modern sciences. A solid and broad knowledge base on the global epidemiology of crime would contribute greatly to criminological theory formation. For example, it would allow American criminologists to understand the recent drops in violent crime in the United States from an international perspective, rather than from a purely domestic one. It would allow criminologists to better understand which features of domestic crime are unique to their country and which are driven by forces that are universal. There can be no doubt about the scientific importance of more and better international crime information.

International Crime Statistics: The Sorry State of the Art

In recent years, the international community has seen a rapid growth in the production of international statistics. International organizations such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) publish annually a wealth of detailed indicators of economic and financial activity (World Bank, 2005). Specialized agencies such as the World Health Organization (WHO), United Nations Development Program (UNDP), and Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) regularly release comparative statistics on a wide range of topics such as diseases, infant mortality, educational attainment, and agricultural issues (UNDP, 2002b; WHO, 2005). There are also comparative statistics on the consumption of illegal drugs (UNODC, 2005), forced labor (ILO, 2005), and many other global social issues. It is not an overstatement to say that the world is experiencing an “information explosion” on cross-national issues.

In contrast, international statistics on crime and criminal justice are few and far between. As rightly observed by Kaufmann (2005), the leading researcher on governance issues at the World Bank Institute, metrics play hardly any role in the international discourse on security and justice. For many of the largest developing countries, no comparative statistical information on either crime or justice is available at all. Since 1987, an international poll has been conducted among the public of more than 70 countries about their recent experiences of crime (the International Crime Victim Survey [ICVS]). Based on results of this survey, new information has become available on experiences of the public of common crime in many developed countries and some cities in developing countries. In many parts of the world, ICVS results are the only source of reliable and up-to-date information on crime (for Southern Africa, see, for example, Naudé & Prinsloo, 2003; Naudé, Prinsloo, & Ladikos, 2006). But reliable crime information on some of the largest developing countries including Brazil, China, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Russia is still conspicuously missing. Surprisingly, there are no signs that this situation is likely to improve in the near future.

In 1999, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) in Vienna, Austria, published the Global Report on Crime and Justice, which contained data that were at the time 5 years old (Newman, 1999). The publication was launched almost stealthily, without press releases or any other communication strategy, and has not become widely known in government circles. This pioneering report has not been followed up with any subsequent comprehensive UN reports on crime since. In fact, at the 14th session of the United Nations Commission on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice in Vienna, Austria, in 2005, Antonio Maria Costa, the current executive director of UNODC, stressed in his opening speech the need for quantitative research as a foundation for policymaking on crime.

The international community has considerable respect for the annual World Economic Report, World Development Report, World Trade Report, and World Drug Report . . . and similar publications. But here is the real question: Is the Crime Commission ready to deliberate policy on the basis of a World Crime Report?

The commission’s short answer to this invitation was a firm no. The delegate from the United States was the first to express reservations about the production of such reports. Crime, in the view of his delegation, was a “more subtle” issue than drug trafficking. Production of and trafficking in drugs involves only a handful of countries, while each and every country has to struggle with domestic and international crime problems. Without further debate, the commission adopted a resolution requesting expert consultations on the feasibility and desirability of such a report rather than on the development of a report. No UN report on global crime and justice issues has since appeared or is likely to appear in the foreseeable future.

Since the 1950s, the international police organization (Interpol) has published biannually comparative police statistics on crime based on data provided mainly by its worldwide network of national liaison officers. In more recent years, these statistics were also available on their public Web site. Although frequently consulted and widely cited, the series has met with increasingly fierce methodological criticism (Rubin, 2006). In 2006, Interpol removed all crime statistics from their public Web site, and it is far from certain that an upgraded version of the series will ever be relaunched.

At the regional level, the situation is not much better. A UN-affiliated research institute in Finland (HEUNI) has published a series of high-quality reports on crime and justice in Europe and North America from a comparative perspective. In the fifth issue of the series, the authors admit that available data sources do not permit any firm conclusions about trends or correlates of crime. The project seems to have run out of steam (Aromaa et al., 2003). In the framework of the European Council’s Permanent Committee on Crime Problems,¹ comparable data on crime and justice on its 46 member states have been collected twice (European Sourcebook, 2003). A third report was prepared with sponsoring of the Ministry of Justice of the Netherlands (European Sourcebook, 2006). Surprisingly, no funds for subsequent work have been made available by the Council of Europe itself. In fact, the Council of Europe, for decades a premier meeting place for young European and Canadian criminologists, seems bound to shelve its comparative criminological research program altogether.

The Eurostat Division of the European Commission, producing comparative statistics on a wide range of topics, once piloted a small “Eurobarometer of crime” (Van Dijk & Toornvliet, 1996). This survey among the public modeled after the ICVS was conducted a few times but failed to develop into a full-fledged crime survey. More recently, the European Commission has, within the framework of its research program, allocated ad hoc funds for the conducting of the International Crime Victim Survey among the 15 old member states of the European Union in 2005 (Van Dijk, Manchin, Van Kesteren, & Hideg, 2007). The development of a regular and comprehensive set of Eurostatistics on crime and justice has been under consideration in Brussels for some time. Several committees have been established to consider the feasibility and contents of such data-gathering instruments, but the issue is politically contentious. Building on the work done by the European Council, Eurostat has recently taken some initial steps toward the development of full-fledged European crime statistics, including an ICVS-type European crime survey. In the summer of 2007, the legality of these efforts under EU law was reportedly contested by at least one of the member states. The future fate of plans for standardized European crime statistics remains uncertain.

Crime as a Social Construct

Given the evident utility of reliable and comparative information on international crime patterns, how are we to explain that so few data are available or will soon become available? Some criminologists will be inclined to reply that comparative crime information is not produced because intrinsic technical-methodological problems render such production impossible. In their view, international crime statistics are a chimera, because universal definitions of crime do not exist. Crime, they assert, is a dynamic social construct reflecting the unique characteristics of societies, their cultures, and their histories.

It cannot be denied that legal definitions of criminal offenses show significant variation across countries and across time. One needs to think only of such culture-bound crimes as blasphemy and adultery. Behavior seen as offensive or reproachable in one country may constitute a serious offense across the border. Antinarcotics laws are also known to show great international variation. However, the cultural relativity of crime definitions should not be exaggerated. The criminal codes of most countries include similar definitions of core crimes such as murder, rape, theft, or robbery. In fact, the majority of countries across the world adopted either the British common-law system or one of the existing criminal codes of other European countries in the 19th or 20th century. The common-law and civil law systems prevail in most regions of the world. More recently, member states of the United Nations have adopted several criminal law treaties that oblige state parties to introduce well-defined crimes in their domestic criminal laws such as money laundering, trafficking in persons for exploitation, or the offering and acceptance of bribes. There is considerable uniformity in definitions of both common and emerging crime in national legislations across the world.

Parallel to the process of legal harmonization, the general public’s perception of crime has also become increasingly universal because of globalization. More and more people are exposed to the same international media messages of crime, spend considerable time abroad every year, and make use of the same cyberspace. Personal experiences of crime are rapidly becoming more uniform across countries. For example, hundreds of millions of people across the world are exposed on an almost daily basis to the same “advance fee” scams emanating from Nigeria or elsewhere.

In the “global village,” the common ground of citizens’ experiences and perceptions of crime is substantial and rapidly expanding. This is especially true of inhabitants of large cities, which now make up more than half of the world population. Shared public perceptions of crime and justice across countries can be harnessed for the production of international crime statistics through survey research among the general public or special target groups of crime.

Although the production of comparative crime statistics is admittedly difficult and will never be easy, there seems to be sufficient communality in legal definitions and public perceptions to allow for the production of a core set of credible international crime statistics based on survey research such as the ICVS-based rates of victimization by common crime. There are, in my view, no a priori methodological reasons why this would not be possible, if serious and sustained efforts are made. It should also not be forgotten that many other topics about which widely used international statistics are collected suffer from a similar lack of universally recognized definitions, including, for example, unemployment, GDP, or educational attainment. There are many “best practices” in the development of interna...

Table of contents

• Cover page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• PART I The Challenge of Measuring Crime Internationally
• PART II Common Crimes Across the World
• PART III Emerging Global Crime Threats
• PART IV International Trends in Criminal Justice
• PART V International Perspectives on Crime and Justice
• Appendix A Data Sources
• Appendix B Data Tables
• References
• Index
• About the Author