Crime and Incarceration rates

Marco Anglesio mpa at the-wire.com
Mon Jun 7 09:25:22 PDT 1999


On Mon, 7 Jun 1999, Adam Stevens wrote:
> I don't have a set of comparative property crime stats in front of me at the
> moment, but for non-violent property crime, the US and many European
> countries DO have comparable rates. However, reliable it is hard to make
> cross-national comparisons of property crime rates because only about 40% of
> crime in the US even gets reported to the police. For some crimes (like

FYI:

I believe that the justice department's major cross-sectional survey of crime rates, but the Bureau of Justice Statistics' flagship survey, the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), is done through statistical sampling rather than through police reports. Rates of reporting (or conviction) thus aren't really germane to the question.

Only one of their major surveys, the Emergency Room Statistics on Intentional Violence, seems to work on a reporting rather than survey basis, and even then they pick a representative sample of hospital emergency rooms and monitor those.

marco

,--------------------------------------------------------------------------.
> Marco Anglesio | There's no justice <
> mpa at the-wire.com | like angry mob justice. <
> http://www.the-wire.com/~mpa | (The Simpsons) <
`--------------------------------------------------------------------------'



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list