Book Description

As a subject area of inquiry and research, fear of crime and punitiveness have played an increasingly important role in criminology. Since the early 1990s, and emanating largely from within the United States, there has been a growing body of research as well as increased attention given to the subject by the media and policy-makers. In part, triggered by the fact that the Unites States has the highest imprisonment rate (approx. 780/100,000 in 2012) in the Western world and still has the death penalty in most states, increasing attention has been paid to the impact of peoples' perceptions of crime, their fear of possible victimization, and their sense of punitivity to-wards offenders. And although the body of literature on fear of crime and puntivity has been growing, there still remain many regions and countries of the world where there is a dearth of such research. This collection includes several of the countries where such research represents the first of its kind. The reader will be provided a broad overview of the subject and presented with varied observations about fear of crime and punitivity from different parts of the world. As the project represents a novel and exploratory venture into the subject area, the collective content provided in this collection will hopefully also serve to advance future research and inform sentencing policy and initiatives to address fear of crime. This volume includes seven comparable reports in which the contributors used a common standardized survey to collect data on fear of crime and punitivity among post-secondary students. The countries represent a cross-section of different legal, political, and cultural systems. The countries also vary in their degree of criminal justice development and in terms of the rights of victims. In each of the contribu-tions, the author(s) provide an overview of their country before discussing the results of the survey they administered. The articles are prepared in a manner that allow varying degrees of comparison as well as recommendations for the future di-rection of this relatively new area of international inquiry. - Cover.