Criminal Policies: A Comparative Analysis of Trends and Outcomes
Comparing Criminal Policies
Outcomes, Trends, and Determinants
Phases and Actors of Criminal Policy
A criminal policy starts with criminalization (policymakers), continues with crime control (policymakers, police, and prosecution services), adjudication (prosecution services and courts), and sentencing and punishment (policymakers, courts, and prisons). The last three phases constitute penal policies stricto sensu. Crime prevention involves actors from the whole public sector, including the criminal justice system, citizens, businesses, and NGOs, that help to reduce crime. Besides that, victim assistance and restorative justice (police, victims, and mediation services) are also important.
There are major differences in crime rates, even homicide rates.
The UK and Spain have the highest crime rates in Western Europe.
The comparison of criminal policy resources, outcomes, and trends shows radically different outcomes.
It is not true that all Western societies are becoming more punitive.
Tonry wants to apply the same approach that is often applied to punitiveness or penal policies. Criminal behavior is often described as a function of risk and protective factors. These factors are probabilistic and dynamic.
Tonry focuses on penal policy.
Tonry also says that most of the things invoked to explain increased punitiveness are nonfactors: e.g. increased crime rates, harsher public attitudes, ethnic tension, rapid socio-economic changes, and postmodernist angst. These nonfactors can be thought of in two ways: background conditions, or necessary but not sufficient conditions, risk factors that lack independent explanatory power. The data, for example, shows that the imprisonment rate is unrelated to victimization rates and is inversely related to reported crime.
Risk Factors
There are some risk factors here. Through comparative analysis, Tonry listed five national features:
- General political culture: Countries that tend to have a conflict system (e.g., UK, US) have a higher imprisonment rate. Countries with consensus politics have a lower imprisonment rate.
- Constitutional structure: This impacts the degree of politicization of criminal justice, which depends on the political or meritocratic selection of prosecutors and judges and upon the degree of involvement of elected politicians in decision-making about individual cases. The obsolescence of the UK and the US constitutions differentiates them from other Western countries: in the US, prosecutors and judges are frequently elected and appointed (which means that they have to follow the moral panic to be elected again), and in the UK, there is no individual bill of rights and no separation of powers.
- Mass media characteristics: Despite the cross-country growth of sensationalism, large differences persist in media reporting about crime. The media are particularly sensationalistic where newspapers are sold at newsstands (e.g., in the UK). The mass media style and politicians’ reactions to them impact these penal policies.