A nation of criminals
Feb 22nd 2001
From The Economist print edition


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BRITAIN may have slipped down many world league tables over the past few decades, but it beats all other rich countries except Australia in one activity: crime. According to a new victimisation survey of industrialised nations, people in England and Wales are at greater risk than anywhere else of having a car stolen. And apart from Australia, people who live in England and Wales are at greater risk of being assaulted, robbed, sexually attacked and having their homes burgled than are people in any other rich country.





The results of the 2000 International Crime Victims Survey (ICVS), published by the Dutch Ministry of Justice, are deeply embarrassing to a government which has promised to be “tough on crime and the causes of crime”. That perhaps explains why the Home Office, which co-operated on the English part of the survey, says it has no plans to publish the findings.

The survey, which asked 34,000 people in 17 countries about their experience of crime, divides the nations into three groups. England and Wales are in the worst group, along with Australia, the Netherlands and Sweden. America—which although way up the murder league is quite moderate in other sorts of crime—is in the middle, with Scotland, Denmark and France. Among the most crime-free countries are Finland, Switzerland and Japan.

There are no obvious reasons why England and Wales should have one of the worst crime records in the developed world. The study points out that violent crime is higher than average there, but the overall pattern of offences is not unusual. Heavy drinking, particularly among young men, is certainly responsible for some of the violence.

Lax sentencing policies cannot be to blame. England and Wales imprison a higher proportion of their people than any other country in Western Europe apart from Portugal. Nor can high rates of burglary be attributed to lack of precautions. More houses in England and Wales have burglar alarms or special locks than do those of any other rich country.

Criminologists, who find the survey results as difficult to explain as ministers, tend to blame the “get-rich-quick” attitudes of the 1980s. Other possible factors, put forward more in desperation than belief, include increased social mobility, and urbanisation.

The home secretary, Jack Straw, says that almost half of all crime is committed by a hard core of 100,000 offenders. The government has already legislated to introduce longer sentences for persistent burglars. It is now proposing to introduce special drug courts for drug offenders, who are responsible for more than a third of all property crime. But whether any of this will change this country’s position in the crime league tables remains open to doubt.