Conferences

After a period of relative stability, EU Member States face rapid changes in their economies, population levels, migration and immigration. These changes are likely to have an impact on, amongst other things, European crime levels and social stability. Common sense indicators based on readily available statistics – such as crime trends – have been used extensively. Much less attention has been paid to crucial but hard-to-measure indicators of public confidence in justice and public levels of insecurity about crime. Without such indicators, there is a risk that crime policies become over-focused on short-term objectives of crime control at the expense of equally important longer-term objectives related to the legitimacy of the criminal justice system.

The presentations in this session will focus on survey-based indicators of trust in justice and insecurities about crime across Europe. Especially welcome are papers that (a) address the difficulties in developing comparable European definitions of trust in justice and public insecurities about crime, and (b) that consider the use of contextual data for interpreting comparative social indicators.