Challenges Facing Comparative Criminal Justice Research

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Challenges Facing Comparative Criminal Justice Research

A Comprehensive Analysis of the Difficulties and Rewards of International

Research

Martin Duffy

Criminal Justice MA Program

State University of NY at Albany

Challenges Facing Comparative CJ Research 1

March 23, 2010


Challenges Facing Comparative Criminal Justice Research

A Comprehensive Analysis of the Difficulties and Rewards of International

Research

Criminal Justice systems are an inseparable feature of human

civilization. And as the 21st century has moved into its second decade, and as

globalization has inexorably brought the community of nations closer

together, comparing and contrasting the world’s various criminal justice

systems has emerged as a critical task for modern criminal justice

researchers. It is all the more critical because, as Bayley and Shearing said

regarding the future of policing specifically,

Modern democratic countries like the United States, Britain, and

Canada have reached a watershed in the evolution of their systems of

crime control and law enforcement. [...] Two developments define the

change -- the pluralizing of policing [by the private sector and

community volunteers] and the search by the public police for an

appropriate role. (1996, p. 585).

Across the world, change is on the horizon for criminal justice

agencies, and perhaps for the entire institution of public criminal justice

agencies altogether. Whereas the emergence of “the nation-state” as a

legal entity is acknowledged as the catalyst for the creation of modern

criminal justice systems across all nations (Maguire & Howard, 1998, p. 31),

new technology and global convergence may serve as an impetus for the

further sharing of ideas and mutual cooperation among the world’s law-


enforcement, correctional, and adjudication professionals. Additionally, this

area of research offers a much needed platform for accountability in

international relations. On this, Maguire, Howard, and Newman said that,

“an unbiased assessment for criminal justice performance could be a useful

tool for holding nations accountable for the decisions they make concerning

the criminal justice systems” (31). For criminal justice researchers

themselves the trend is beneficial, as well. Frey described this when he said

(regarding social science survey researchers) that, “the great utility of cross-

cultural research is that it dramatically expands the range of variation in the

natural setting from which the researchers draw [their] case” (181). In light

of all this, it is imperative for comparative criminal justice researchers to

take on the daunting challenge that their area of expertise presents them.

Comparing criminal justice systems, particularly police, across

international borders is a very difficult proposition. Even just studying crime

comparatively presents enormous methodological and epistemological

difficulties (Beirne, 1983). Putting aside those epistemological issues for a

moment (for the sake of clarity), let us first consider the fundamental

problem of gathering crime data. Bayley addressed this when he wrote that,

“assuming that crime-fighting is the key feature of police performance,

information about it cannot be trusted” (1990, p. 18). The reason that

information cannot be trusted is due to both cultural and systemic factors.

Explaining the poor data from developing countries due to particularly major

systemic problems, Clinard said that, “These countries frequently have


inefficient record systems and inadequate crime reporting methods.

Improvements are difficult because of the scarcity of trained personnel or

[due to] the difficulty of providing nationwide coverage with limited

resources” (1978, p. 223). Indeed, many countries cannot maintain or

manage elaborate, comprehensive systems for accounting for most social

data; much less for data related to crime or criminal justice performance

measures. And even beyond capability, the tracking of criminal justice data

is nevertheless inaccurate or inaccessible in countries that are capable of

acquiring such data. Hinton, for example, wrote that, “In Brazil, where

decentralization is higher, [he] came across significant discrepancies when

comparing social and financial data provided by the federal government,

states, and municipalities on identical issues” (2006, p. 204). He went on to

say that, “this is still a nascent issue in both Argentina and Brazil, owing not

so much to technological barriers as to reluctance to relinquish control of

potentially damaging data” (204). The scrupulous gathering and

dissemination of criminal justice data can be “damaging” even in societies

where crime is not (impressionistically speaking) a major problem. Police

agencies in the United States confront this frustrating fact because, as one

explanation puts it, “active and attentive police work can have the

paradoxical effect of raising rather than lowering reported crime” (Bayley,

1990, p. 18). Crime data, then, is difficult to gather for many simultaneous

reasons: a country’s technological and social capacity to do so may be

inadequate, to do so is expensive and time-consuming, and the statistics


resulting from the data can be a political liability, thus deterring the effort all

together.

These problems with crime data, however, are only the ones that are

immediately apparent. Even in countries where criminal justice data are

diligently collected to provide transparency, the means of measurement are

various. “Some countries count crimes according to police reports of

‘offenses known’; other countries keep a crime count according to judicial

statistics of the number of persons brought to trial and convicted”

(Wolfgang, 1967, p. 65). Even if only police or law enforcement data are

considered, there are still major differences, because “police forces, in

particular, have different rules for when an event should be recorded as a

crime and when it should not” (Van Dijk, 2000, p. 35). The administrative

efficiency of police systems also varies, and so even if data is collected -- the

quality and accuracy of the collection process can be troublesome. A

remedy to this problematic situation can be found in Hinton’s study of Brazil

and Argentina, on which he says that, “[regarding] statistical data, one of the

most important needs was the capacity to compare and triangulate official

statistics with information obtained from other sources” (2006, p. 203-204).

One example of a commonly used information source to this end is

victimization surveys. Victimization surveys are far more reliable than

officially recorded data. As Cook and Khmilevska explained, crime

victimization survey numbers and official statistics “often differ dramatically


not only in level but also in trend” (2005, p. 331) which will be discussed

later in further detail.

So far, this paper has examined how systemic complications make

crime data unreliable as a criminal justice system performance measure, but

there is another realm of complication for crime data in comparative criminal

justice: culture. Cultural differences between countries have a huge impact

on how crime is defined, enforced, and catalogued. Different legal codes can

have – at the very least – subtle impacts on how crimes are defined, and so

what even constitutes a “crime” in one country maybe be a perfectly legal,

non-deviant act in another country. This is even the case in extremely

similar countries with shared history. The Spanish Empire, for example,

treated money lenders who issued high interest rates as deviants (usurers)

and stagnated because of their policy, while other European colonial powers

and neighboring countries like England and the United Provinces allowed the

practice (much to the benefit of their exploration and trade). Observing and

accounting for cultural variation is an enormous – perhaps insurmountable –

enterprise. Frey clearly addressed the problem when he said that,

The fundamental difficulty in the concept of culture is vagueness,

especially in its broadest anthropological usages […] Cross-cultural

research essentially refers to research in social units that differ to

some usually unspecified degree in shared patterns of behavior and

orientation. A nasty problem in this connection is that of designation


the amount of sharing and the specific kinds of behaviors and

orientations that need to be examined… (1970, p. 178-179).

Frey addressed the fundamental problem comparative researchers face: an

extraordinary amount of nuance and context is necessary in order for one to

be able to compare anything – even something as intuitively “simple” as

crime rate; “simple” because crime rates are a convenient, but far from

complete or comprehensive means for one to use in order to evaluate police

performance in comparative studies.

There are other measures, such as aforementioned victimization

surveys, which are acknowledged by many as a way of getting around the

majority of the problems inherit with measures like crime rate or case

clearance rate. The victimization approach was first attempted in Denmark

in 1720 as a part of a household review to discover “actual” crime volume in

the city of Aarhus (Clinard, 1978, p. 222). Modern crime victimization

surveys began to be developed and conducted, however, in the 1960’s;

Bayley conducted a limited victimization survey in India as a part of a study

of police in that country, and Clinard says that “the first comprehensive

victimization survey in a developing country” was carried out in 1974 in

Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire (1978, p. 223). Modern surveys such as these have

made it much easier to compare crime rates in different countries, since

previous attempts had been virtually impossible using official crime statistics

(or lack thereof) alone.


Victimization surveys, while certainly preferable over official crime

statistics, are nonetheless flawed as comparative research tools. Bayley

says that, “victimization surveys get around some of the problems with

reported crime statistics, but they have difficulties of their own, notably the

faulty recall of respondents” (1990, p. 18). To elaborate further, there are

several different dimensions within which to categorize the faults of these

surveys: respondent choice, sampling problems, respondent perspective on

crime, the age of victimization, questionnaire construction, and interviewing

difficulties.

Regarding the matter of respondent choice, according to Clinard,

“some more recent studies in the United States have shown that household

respondents tend to under-report victimization of other household members”

(1978, p. 225). This is relevant because different victimization surveys in

different countries have approached respondent choice differently. For

example, the U.S. LEAA-Census surveys used individual respondents as a

measure while Zurich, Switzerland used heads of households, and while

Stuttgart, Germany used both individuals and heads of households for their

surveys (and the latter two achieved greater accuracy as a result). The cost

for surveying both individuals and heads of house hold or for interviewing

only heads of households is significantly higher than surveying individuals

alone, though, and “not only because of the interview time, but also the

larger number of return visits necessitated by the more specific type of

respondent” (Clinard, 1978, p. 226).


Sampling presents another challenge in using victimization surveys in

comparative studies, primarily because data on an entire nation-state has

less meaning than of a particular city or homogeneous region. Consider the

fact that an entire country is going to be differentiated and variable in crime

levels depending on regional factors (affluence, rural/urban, etc.), and it

becomes clear why this is so. Funding compound the issue yet further then,

as few nations have the wealth, means, or motivation at the ready to pay for

numerous, city or region-scale surveys throughout their entire territory. The

United States and other developed nations have this luxury, but cannot

easily compare themselves to less developed nations even using

victimization surveys, since the comprehensiveness of every nations’

victimization surveys are simply too diverse.

The respondents’ perspectives on what does or does not constitute a

“crime” complicate crime victimization surveys dramatically. Is what the

“victim” supposes to be a crime actually a crime? If someone takes a short-

cut through a property owner’s back yard, for example, how many house

owners will skew numbers by claiming that the intruder was committing an

“attempted robbery” or the like? This is all the more complicated by the fact

that comparative criminal justice examines so many macro-level social

entities like diverse nation-states. Findlay echoes this sentiment when he

says that,

With no shared (if not common) morality and a resultant relativity in

justice as a justification for violent response, the violent struggle


regresses to issues of guilt and innocence […] it is the guilt of [the

offender] more than any deep empathy for the victim’s situation which

will motivate a violent penal response (2008, p. 101).

In light of this, does the victim’s perception of what did or did not transpire

actually even matter? If one feels guilty for a crime which did not offend the

sensibilities of another or vice-versa (flirting versus sexual harassment/lewd

behavior, as an example), how can a victimization survey reveal the true

nature of crime across a society where opinions naturally ebb and flow? And

what about the plethora of minor crimes that go unnoticed, or even serious

crimes like kidnapping or murder which – when they occur in the developing

world, especially – may also go largely unnoticed?

Survey victim age compounds the problem of perspectives on crime.

Great variation is found in the age of individuals surveyed by crime

victimization surveys. Minimum ages range from as young as 12 to as old as

18. Some countries see victimization information from young teenagers as

important because of possible unfolding major trends this information might

reveal; for example, if we see a rash of stolen bicycles, this might indicate

that youth may be subject to an increase theft or robbery in countries where

younger people can work (as newspaper carriers, grocery store baggers,

etc.) (Clinard, 1978, p. 226). Younger ages aren’t usually considered worth

interviewing by some countries, while setting the minimum age at 18 is seen

as too high in other countries because “most criminal offenses are

committed by someone under that age, and many of their victims,


presumably, are also under this age” (Clinard, 1978, p. 226-227). Age also

compounds the aforementioned issue (regarding crime-perception), because

inter-generational perspectives on deviance dramatically differ with regard

to certain laws such as drug or alcohol use.

The construction of a crime victimization questionnaire is

advantageous in that it simplifies the often complicated and unclearly

defined legal terms that human societies use to classify crime. However, in

comparative victimization surveys, this is both advantageous and

disadvantageous. The challenge a survey designer must meet is that his or

her questions “must be constructed so that terminologies for specific crimes

can be equally well understood by respondents in all countries” (Clinard,

1978, p. 227). Questions must – for participants reading in multiple

languages – hone in on simply phrased yet simultaneously descriptive crime-

types. Frey put it well when he said, “The basic tools of social science are

not alternative instruments but supplementary and complimentary

instruments. Thus, the competent survey researcher welcomes and depends

upon insightful impressionistic analyses or penetrating case studied,

particularly in a cross-cultural project” (1970, p. 176). Frey is absolutely

right in this instance, because cross-cultural survey research depends on

other sorts of research in order to give linguistic and cultural parity between

victimization surveys. As was said earlier, even countries with shared

cultural and historical bonds nonetheless lack clear comparability.


Regarding comparative studies using crime victimization surveys between

1981 and 199, Farrington and Jolliffe said that,

serious assault was not very comparable. Burglary and vehicle theft

were not explicitly distinguished from other types of theft in the

criminal codes of the Netherlands and Switzerland, rapes included

male victims in the Netherlands, and there were no convictions of

persons under age eighteen in Switzerland (2005, p. 377).

Keep in mind all of the countries surveyed by Farrington and Jolliffe (the

United States, England, Wales, the Netherlands, and Switzerland) have a

great deal in common with one another: England and Wales have been in

union for centuries; the United States was colonized and settled by

explorers from England and the Netherlands; the English crown was usurped

by Dutch protestants in the Glorious Revolution. Even Switzerland shares a

great deal with its continental and trans-Atlantic counter-parts that are

examined in Farrington and Jolliffe’s survey: all of these countries are

predominantly western, Christian, capitalist societies with Judeo-Christian

and classical influences informing their laws and societal mores. The point

here is that despite enormous similarity among these developed, modern,

western nations, comparison between their collected data is still remarkably

challenging.

Lastly on the issue of crime victimization surveys, interviews with

respondents can be a source of complication. Interviews are important in

victimization survey research in order to probe reluctant respondents in


order to overcome victim reluctance. Skilled interviewing is also necessary

in order to prevent a survey’s results from over-reporting victimization.

Good interviewers, like police, do not just accept alleged victims’ accusations

at face value, and probe to discover whether or not a crime actually

occurred.

Problems resulting from internal inconsistencies (both systemic and

cultural) are not the primary problem with utilizing crime or victimization

data to conduct comparative research, though. There is an even greater

epistemological problem with the entire concept. The use of crime data as a

base for comparison in comparative studies is an old idea dating back to the

first national (1825 in France) and international (1829) system of criminal

statistics (Thorsten, 1967, p. 2), but it is deeply flawed nonetheless because

it measures criminal justice system outputs rather than actual achievements.

Bayley recognized this when he said, regarding police, that,

Efficacy measures such as clearance rates, usually meaning the ratio

of arrests to the number of reported crimes, are wholly spurious. Not

only are they based on unreliable reported crime figures, but they

measure what police do – making arrests – rather than what police

achieve – preventing crime (1990, p. 18)

Crime rates cannot even tell a researcher what crime has been or is being

prevented due to police action. This is because there is no one-to-one

relationship between the functions of law enforcement and the quantity of

crime. Crime is a phenomenon, and it is one “which comes in a variety of


forms, has been attributed to many factors having nothing to do with police

activity – age, sex, race, income, employment, industrialization, urbanization,

community cohesiveness, values, psychological disorganization, and

opportunity” (Bayley, 1990, p. 18). This point applies to other criminal

justice actors besides the police, as well. Courts and the adjudication system

as a whole are considered responsible for out-of-control crime rates in the

media. Additionally, servants/policy makers and even civil servants involved

with the criminal justice system are all critiqued by what is seen and not by

what is prevented.

Perhaps most concerning of all the problems with regard to

comparative study is: how exactly do we determine what

actors/agencies/systems should even be compared? Bayley’s Patterns of

Policing discusses this matter in depth where he is concerned with forms of

police. He wrote that, “In order to study the police, one must be able to

recognize them in their historical diversity throughout the world” (1990, p.

7). Recognizing other countries’ historical diversity is in and of itself a useful

research goal in comparative studies, and is research that is being

conducted actively. In their article “The Legal Cultures of Europe”, Gibson

and Caldeira said that, “Ultimately, our purpose is to document cross-

national difference in legal cultures and to take some tentative steps toward

explaining the origins of these differences” (1996, p. 55). Though their

research was not focused on policing, which Bayley addressed, it is

nonetheless an example of the sort of beneficial analysis that can help make


countries’ criminal justice systems and police agencies more comparable.

They further said that,

We are interested in the structure of the values held by ordinary

citizens on important issues concerning the nature and operation of

law. These broad values are important because they structure more

specific opinions and expectations toward legal institutions, including

the willingness to turn to legal institutions for the management of

essentially private conflicts (p. 59).

But without understanding these broad values, without understanding these

opinions and expectations, a comparative researchers’ ability to understand

the composition and purpose of criminal justice agencies and actors in a

foreign country is severely limited.

In understanding how differentiated societies can be, Bayley’s analysis

of police/law enforcement is extremely useful. Bayley wrote that,

Police come in a bewildering variety of forms, from the New York City

Police Department to the “People’s Police” (Druzinikii) of the Soviet

Union, from the French Gendarmerie to the Provincial Armed

Constabulary in India, from the American county sheriff to the

Norwegian rural Lensman. Moreover, many agencies that are not

thought of as police nonetheless possess “police” powers. The Coast

Guard in the United States, for example, along with the Customs

Service and the Immigration and Naturalization Service, are authorized

to arrest and detain (1990, p. 7).


In order to conduct effective comparison, Bayley broadens his definition of

“police” to be those authorized by groups to hold others accountable for

their actions and interpersonal activities by using physical force (p. 7).

“Groups” as opposed to “governments” functions as a keyword. This

keyword highlights the fact that the private individual, companies, tribes,

even religious orders and many other organizations all have a capacity to

“police” themselves or those within their property. Moreover, in most

developing countries around the world, police are considered only “dubiously

professional” (p. 6), and non-industrialized countries, “generally have lower

crime rates than industrialized nations. These lower crime rates may result

from the non-industrialized countries’ frequent use of informal criminal

justice” (Ebbe, 2000, p. 5). In the case of both developing and non-

industrialized countries, then, comparative researchers clearly face a

daunting challenge: how does one easily compare the achievements of

unprofessional police with professional police? How does one compare

informal social control and highly localized (and perhaps even non-codified)

criminal justice with the highly complex and professionalized systems of the

richer, more developed nation-states? And what can account for the

dynamic nature of criminal justice agencies themselves in this context? As

Cohen notes,

Just when Western crime control rhetoric is talking about “community”

and extolling the virtues of mediation, conciliation and informal dispute

resolution, so the Third World appears to be abandoning such methods


and moving toward centralized, bureaucratized and professional

criminal justice systems (1982, p. 124-125).

These issues all draw attention to the fact that macro-scale and longitudinal

examinations of criminal justice system components are greatly jeopardized

by intuitive assumptions about the form the criminal justice system

components themselves even take (much less operate or perform).

Much of this paper has addressed the many seemingly insurmountable

difficulties in comparing criminal justice systems internationally. This is not

meant to discount the merit of the field of study or to contend that it is

impossible to effectively compare anything between countries’ criminal

justice systems. It simply demonstrates that the rewards of comparative

study depend on a less generalized approach with careful consideration and

accounting for cultural and systemic differences, and respect to the actual

form and function of other countries’ criminal justice systems. The

aforementioned definition of “police” used by Bayley, for instance, is an

example of how careful consideration can allow comparisons of criminal

justice actors/agencies to operate with internal logic among the various

countries that are being compared. Bayley wrote that his definition of police,

“deliberately errs on the side of inclusiveness. The advantage is that it

allows comparative study of a wide variety of institutions of forceful

constraint in society” (p. 8). And although “institutions of forceful

constraint” may not intuitively fit the schema of what “police departments”

are (even in the United States, where agents such as motor carrier


investigators, peace officers, Coast Guard sailors, etc. all have capacities for

law enforcement), these institutions are nevertheless the desired

“specimens” for comparative study: they are the system.

Comparative criminal justice researchers have attempted to overcome

the challenges their field presents them in a variety of ways. In their article

Measuring the Performance of National Criminal Justice Systems, Maguire,

Howard, and Newman said that, “If the various parts of criminal justice are to

work as a system, then there must be some way to assess their performance

as an operational unit” (1998, p. 35). They proposed an attempt which – for

the first time – would index criminal justice performance in a comprehensive

manner, cross-culturally. They said that, “The index measures the

performance of national criminal justice systems in three areas: equality,

effectiveness, and efficiency” (p. 31). The ideas that inform the index the

three researchers wish to create are exactly the kind of approach

comparative criminal justice studies calls for. Take for example, the matter

of ‘efficiency’. On this subject, they write that, “Prior performance measures

tended to ignore the central notion that performance is a multidimensional

concept. It isn’t just about crime; it’s also about fairness and resource

efficiency” (p. 37). What is interesting about this index approach is that it

takes into account crime, but it does not crutch on it. In a sense it is taking

information obtainable from official statistics (which are not designed or

collected for research purposes) or victimization surveys, and it is applying

the information rather than relying on it.


The component parts of what could be used in a comprehensive

measure of criminal justice agencies (such as crime rate) can also be

improved. New methods to account for variations in crime rate, for example,

have been proposed and put into effect. Victimization surveys are an

example of this (despite their own drawbacks), but there are others as well.

Marvin E. Wolfgang, for example, proposed a method for collecting

international statistics where “seriousness scores” for deviant behavior

throughout various countries would be taken into account. He wrote that,

Among several main features of this system is the elimination of legal

labels for measurement purposes. Thus, as noted, rape, robbery,

burglary, larceny, homicide, etc., are replaced by requests for

information about the type of physical injury, the pecuniary value of

property theft or damage. To these items are added information

regarding the existence of forcible sex relations, the existence of

intimidation and by what method, and the presence of a forcible entry

(p. 66).

Whether or not the method is valid or practical is not so much the point as is

the idea that the researcher acknowledges that something other than

subjective legal definitions is necessary in order to approach comparable

meaning to rates of offense internationally.

As societies continue to interweave, converge, and communicate in the

21st Century, comparative criminal justice studies take on a unique role as a

means to learning, improving, and reconciling variations in criminal justice


practice, form, and performance among the nation-states and private

entities of the world. Performance measures to evaluate different criminal

justice systems and system components comparatively are elusive. Though

official sources such as the crime rate have been tracked and catalogued by

police and other agencies for a very long time in different countries, the

numbers simply have massive problems because they are not designed for

disinterested scientific research; they are designed for system purposes

within a cultural framework. Other methods to track crime like victimization

surveys are far more useful, but there are always flaw and shortcomings to

be considered in any measuring tool. And though the challenges are

enormous and the prospects of accurate, contextually appropriate research

and analysis are limited, the pursuit of comparative study is worthy of effort.

The knowledge, context, inter-cultural fluency, and understanding

desperately required in order to conduct effective comparative research are

all in and of themselves fostered and enhanced through exploratory research

that grant new opportunities to inspire creative research design by

subsequent researchers.


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Challenges Facing Comparative Criminal Justice Research