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Use of crime and criminal justice statistics at the national and international level
Steven MalbyResearch OfficerStatistics and Surveys Section
Purpose of crime and criminal justice statistics
Statistics on crime and criminal justice help governments to assess and monitor:the conditions, circumstances and trends of well-beingsocial impact of public expenditures and policies
“The collection of reliable and comprehensive statistics is of immense importance to everyone involved with criminal justice, especially to the
criminal justice administrator.”
However, it is only when raw information is transformed through purposeful collection and organization into statistical form that individual records provide valuable information for criminal justice decision making.
Purpose of crime and criminal justice statistics Analysis of crime levels and perceptions and experiences of public
safety for policy making
• Prosecutors may benefit from knowledge of police-recorded crime, including information on numbers of persons suspected, arrested or cautioned
Monitoring and evaluation of the impact of crime prevention strategies• Prosecutors may have access to detailed case information not available at the law-
enforcement level. Comparisons may be made between different provincial/district prosecutor offices and between sub-categories of suspects, including children, women, and citizens of other countries
Decisions on allocation of resources
Assessment of the workload and operation of criminal justice system components and of their efficiency and effectiveness
• Prosecutors may benefit from analysis of case data at different levels of the criminal justice system in order to assess the effectiveness of their work
Sources of crime and criminal justice statistics Administrative statistics (police, prosecution, courts, prisons) Victimization surveys (households, women, businesses) Self-report studies (juveniles, prisoners) Ad-hoc studies on specific types of crime, such as organized crime,
trafficking in persons)
Definition Counting Unit
Institution
Number of crimes recorded Incidents Law enforcement
Number of persons arrested Persons Law enforcement
Number of persons prosecuted Persons Prosecution
Number of persons convicted Persons Courts
Number of persons detained Persons Prisons
Distribution of responsibility
may vary depending upon the specific national criminal
justice system
From operational systems to statistical systems
DetentionProsecution CourtsPolice
Case file Case file Court file Logs/prison files
Central Police
Command
Attorney General
HighCourt
Ministry of Justice/Interior
* System represents a generic example criminal justice system and does not correspond to that of any individual country.
Data collection by the United Nations
• The United Nations Survey of Crime Trends and Operations of Criminal Justice Systems (UN-CTS)
Tenth UN-CTS covered the period 2005-2006
Consists of four parts – Police, Prosecution, Courts and Prisons
Each part completed by the relevant institution
Responses to the Tenth UN-CTS, by partNumber of respondents by Part
Percent of numerical items completed
Analysis of UN-CTS data Cross-national analysis of data presents a number of challenges,
including different national case recording/counting rules, different crime definitions and different criminal justice system crime ‘priorities’
UNODC attempts to address these challenges through provision of metadata that assists users in establishing data quality and comparability across time and countries
• Selected data reviewed for: Consistency of responses with previous CTS waves (trend analysis) Internal consistency of responses within Tenth CTS Consistency of response with other known crime statistics sources
Dissemination and analysis of UN-CTS data• Data from Tenth CTS presented in two formats at unodc.org:
Values and rates annotated with extended UNODC metadata for selected variables (to date – police-recorded homicide)
Values and rates for all CTS variables reproduced as received, including prosecution data
What can the data tell us?
0
50
100
150
200
1995
1996
1997
1998
1999
2000
2001
2002
2003
2004
2005
2006
Basis: 1995 = 100
Intentional homicide (14 countries)
Robbery (15 countries)
Burglary (10 countries)
Drug-related crime (14 countries)
Automobile theft (14 countries)
Trends in selected categories of police-recorded
conventional crime, 1995-2006
• Same set of countries across time series
• Crime rates ‘normalized’ to base of ‘100’ in order to display trend only
• Crime types that show significant variation in definition (such as assault) not included in analysis
Attrition analysis of homicide in the UN-CTS
Criminal justice system attrition for intentional homicide (4 year average 03-06)
0
200
400
600
800
1000
1200
1400
Belarus
Costa Rica
Croatia
Czech
Republic
Georgia
Kyrgyzs
tan
Moldova
Portgua
l
Romania
Sweden
Coun
t
Suspected, arrested or cautioned
Prosecuted
Convicted
• UN-CTS attrition data does not represent the same cohort of cases and is challenging to analyse due to differences in national systems
• Prosecutors may play different roles in case initiation and subsequent case recording
• ‘Backlogs’ may affect ratios between different parts of the system although, to some extent, this is corrected for by use of an average over time
Measuring criminal justice system performance?
Careful combination of victimization survey and administrative statistics may allow analysis of criminal justice system ‘attrition’ rates for selected crimes
Other measures require the capacity to follow a ‘cohort’ of cases, rather than attrition analysis at the macro level
This may represent a challenge where different components of the criminal justice system adopt different approaches to case recording, particularly in light of different prosecutorial roles
Data may be obtained from prosecution or court depending upon nature of national criminal justice system
Future directions UNODC Expert Group Meeting in January 2009 recommended that, in
order to enhance knowledge of thematic and cross-sectoral trends in specific crime issues:
• The UN-CTS questionnaire should be revised in order to improve response rate, produce more timely data and to minimize the reporting burden and complexity for Member States
• This should be achieved through a reduced questionnaire containing a core set of questions with annual periodicity, together with an ad-hoc thematic module which would change every year
• A network of national contact points for crime and criminal justice statistics should be established. The network should include contact points in national statistical offices, law enforcement, prosecution, courts and national penal administrations
Conclusions
Crime and criminal justice data from the system as a whole may be important to prosecutors for reasons of policy analysis, assessment of effectiveness, and workload management
Data at the prosecution level is important both for analysis of criminal justice system performance and providing disaggregated data (eg. final classification of criminal offence or details of nature of the offence) that may not be available at the law-enforcement level
The UN-CTS focuses both on crime and operation of criminal justice systems. Prosecution data is crucial to a full understanding of the response of society to different forms of crime
Appointment of focal points within national offices of the prosecutor will be key to effective reporting of data at the international level
Thank you for your attention
[email protected] and Surveys Section
Policy Analysis and Research Branch