NCJ Number
204177
Editor(s)
Kauko Aromaa,
Seppo Leppa,
Sami Nevala,
Natalia Ollus
Date Published
2003
Length
239 pages
Annotation
Based on an analysis of national responses to the Sixth United Nations Survey of Crime Trends and Operations of Criminal Justice Systems (1995-97) supplemented by other information, this report describes public safety in the European and North American region as a whole as well as the individual countries within the region.
Abstract
The survey attempted to collect routinely produced and published data on recorded crime trends and features of the criminal justice system of each responding nation. In focusing on "public safety," this report refers to the general risk of criminal victimization. The report advises at the outset that an assessment of "public safety" by means of crime statistics and other crime-related data cannot be reliably made due to the fact that the level of criminality as a phenomenon cannot be reliably measured, given flaws in the available tools. A general overview of the criminal justice systems of the region provides some general observations followed by summaries of the Central and Eastern European scene and the Western European and North American scene, along with information on the national criminal justice systems. A chapter on cross-national variations of crime rates in Europe and North America addresses sources of crime data, types of crime, theoretical explanations for cross-national variations of crime rates, the survey method, and results. The results of the analyses are presented in two main sections. First, the chapter discusses findings concerning the bivariate relationships between official and victimization measures of violent and nonviolent crime. Next, the chapter considers the results of multivariate analyses. These analyses address the differential power of competing theories to account for violent and nonviolent crime as well as whether theoretical conclusions are conditioned by the source of data for dependent variables. Another chapter discusses crime trends in Europe and North America. This chapter contains data and information on crime indexes for each country and each crime category. Data and data analyses address burglaries, motor vehicle crime, petty crimes, violent crimes, and corruption (government officials taking bribes). A chapter on the operation of the criminal justice systems of the countries considers criminal justice resources, the productivity of criminal justice personnel, citizen satisfaction with the police, and corruption. The sixth chapter presents data on sanctions, with attention to data and trends in the prison population. The concluding chapter focuses on the need for situational crime prevention efforts to counter transnational organized crime in Europe and North America. Topics addressed include criminal opportunities produced by globalization, data-collection efforts, and significant developments in transnational organized crime trends. Extensive figures and tables and appended survey questionnaire, variables used in constructing indexes and tables, and homicide index distribution and nonfatal violence index distribution