Crime and Punishment in Western Countries, 1980-1999
Crime and justice: A review of research (Volume 33)

Edited by Michael Tonry and David P. Farrington
Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005

Anyone interested in the thorny issue of the crime rate in Western democracies, and the subsidiary and often intractable questions of whether it is rising, in respect to what offences, if any, and whether violent crime is rampant, to point to but a few of these highly contentious matters, will wish to consult the twelfth thematic volume of the acclaimed Crime and Justice.¹  

Indeed, the editors, both of whom are eminent and distinguished scholars, have enlisted the aid of a number of prominent researchers and thinkers in this field, and together have delivered a first-rate analysis of the subject notwithstanding the difficulties in making sense of often bewildering data and the lack of uniformity in the collection of information and the absence of any universal agreement as to the nature and definition of most offences.  The resulting essays report original empirical analyses of criminal justice system data from England and Wales, Scotland, the United States, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Canada and Australia, augmented by concluding studies on Cross-National Patterns in Crime Rates and Cross-National Measures of Punitiveness.  In the result, these contributions serve to guide us in achieving a better understanding of cross-national comparisons of crimes rates in England and Wales, America, the Netherlands and Switzerland.  In addition, these contributions complement the opening chapter penned by the co-editors in which they guide the reader to a fuller appreciation of the questions of punishment and crime across time and space. 

It is not pointless to state the obvious in light of the importance of the subject matter, the erudition of the contributors, and the wealth of information considered by them: this text provides a signal and valuable contribution to a subject matter marked by confusion and contradictory claims and bedeviled by the deficiencies of many of those who cite statistics and numbers to achieve partisan or political objectives.²  In this vein, I refer to Chapter 1, page 1, of Expanding the Criminological Imagination Critical Readings in Criminology, edited by Alana Barton, Karen Corteen, Davis Scott and David Whyte [Portland, OR: Willan Publishing, 2007] and to the words selected to open the discussion:  “Future generations of social scientists will look back critically at this period and ask why liberal democracies continued to expand their apparatuses of criminal justice when, at the same time, officially measured and defined rates of ‘crime’ had been in steady decline…”  One may question whether this belief is correct in light of the evidence found in Volume 33.

In particular in respect of this controversy, I commend Chapter 8, “Crime and Punishment in Australia, 1980-2000”, by Professor Carlos Carcach, formerly head of the Communities and Crime Analysis Program at the Australian Institute of Criminology, for its detailed and nuanced overview of the data indicating that “[…] contrary to what is suggested by the results from crime surveys, crime has increased in Australia over the past twenty years” (p. 296).  It is not this conclusion which is significant but rather the methodology that leads one to accept or to reject the numbers which are bandied about. 

At all events, the need for better and more detailed data was noted by Professor Sandra Wachholz in her ground breaking contribution, “’At risk’: climate change and its bearing on women’s vulnerability to male violence”, on pages 161-185 of Issues in Green Criminology Confronting harms against environments, humanity and other animals, edited by Piers Beirne and Nigel South, [Portland, OR: Willan Publishing, 2007].  In particular, page 171 relates how the research data addressing violence against women after natural disasters is far from complete as data from police departments, court records, evacuation centres and battered women’s shelters do not routinely survey directly the question of violence towards women after natural disasters. 

As a concluding comment, Crime and Punishment in Western Countries, 1980-1999 is neither interesting reading nor facile in either its approach or attention to detail.  What it has sought to achieve in terms of advancing a signal debate is interesting and will serve to dispel many facile answers to many thorny questions touching upon crime and punishment.

¹ Interested readers are invited to refer to my book review of Volume 30, published in Vol. 10(1) Deakin L. Rev. (2005) on pages 369-371 for an illustration of the general merits of the Series.

² I refer in particular to the concerns raised by Professor John Pratt in Penal Populism [New York: Routledge, 2007], reviewed by the writer in Canadian Journal of Criminology and Criminal Justice (July 2007) Vol. 49(3), on page 424 and by Professor Julian Roberts and his colleagues in the text, Penal Populism and Public Opinion: Lessons From Five Countries, [Oxford University Press: 2003, N.Y., N.Y.], reviewed also by the writer in (December 2003) Vol. 41(3) Alberta Law Review, pp. 797-799.