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Conviction Statistics as an Indicator of Crime Trends in Europe from 1990 to 2006

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Abstract

Convictions statistics were the first criminal statistics available in Europe during the nineteenth century. Their main weaknesses as crime measures and for comparative purposes were identified by Alphonse de Candolle in the 1830s. Currently, they are seldom used by comparative criminologists, although they provide a less valid but more reliable measure of crime and formal social control than police statistics. This article uses conviction statistics, compiled from the four editions of the European Sourcebook of Crime and Criminal Justice Statistics, to study the evolution of persons convicted in European countries from 1990 to 2006. Trends in persons convicted for six offences –intentional homicide, assault, rape, robbery, theft, and drug offences– and up to 26 European countries are analysed. These trends are established for the whole of Europe as well as for a cluster of Western European countries and a cluster of Central and Eastern European countries. The analyses show similarities between both regions of Europe at the beginning and at the end of the period under study. After a general increase of the rate of persons convicted in the early 1990s in the whole of Europe, trends followed different directions in Western and in Central and Eastern Europe. However, during the 2000s, it can be observed, throughout Europe, a certain stability of the rates of persons convicted for intentional homicides, accompanied by a general decrease of the rate of persons convicted for property offences, and an increase of the rate of those convicted for drug offences. The latter goes together with an increase of the rate of persons convicted for non lethal violent offences, which only reached some stability at the end of the time series. These trends show that there is no general crime drop in Europe. After a discussion of possible theoretical explanations, a multifactor model, inspired by opportunity-based theories, is proposed to explain the trends observed.

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Notes

  1. In contemporary terms, they can be seen as a sort of prosecution statistics that cover the cases brought before a court for some types of offences only.

  2. See http://www.interpol.int/public/ICPO/GeneralAssembly/AGN75/resolutions/AGN75RES19.asp. In the context of this article, it is interesting to point out that the section Frequently Asked Questions of Interpol’s website specifies that “The decision to remove the statistics was taken as some users and some members of the media were making comparisons between countries based on these statistics, when different collection methods make such comparisons problematic” (http://www.interpol.int/FAQs, last accessed on 23-09-2011).

  3. The contribution of Alphonse de Candole (1806-1893) to the debate on the validity of official statistics was seldom taken into account by criminologists until he was rediscovered by Bomio and Robert (1987) in the 1980s. For example, in his seminal article on the basis of a crime index, Sellin (1931) summarizes the positions of Georg von Mayr, Gabriel Tarde, and V. Verkko, but does not mention de Candolle. Nor is he mentioned in the influential works of Robinson (1910, 1911) about the history and organization of criminal statistics in the United States of America.

  4. While a funnel or an iceberg provide a useful graphic representation of the shape of the criminal justice system, the image of a sieve with different sized meshes allows an illustration of the way in which the system works (Killias et al. 2012: 342). The meshes filter out some of the cases, while a funnel would let them all pass through.

  5. “I maintain that before the records of our criminal courts are filed away in the burying grounds of the Clerks of Quarter Sessions or similar officials, there should be something in the nature of a face-sheet attached either to the bill of indictment or to the record of the procedure before the court as a basis for criminal statistics” (Robinson 1920: 161).

  6. August Vollmer (1876-1955) later became a university professor, and the American Society of Criminology paid tribute to his memory by naming one of its Awards after him. Thorsten Sellin (1896-1994) deserved the same honour, and his dictum of 1931 is almost systematically quoted when discussing the validity of crime measures. Louis N. Robinson updated in 1933 his history of criminal statistics in the United States, dedicating a chapter to the Association of Chiefs of Police and the decision of the Congress on the UCR. In a major example of fair play in scientific research, Robinson declared: “The author has only the highest praise to bestow upon the research performed by the Committee of the International Association of Chiefs of Police” (Robinson 1933: 134). He also acknowledged that “Several very practical reasons led to the decision to place the work in the Bureau of Investigation and it is very doubtful if the system could have been started in any other way” (Robinson 1933: 134). It is extremely difficult to find biographical information about Robinson. The Library of Congress Online Catalogue mentions that he was born in 1880, but provides no information on the year of this death (http://catalog.loc.gov/, last accessed on 23-09-2011).

  7. The problems related to the counting unit used in criminal statistics were already discussed in the nineteenth century by Georg von Mayr (Robinson 1910). Robinson (1910) also provided a discussion on the advantages and disadvantages of the three main units used in criminal statistics (the affair or case, the infraction of the law, and the delinquent).

  8. In the same perspective, a study of the role of police forces in the criminal justice proceedings has shown that, as far as minor offences are concerned, the police forces of several European countries can decide to drop cases because of insufficient evidence or because the offender is unknown (Elsner, Smit & Zila, 2008). Such interventions by the police reduce the number of cases that are treated by the Public Prosecution Services and, later, by the courts.

  9. See, for example, Ferracuti et al. (1962), who conducted an empirical study that highlighted many of the mistakes in the identification and classification of crimes by police officers.

  10. The raw data tables available on the European Sourcebook website (www.europeansourcebook.org) were also consulted.

  11. Ireland presents also the particularity of showing zero persons convicted for intentional homicide in 1997 and, according to the second edition of the European Sourcebook, zero persons convicted for completed intentional homicide from 1995 to 1999 (although the first edition mentioned 0.3 and 0.1 persons convicted per 100,000 population in 1995 and 1996 respectively). The absence of convictions seems related to a particular way of recording the convictions pronounced because, during the 1990s, Ireland registered roughly 50 victims of homicide per year (Dooley 2001).

  12. The following five countries did not provide information regarding whether they apply or not the principal offence rule: Croatia, Estonia, Latvia, Moldova and Norway.

  13. England and Wales, Finland, the Netherlands, Northern Ireland, Portugal, Russia, Scotland and Sweden.

  14. Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Romania, Slovenia and Switzerland.

  15. Latvia, Moldova and Norway.

  16. A similar, but broader, hypothesis has been suggested by van Dijk (2008), who considers that “The number of crimes officially recorded by the police goes up with modernization because of the strengthening of the official systems of social control, including their capacity to record crime and invite victim reporting. Countries record more crimes to the extent that they are ‘modern’” (van Dijk 2008: 33).

  17. Taking as an example the case of total intentional homicide, we interpolated the figures for France in 1994, Estonia in 2005 and 2006, Greece in 1998, 1999, 2003 and 2004, Latvia from 2000 to 2002, Norway in 1995, 1996, and from 2000 to 2002, and Russia in 1995, 2001 and 2002.

  18. Taking once more the case of total intentional homicide as an example, we extrapolated the figures for Belgium in 2005 and 2006, and Greece, Italy and Scotland in 2006.

  19. Trends in persons convicted for other property offences are available for a few countries only, but the current downwards trend in theft is corroborated by the few available data on theft of motor vehicle, burglary, and domestic burglary.

  20. England and Wales, Finland and the Netherlands participated in the five waves of the ICVS. France, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Switzerland did not participate in the second wave, while Belgium did not participate in the third wave. In these cases, the missing value was calculated using linear interpolation. Sweden did not participate in the first wave and its value for that year was extrapolated by repeating the one provided for the second wave. It can be seen that the logic for these interpolations and the extrapolation is the same applied for the missing values in conviction statistics.

  21. The authors wish to thank John van Kesteren, who provided them with the figures required to calculate these rates (van Kesteren, personal communication, October 14, 2009).

  22. Mobile phones provide a relatively recent example of the influence of lightweight valuable goods on crime rates. For example, in England and Wales, the number of police recorded phone thefts doubled between 1998/1999 and 2000/2001, and it was estimated that 28% of the robberies in 2000/2001 involved a phone, a proportion that represents an increase of 8% in such robberies in two years (Harrington and Mayhew 2001).

  23. Although LaFree (1999) refers to the explanations given for postwar crime trends in the United States, his classification can be extrapolated to the explanations of crime trends in Western Europe. Not only did both regions undergo a similar evolution both in socioeconomic and political terms after World War II, but European criminologists have not proposed alternative explanations for the trends observed in the Old Continent.

  24. For these and other explanations of the crime drop in the United States, see Blumstein and Wallman (2000, 2006) and Zimring (2007).

  25. The trends found by van Dijk (2008: 127) are similar to the ones found by Aebi and Linde (2010), even if the latter combined all Western European countries in a single cluster and studied assaults and robberies separately, while van Dijk (2008) combined three different types of victimizations in a single cluster (assaults and threats, robberies, and sexual offences) and analysed trends in each country. In particular, the analysis of van Dijk (2008: 127) shows that in six out of eight Western European countries there was no drop in violent victimizations.

  26. This critique is not addressed to the short articles published in Criminology in Europe, the Newsletter of the European Society of Criminology (Tonry 2010; van Dijk 2010), which is not a peer-reviewed journal, but to the ones published in the The British Journal of Sociology (Rosenfeld and Messner 2009) and the Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency (Farrell et al. 2011), which are two of the most prestigious peer-reviewed journals in the field of social sciences.

  27. In the three cases, opportunity-based theories were used to explain the decrease in property offences as well as the increase in violent offences and drug offences.

  28. Regarding the presence of second-generation ethnic minorities in Europe, see Weerman and Decker (2005). For the increase of security measures in Western Europe, see Lamon (2002) and van Dijk et al. (2007). Concerning the rise of private security companies and employees in the EU, see de Waard (1999). For the increase of the engagement of young people in binge drinking, see Hibell et al. (2009). Regarding the involvement of European youth gangs in violence and drug trafficking, see Klein et al. (2006).

  29. It must be reminded here that the countries covered in this article and the ones covered in the analysis of police statistics (Aebi and Linde 2010) are not exactly the same, and that the counting units used in both articles are different because police statistics refer to offences known to the police and conviction statistics refer to persons convicted. These factors may also play a role in the divergences observed between the two studies regarding trends in homicide.

  30. Organic law 1/2004 on Integral protection measures against gender violence.

  31. Reliable figures on the number of women victims of homicide (i.e. femicide) perpetrated by partners or ex-partners are not easy to find. For the year 2006, it is possible to combine the figures on femicide collected by Nectoux (2010) with the figures on completed homicide included in the European Sourcebook. This combination shows that, in Western European countries, femicides represent between 15% and 30% of all completed homicides.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Criminal Sciences, Institute of Criminology and Criminal Law, University of Lausanne, ESC-ICDP-Sorge-BCH, CH-1015, Lausanne, Switzerland

    Marcelo F. Aebi & Antonia Linde

  2. Department of Law and Political Science, Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (Open University of Catalonia), Avinguda Tibidabo, 39-43, 08035, Barcelona, Spain

    Antonia Linde

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  1. Marcelo F. Aebi
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  2. Antonia Linde
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Correspondence to Marcelo F. Aebi.

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Aebi, M.F., Linde, A. Conviction Statistics as an Indicator of Crime Trends in Europe from 1990 to 2006. Eur J Crim Policy Res 18, 103–144 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10610-011-9166-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10610-011-9166-7

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