A short history of the collection of UN crime and justice statistics at the international level

The earliest known occasion that the collection of statistics on crime at the international level was considered was at the General Statistical Congress held in Brussels in 1853.  The next known major effort was made at the International Congress on the Prevention and Repression of Crime, held in London in 1872.  At these meetings a factor emerged which until relatively recently continued to remain in the foreground through all subsequent efforts, namely, the problem of comparability of definitions.  Also, the rationale for attempting the collection of such statistics at the international level and of making cross-national comparisons with those statistics was a source of difficulty, although much less emphasized.

The issue of definitions still featured centrally in the conclusions of the International Penal and Penitentiary Foundation in 1946.  Soon after that, the IPPF handed over most of its functions to the newly-formed United Nations Organization.   In the early years of the organization, the United Nations paid attention intermittently to the possibility of developing the collection of criminal statistics at the international level.  There are relevant Resolutions of the Economic and Social Council from 1948 and 1951, but, with the exception of one limited cross national crime survey conducted over the period 1937-1946, little seems actually to have been done until the early 1970s, when the present series of surveys was initiated by a Resolution at the General Assembly.

The Surveys, as the different sweeps were known, were started in 1977, covering five-yearly intervals from 1970.   These were, as now, years of increasingly limited resources for the UN, and it would not have been possible in the 1980s to develop and improve the questionnaire without the help of a succession of institutions in the USA, which hosted expert group meetings to consider the results of one sweep and plan an improved version of the next.  The hosts were: the School of Criminal Justice, Rutgers University, New Jersey, 1981; the Criminal Justice Center, Sam Houston State University, Texas, 1983; and the Bureau of Justice Statistics, US Department of Justice, Washington DC, 1986.  In the early 1990s, smaller parallel meetings were held at the United Nations Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute (UNICRI).  The most recent was hosted by the government of Argentina in Buenos Aires in 1997.

Other inter-governmental organizations, such as the International Police Organization (INTERPOL), the Council of Europe, and the Organization of Economic Development have made attempts to collect similar statistics, but have concentrated on statistics of recorded crime, rather than of the criminal justice system as a whole.

The development of the present data base.  The administration of justice has traditionally been seen primarily as an extension of the criminal law, in effect its implementation in practice.  The discipline which therefore dominated both the making of the law and the administration of justice was jurisprudence; and the legal profession has always, and quite properly, paid great attention to definitions, but equally has tended to be unfamiliar with and sceptical, perhaps even apprehensive, of quantitative approaches.   Legal specialists in international meetings have tended to take the position that each legal system has its own very specific set of definitions of what constitutes criminal acts and that comparison between them is of limited value.  A number of these and related issues are reviewed in Chapter 3 of this volume.

The early  rationale for collecting and comparing statistics at higher than the national level was originally, and continued to be until relatively recently, a part of criminological etiology, the search for the Acauses@ of crime.   Such an origin is understandable as a product of the positivist optimism of using quantitative methods to establish explanations in the late nineteenth century.  The Second Survey, developed at the Rutgers expert meeting, was the first sweep that reflected an explicit change in rationale.  The focus of the surveys shifted away from the causes of crime to the operations of criminal justice systems.  This focus was more in keeping with the overall  mission of the United Nations - one of assisting governments in the management of criminal justice and, indeed, calling upon governments to provide an official accounting to the international community of their criminal justice operations.  However, another problem arose as a result of this new found rationale: the survey became highly detailed, requesting data concerning every level and aspect of the criminal justice system.  In the second and third sweeps the survey questionnaire became excessively large, requesting too much detail, with the result that it became a burden on officials of member countries whose job it was to fill them in.  It also became apparent that often no single national government department existed which had access to the variety of information requested.  As noted in several boxes in this chapter, a number of governments have since developed whole governmental departments whose mission is to compile justice statistics.  As a result, the Fourth and Fifth Surveys have been reduced somewhat in scope, and it is expected that subsequent surveys will be substantially shortened, administered more often (every two years instead of every five years), with special topic surveys^[1] added to the core survey every five years.