Why Do the Finns Trust the Police?

Ideological trends in the criminal policy of the Nordic countries since the 1960s are analysed. Although criminal policy in these countries is not unified, one can argue for the existence of a 'Scandinavian criminal policy' characterized by several common features concerning historical tradition, intensive cooperation and a similar approach to crime prevention and control. The following trends and characteristics are examined in some detail: the cycle from criticism of the treatment ideology to a reappraisal of the role of the criminal justice system and the function of penal sanctions; the differentiation of criminal policy strategies (e.g. social and situational crime prevention, cost-benefit thinking, criminal law policy, sanctions policy). Discernible tendencies towards more unified or, at least, more harmonized criminal policies on the international and European level are also examined. Active participation in this developmental process is encouraged to ensure that the fundamental principles of Scandinavian criminal policy are properly utilized.     

The historical criminal statistics of Finland 1842–2015 – a systematic comparison to Sweden

ABSTRACT

The purpose of the article is to provide an overview to the trends in crime and crime control in Finland and Sweden during the past 150 years, systematically comparing the two countries. The secondary objective of the study is to introduce a Nordic data collection project aiming to compile coherent comparative criminal justice time series from the early nineteenth century to the present, and to present the first collection of data, the Finnish justice statistics 1842–2015. The study examines the long-term development of homicide, assault, rape, defamation, prison population, and penal severity. Historical statistics provide opportunities to examine the crime trends and the society’s responses to them keeping in mind that the statistics do not necessarily reflect changes in total criminality. As such, the study does not provide conclusive explanations on the development of crime and punishment but rather opens new questions to be answered in future research.     

Justice or Welfare? Nordic Women's Shelters and Children's Rights Organizations on Children Exposed to Violence

Efforts to promote the protection of, and support to, abused women have opened up new understandings concerning children who see, hear, or in other ways are exposed to men's violence against women and its consequences. On the basis of a redefinition of children exposed to violence into children subjected to violence, some important policy changes have recently been made in the Nordic countries as regards children's status as crime victims. To enable a better understanding of the context of such changes in policy, this article explores the extent to which Nordic women's shelter/crisis centre organizations and children's rights organizations draw upon a justice discourse in relation to the issue of children exposed to violence. The analysis is based upon a study of 10 organizations working at a national level in Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden.     

The Vodka Sea: Comparative History of Spirits Smuggling in the Baltic Sea

This paper examines the spirits smuggling in the Baltic Sea region in the inter-war period. On 1 June 1919 the Finnish Parliament passed the Prohibition Act forbidding the production, transportation, sale, and storage of alcohol which activated spirits smuggling to Finland. Large-scale spirits smuggling was arranged during Prohibition by criminal organizations through international networks. Mostly cheap German liquor was delivered to Nordic countries and to the United States. The representatives of organized crime in the Baltic Sea region became rich fast during Prohibition thanks to limits set by countries. Contemporary drug smuggling and spirits smuggling are comparable due to similar organizational structure and modus operandi.     

Crime is Part of the Problem: Contexts of Lethal Violence in Finland and the USA

According to Zimring & Hawkins, the exceptionally high level of homicide in the USA is unrelated to the nation's overall crime problem. In contrast to this statement, a critical review of their evidence suggests that criminal activity may explain a significant share of the excess levels of lethal violence in the USA. As a first step towards testing this hypothesis, we have created a uniform victim-level data file of information on the method and the situational context of homicide cases in Finland and the USA. In support of the hypothesis, we find that homicides that occur in the context of another crime are much more prevalent in the USA than in Finland. This difference accounts for 35% of the overall gap in the homicide rate between these two nations. Moreover, our research indicates that the effect of the criminal context cannot be reduced to the 'instrument effect', i.e. the fact that handguns are much more prevalent in the USA. In light of these findings, it would be premature, in terms both of theory and of public policy, to treat lethal violence as a problem entirely independent of other crime.     

Policing and the Feeling of Safety: the Rise (and Fall?) of Community Policing in the Nordic Countries

A major trend in the Nordic countries is the increasing focus on citizens' perceptions of safety, the enhancement of which is seen as a task for the police. One way to accomplish this has been the introduction of proximity policing. Existing research on the subject from all the Nordic countries is evaluated, with special focus on a comprehensive evaluation of a Danish experiment. The evaluations demonstrate that the concept of proximity policing has had limited success, and it has been abandoned in Finland and Norway. The article concludes by offering some explanations for the lack of success, among these the high level of perceived safety already present in the Nordic countries, the lack of causal relation between police visibility and citizens' perception of safety, and the lack of tradition for citizen involvement in the Nordic welfare states.     

Rising crime rates amidst transformations in Eastern Europe: Socio‐political transition and societal response

Unprecedented and dramatic increases in crime rates in countries of Eastern Europe (data are available to document the increases for Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and many of the former Soviet Republics) raise the issue of whether the political and social transformations that have been taking place in Eastern Europe must inevitably lead to social disruption and resulting crime increases. Since the nature of the phenomenon is historically unique (there has never been a similar revolutionary transition from socialism to capitalism), a new, unconventional, and innovative theoretical approach is needed to account for the phenomena being discussed here. Assuming that the transformations can be legitimately subsumed under the concept of ‘‘socio‐political process,’’ the purpose of the paper is to identify some basic and inherent characteristic features of the causal mechanism at work, specifically —?''How do the dynamics of the Eastern European socio‐political process explain the rising crime rates?'’ (''What causal factors inherent in the dynamics are responsible for the crime rises?'') Another issue to be examined is that because of the unprecedented nature of the process being talked about here, a different dimension of the socio‐political process theory must be realized and examined. The paper will be based on three hypotheses: 1. The Eastern European transformations imply a need for a new component of the socio‐political process theory (transition from socialism to capitalism, not vice versa as has historically been the case).

2. To the extent that crime is a product of socio‐political change, crime rates are bound to increase much more during a socialism‐to‐capitalism transition rather than during a capitalism‐to‐socialism transition.

3. Some inherent traits of socialism‐to‐capitalism transitions explain why crime rates increase much more during those transitions than during capitalism‐to‐socialism ones.

     

Eastern Prostitution from Russia to Sweden and Finland

Trafficking is a relatively new phenomenon in the research agenda on organized crime. In this article the spread of the phenomenon in Scandinavia is described and discussed. Special attention has been given to Russian-organized prostitution in the Tornio Valley (the borderarea between northern Finland and northern Sweden). The data for the article consist of observations at special 'deposit-sites' in Finland and interviews with the authorities concerned (police, customs, social services, Center for Disease Control (CDC), etc.) in Sweden, and also newspaper articles that have reported on the phenomenon. The methological projection of the article is exploratory in character with the purpose of describing the phenomenon, rather than being able to explain it. The results show that there is an organized trade in women in the Tornio Valley (set rendezvous points, pick-up sites, transport via Russian-registered minivans etc). Despite this the phenomenon cannot be tied conclusively to Russian-organized crime. One conclusion is that further research on this phenomenon should gather information from the Russian authorities and from the prostitutes themselves.     

Influences on the Prisoner Rate: Number of Entries into Prison, Length of Sentences and Crime Rate

On the basis of the data contained in the European Sourcebook, this article tries to answer the question: 'What influences the prisoner rate most? The number of entries into prison, the length of sentences, or the crime rate?' The authors show that the crime rate is absolutely not correlated with the prisoner rate. The latter depends principally on the length of the imposed custodial sanctions and secondly on the number of those imposed prison sentences. Nevertheless, there are some indications suggesting that these results could be different from one type of offence to another. Unfortunately, this hypothesis could not be tested on the basis of the European Sourcebook data.     

Nordic Cooperation in Criminal Policy and Crime Prevention

The Nordic crime prevention councils have tried to articulate their common ideology as the ‘Nordic model’. However, Nordic crime prevention is neither theoretically nor methodologically particularly original. Its common characteristics are best understood against the background of a long‐standing Nordic cooperation in criminal policy and criminology and on the basis of cross‐national influences between historically interrelated and culturally relatively similar countries. The present study describes how crime prevention has developed and is organized in the Nordic countries. It describes cooperation between the national crime prevention councils and their common knowledge and value base. The Nordic countries can offer examples of successful crime prevention, but the fact that these societies with low repression are safe and perceived as safe can hardly be attributed solely to the activities of Nordic crime prevention.     

Crime prevention cooperation in Sweden: a regional case study

In crime prevention, local cooperation and networks have recently become central organizing principles and concepts, especially in Nordic countries such as Sweden. This article explores cooperation in Swedish crime prevention by examining a local example, the regional network Regbrå. Regbrå aims to increase knowledge about crime prevention through cooperation and to support local crime prevention efforts by the municipalities in Östergötland County. Regbrå has promoted many universal (primary), selective (secondary), and indicated (tertiary) crime prevention mechanisms. The Regbrå case also merits attention because of its strong links with a local university and higher education. Some shortcomings and problems also emerge in the analysis, such as the possibility that cooperation becomes an end to itself, detached from verified crime reduction effects. The analysis draws on a study of the Regbrå network, including interviews with qualitative experts (N = 10) and a survey sent to involved municipalities (N = 13).     

Organized Crime in Africa

This paper examines the extent to which the crime problem—adult crime and juvenile delinquency—in general and elements of organized crime in particular have surfaced in the 1960's and 1970's in the new states of Africa. That is, it touches on what observers of the African scene used to say about it as a point of departure. The emergence of the crime problem in the 1960's and 1970's is mentioned in order to provide the logical linkage between the existence of the crime problem in general and the emergence of organized crime in particular in some of these states.

The extent to which organized crime in the new states of Africa resembles in other parts of the world, particularly in the United States and in Western European countries, is examined in terms of definition and organizational structure. In the latter case, the examination is done in order to briefly shed some light on such aspects as the scope of legitimate and illegitimate activities and the impact of organized crime on the new states of Africa.

By way of summary, implications of the study of organized crime in the new states of Africa are examined in so far as they have a bearing on the development of African criminology, and the latter, in turn, in its contribution to nation-building.     

Population Size,Age Structure,and Sex Composition Effects on Official Crime in Canada

Canada, along with most other Western, industrialized countries, has experienced a dramatic increase in both the overall volume and the rate of official crime, as well as significant increases in the amount of female crime since the mid-1950's. Several authors have suggested that much of this increase in official crime is related to major demographic fluctuations, such as the post-war “baby-boom.” Specifically, in this paper it is maintained that a large proportion of the increase in the overall amount of crime is due to both absolute as well as relative increases in those segments of the population which have high a priori crime rates.

Using 1957 as a base year, the volume of convictions for criminal offenders in Canada is standardized for population size, age structure, and sex composition effects. It was found that approximately one-half of the increase in volume of crime could be attributed to overall population growth. The impact of age structure and sex composition was not unambiguous, however, with the period 1958–1964 showing a greater sensitivity to these variables than the period 1965–1973.     

Crime,Disorder and Decay in Chicago's Latino Community

Abstract

This paper utilizes results of citywide surveys to examine trends in Chicago during the 1990s in the extent of crime, social disorder, and physical decay. These trends depict a tale of three cities, for trends in neighborhood problems differed dramatically for Whites, Blacks, and Latinos. All fared differently, and no group was “average.” By the beginning of the new century, Whites saw some improvement in neighborhood conditions, and Blacks experienced major improvements, but conditions for Latinos actually worsened. Analysis indicates that a combination of language and geographical concentration were among the factors associated with worsening conditions. The paper concludes with the recommendation that the city, the police department, and the community itself redouble their efforts to address the problems facing Latinos in Chicago.     

Discourse Analysis on Media Reports of Perceptions About Religion as a Solution to Jamaica's Crime Problems

ABSTRACT

This discussion, which focuses on Jamaica's crime rates, explanations for these trends, and recommended solutions, is based on discourses about the role of religion in crime resolution and specifically on the issue of (re)integrating religion in addressing Jamaica's crime problems. The analysis draws on the content of news, editorials, commentaries, and letters to the editor in both the Jamaica Daily Gleaner and the Jamaica Observer on the topic of religion and crime. It also looks specifically at the disjuncture between perceptions of and by the church regarding its role in crime resolution.     

Hardened professional criminals,or just friends and relatives? The diversity of offenders in human trafficking

ABSTRACT

Human trafficking has been extensively discussed, studied and debated over the past 20 years, but many misleading images and stereotypes still exist regarding trafficking, its victims and its perpetrators. Trafficking is often framed as a problem of organised crime. The article problematises (1) the stereotypical images of perpetrators and (2) the involvement of organised crime in human trafficking, particularly in Finland, drawing on court cases that deal with trafficking in human beings. The article analyses, on the one hand, the characteristics of detected traffickers by reflecting the findings against the image of the ideal offender and, on the other hand, the role and involvement of organised crime in human trafficking. The article concludes that most convicted traffickers are not so-called ideal offenders. The variety of traffickers involved in the cases studied does not correspond very well to the rather stereotypical and oversimplified image of traffickers and ideal offenders.     

The BT Kemi Scandal and the Establishment of the Environmental Crime Concept

This study analyses the significance of the 1977 BT Kemi scandal in Teckomatorp, Sweden for the establishment of the concept of 'environmental crime', first in the public debate and then later in legislation. The BT Kemi scandal is analysed as a 'focusing event' that placed the relationship between environmental pollution, responsibility, legislation and penal sanctions firmly on the political agenda. Several commissions of inquiry were established as a consequence, and in 1981 the Environmental Protection Act was revised and environmental crimes were included in the penal code. This tightening of the legislation had very little effect in practice, however, and this study examines why these legislative changes had so little practical impact. Attention is focused on the historical and societal contexts in which Swedish environmental legislation during the 1960s, as an explanation of why environmental crime has been and remains such a marginalized phenomenon. Shared mentalities in the area of environmental protection, which have evolved over time within public sector agencies and the private sector, coupled with an unequal emerged distribution of power and diffuse legislation, have obstructed the establishment of environmental crime. The BT Kemi scandal was a decisive factor in the coming of age of environmental offending, but it nonetheless takes time before a new form of crime becomes 'self-evident' and accepted as such in the wider society.