The United Nations International Crime
Prevention and Criminal Justice Branch began the Surveys of Crime Trends
and Operations of Criminal Justice Systems (formerly known as the World
Crime Surveys) in 1978. The goal of the data collection effort was to
conduct a more focused inquiry into the incidence of crime worldwide. To
date, there have been five quinquennial surveys, covering the years
1970-1975, 1975-1980, 1980-1986, 1986-1990, and 1990-1994, respectively.
Starting with 1980, the waves overlap by one year to allow for reliability
and validity checks of the data. For this data collection, the file
structure and naming conventions were standardized across waves to
facilitate cross-national comparisons and other analyses.
This data collection reconfigured the original
United Nations data into a standard contemporary file structure, with
each file consisting of all data for one year. The data received from
the United Nations were entered into a computerized dataset, using SAS
on a mainframe for the second survey and SPSS PC+ for the third and
subsequent waves. Each country and each variable was given a unique
identifying number. Some of the variables in the original dataset were
not maintained in this version, because the principal investigators
decided that they had no value or potential for analysis. This applies
particularly to the first three surveys, where some variables were
difficult to interpret and others contained almost no data. The
original datasets, in the original configuration, are held by the
United Nations office in Vienna, and can be requested by anyone with a
particular interest in any of the variables omitted from this
collection.
The surveys were distributed to member and nonmember
states of the United Nations and completed on a voluntary basis.
All countries.
Countries.
(1) FIRST UNITED NATIONS WORLD CRIME SURVEY, 1970-1975,
(2) SECOND UNITED NATIONS SURVEY OF CRIME TRENDS, OPERATIONS OF
CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEMS, AND CRIME PREVENTION STRATEGIES, 1975-1980,
(3) THIRD UNITED NATIONS SURVEY OF CRIME TRENDS, OPERATIONS OF
CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEMS, AND CRIME PREVENTION STRATEGIES, 1980-1986,
(4) FOURTH UNITED NATIONS SURVEY OF CRIME TRENDS AND OPERATIONS OF
CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEMS, 1986-1990, (5) FIFTH UNITED NATIONS SURVEY
OF CRIME TRENDS AND OPERATIONS OF CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEMS, 1990-1994,
all conducted by the United Nations International Crime Prevention and
Criminal Justice Branch
aggregate data
Crime variables include counts of recorded crime
for homicide, assault, rape, robbery, theft, burglary, fraud,
embezzlement, drug trafficking, drug possession, bribery, and
corruption. There are also counts of suspects, persons prosecuted,
persons convicted, and prison admissions by crime, gender, and adult
or juvenile status. Other variables include the population of the
country and largest city, budgets and salaries for police, courts, and
prisons, and types of sanctions, including imprisonment, corporal
punishment, deprivation of liberty, control of freedom, warning, fine,
and community sentence.
Not applicable.
None.