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 UN-CTS

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

UNODC research and use of cross-national prosecution data

under UNSCR1244

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

sass.crime@unodc.orgStatistics and Surveys Section

Policy Analysis and Research Branch