Comment mesurer la délinquance des toxicomanes adultes ? Une comparaison empirique de la validité des registres de police et des sondages de délinquance autoreportée

Cet article se base sur une analyse comparative des interpellations enregistrées par la police et des délits admis par un échantillon de toxicomanes adultes dans le cadre d'un sondage de délinquance autoreportée. La moyenne d'âge des membres de l'échantillon (N=491 dont 135 femmes) est de 31 ans. Il s'agit de toxicomanes qui étaient très engagés dans la délinquance avant de participer aux essais suisses de prescription d'héroïne. Différents concepts de validité sont testés, à savoir La validité de contenu (qui comprend la validité apparente et la validité logique) et la validité concourante (qui comprend la validité pour groupes différents et la validité corrélationnelle). L'analyse montre que ce n'est pas tellement le nombre de délits commis qui détermine le risque de se faire interpeller par la police, mais plutôt la diversité et la gravité de ces délits. Elle montre également que, dans le contexte étudié, le sondage de délinquance autoreportée s'avère être un indicateur valide de La criminalité. En fait, le sondage offre plus d'information et permet de déceler un plus grand nombre de délin- quants et de délits que les données de police.This paper is based on a comparison of self-reported delinquency and police recorded contacts for a sample of adult drug-addicts. The average age of the sample (N=491 of which 135 are females) is thirty-one. The members of the sample were heavily involved in delinquency before entering a heroin prescription program in Swit- zerland. Different concepts of validity are tested, namely content validity (including face validity and logical validity) and concurrent validity (including known-group validity and correlational validity). The results show that the risk of having a police contact is explained better by the variety and the seriousness of the offences than by the number of offences. They also show that the self-report method can produce valid results in this particular context. Moreover, self-reports seem to measure the amount and patterns of delinquent behavior more accurately than official data

The Prosecution Service Function within the Spanish Criminal Justice System

The national criminal justice system of Spain is described. Special attention is paid to the function of the Public Prosecution Services within this framework and its relationship to police and courts. The article not only refers to legal provisions but to the factual handling of criminal cases as wel

Conviction Statistics as an Indicator of Crime Trends in Europe from 1990 to 2006

Convictions statistics were the first criminal statistics available in Europe during the nineteenth century. Their main weaknesses as crime measures and for comparative purposes were identified by Alphonse de Candolle in the 1830s. Currently, they are seldom used by comparative criminologists, although they provide a less valid but more reliable measure of crime and formal social control than police statistics. This article uses conviction statistics, compiled from the four editions of the European Sourcebook of Crime and Criminal Justice Statistics, to study the evolution of persons convicted in European countries from 1990 to 2006. Trends in persons convicted for six offences -intentional homicide, assault, rape, robbery, theft, and drug offences- and up to 26 European countries are analysed. These trends are established for the whole of Europe as well as for a cluster of Western European countries and a cluster of Central and Eastern European countries. The analyses show similarities between both regions of Europe at the beginning and at the end of the period under study. After a general increase of the rate of persons convicted in the early 1990s in the whole of Europe, trends followed different directions in Western and in Central and Eastern Europe. However, during the 2000s, it can be observed, throughout Europe, a certain stability of the rates of persons convicted for intentional homicides, accompanied by a general decrease of the rate of persons convicted for property offences, and an increase of the rate of those convicted for drug offences. The latter goes together with an increase of the rate of persons convicted for non lethal violent offences, which only reached some stability at the end of the time series. These trends show that there is no general crime drop in Europe. After a discussion of possible theoretical explanations, a multifactor model, inspired by opportunity-based theories, is proposed to explain the trends observe

Is There a Crime Drop in Western Europe?

Combining data from police statistics and crime victim surveys, this article analyses the evolution of crime in Western Europe from 1988 to 2007. The results show that there is no general drop in crime. Property offences and homicide have been decreasing since the mid 1990s, while violent and drug offences have increased during the period under study. These trends highlight the limits of the explanations to the crime drop in the United States, which are based on the premise of a correlation in the evolution of all offences. The drop in property offences seems related to changes in the socioeconomic situation in Europe as well as to increases in security measures in households, and the reinforcement of private security. The increase in violent offences can be explained by the combination of several factors, including changes in youth's free time provoked by the development of the Internet, changing demographics, and the rise of episodic heavy alcohol consumption and street gang

Prisons and Prisoners in Europe 2018: Key Findings of the SPACE I report

This document summarises the main findings of the 2018 Council of Europe Annual Penal Statistics on Prison Populations, better known under the acronym SPACE I. The rates and percentages presented here correspond to the European median values computed on the basis of figures weighted by the population and the number of inmates in each country (see Methodology for further details). Forty-five (45) out of the 52 Prison Administrations in the 47 Council of Europe member states answered the SPACE I 2018 questionnaire, which corresponds to a participation rate of 87%

Probation and Prisons in Europe, 2018: Key Findings of the SPACE reports

This document summarises the main findings of the 2018 Council of Europe Annual Penal Statistics on Persons under the Supervision of Probation Agencies , better known under the acronym SPACE II, and compares them to those of the 2018 Council of Europe Annual Penal Statistics on Prison Populations, SPACE I, which was published in April 201