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Cross-National Comparisons of Crime Rates in Four Countries, 1981-1999

The main aims of this essay are to compare changes in crime rates over time in different countries and to assess the plausibility of some explanations of these changes. We do not attempt to explain differences between countries in levels of crime. We compare four countries: England and Wales (hereafter referred to as England), the United States, the Netherlands, and Switzerland. We choose these countries because the essays on the United States, the Netherlands, and Switzerland most closely followed the template of the original England chapter in the Bureau of Justice Statistics report (Farrington, Langan, and Tonry 2004), both in documenting changes in crime and punishment over time and in investigating correlations between crime rates and other possibly influencing factors. We analyze victim survey crime rates for residential burglary, vehicle theft, robbery, and assault because we believe that they are more accurate than police-recorded crime rates, but we have to use policerecorded crime rates for rape and homicide. Despite efforts to collect comparable data in different countries, many problems remain. In particular, the methodology used in victim surveys in