The Eighth United Nations Survey on Crime Trends and the Operations of Criminal Justice Systems (2001 - 2002)

Responses to the Eighth Survey

This Survey questionnaire consists of a series of questions asking for data, primarily statistical, on the main components of the criminal justice system for 2001 - 2002. The following paragraphs include the instructions given to government respondents. The central responding office to

reviewed partial replies to ascertain that the data collected from the official address clearly defined jurisdictions (such as national or federal) and are statistically valid. For this reason, the importance of reviewing all parts of the survey for consistency was emphasized. The survey instrument was sent to 191 Ministers of Foreign Affairs (UN) in August 2003.

The questionnaire is available to download in PDF format in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Spanish, and Russian or as a Microsoft Word form in English, French and Spanish.

The questionnaire is compiled so that it can be broken down and sent to separate agencies for response and reassembled in the central responding office before it is returned.

In completing the tables, respondents were provided with the following suggestions:

If figures provided in one table differ significantly from one year to the next, please explain the discrepancy in notes to the table.
If it is not possible to supply the figures as classified or defined in the tables, please try to adjust data as far as possible and describe the steps involved in notes to the table or on the facing pages.
Where figures are not yet available, provisional data or estimates, if possible, should be inserted and noted accordingly.
If a table can be completed only in part, please note in the appropriate section that the rest of the data are "not available".
If no figures at all are available, please indicate by writing across the space for reply "not yet available", "not tabulated" or "not collected", as the case may be.
In most cases, the data requested use the calendar year as the recording period. Where some other annual period, such as a fiscal year not corresponding to the calendar year, is used, this should be noted.
Statistics on such matters as criminal justice personnel, court actions and prison population should extend to all levels of government, that is, central government as well as national, state and local authorities.

UNODC has confined itself to reproducing the figures as received on the questionnaire forms.

The statistics cannot take into account the differences that exist between the legal definitions of offences in various countries, of the different methods of tallying, etc.Consequently, the figures used in these statistics must be interpreted with great caution. In particular, to use the figures as a basis for comparison between different countries is highly problematic.

UNODC would like to thank all contributing states and their corresponding agencies for their cooperation, which made it possible to produce these statistics.

70 countries provided data for the Eighth Survey

Preliminary release of responses to the Eighth Survey as of 31 March 2005 are available in table format:
Verification of part I is in progress.

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PDF	Size	Pages	PDF	Size	Pages
Sorted by variable	1.37 MB	266	Sorted by variable	1.39 MB	241
Sorted by country	1.97 MB	373	Sorted by country	1.31 MB	236
Comments by table	90 KB	25	Comments by table	90 KB	25
Comments by country	190 KB	95	Comments by country	189 KB

Responses to the Fifth, Sixth, and Seventh Survey as of 31 March 2005 are available in table format:

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PDF	Size	Pages	PDF	Size	Pages
Sorted by variable,counts	5.03 MB	488	Sorted by variable,counts	5.03 MB	488
Sorted by variable, rates	5.21 MB	488	Sorted by variable, rates	5.21 MB	488
Sorted by country	19.9 MB	2123	Sorted by country	19.6 MB

MS Excel pivot table:

8th all 050331.xls(3451 KB) 8th all 050331.zip (899 KB)

Explanation: The pivot table contains the following elements:

Part: POLICE, PROSECUTION, COURTS and PRISONS.
Table: table number and name, e.g. "1. Police personnel, by sex, and financial resources"
tc: table sorting sequence
ISO3166_3: country code
Country: Country name in English
QN: Number given to a variable in the questionnaire
Vlabel: Explicit description of a variable
year: year (2001 - 2002)
Sum of NumValue: the numeric value entered per Country, Variable and Year (cases, persons or millions of local currency)
Sum of rate: NumValue per 100,000 inhabitants (World Bank population figures)

Comments

UNODC would like to express sincere thanks for the assistance received in the verification of the following parts of the Eighth Survey:

- Prison data (received up until April 2005), Mr. Roy Walmsley

- Police data, John Jay College of Criminal Justice

Individual Country Comments

Situation of the criminal justice system in the UK:

Due to different legal systems in different parts of the UK the values from the Police-, Prosecution- and Court sections for England and Wales, Northern Ireland, and Scotland can not simply be combined to produce estimates for the entire UK. Per capita values from England and Wales may be considered as a proxy for the entire UK. Please ignore the aggregate entries for the UK in the above tables that do not relate to prison numbers.