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 People sometimes say that we are moving into a "post-truth" world where facts have less influence on what people think than they used to.  Paul Krugman had a column on perceptions of crime which didn't explicitly endorse this analysis, but seemed to lean in that direction.  He concluded "The good news is that . . . we seem to be heading back to the prepandemic normal of fairly low crime. The bad news is that the politics of fear can work, even if there isn't much basis for those fears."   The column referred to a Gallup poll from October 2022 that found 56% of people thought that crime had increased in their area in the last year, which was the highest figure since they started asking the question in the early 1970s, even though the actual crime rate is substantially lower than it was in the 1970s and 1980s.However, although the Gallup question speaks of more or less, some people volunteer that it's about the same.  In 1981, 54% said there was more crime in their area, 29% the same, and 8% less; in 2022, it was 56%, 14%, and 28%.  In general, the percent of "same" answers has been declining, so looking at changes in the average gives a different impression than looking at the "more" answers.The figure shows the average, counting more as 1, less as -1, and same as 0.  There was a jump from 2020 to 2022, but the 2022 figure is still lower than the values for most of the 1970s and 1980s.  Also, perceptions seem to have responded to the decline in crime in the 1990s and early 2000s.  So if you consider the "same" answers, perceptions seem to have a better match to actual conditions.I estimated a model in which perceptions depend on perceptions the last time the survey was taken and the change in the homicide rate over the last three years.*  The estimates are:.029+(.90^gap)*LY+.053*X, where LY is perceptions in the previous survey, X is the change in the homicide rates and gap is the gap in years between the current survey and the previous one.  The estimated coefficient for X has a t-ratio of about 3.  This is a pretty crude model, but it suggests that if we are returning to a period of lower crime, that perceptions can be expected to follow--or to put it another way, the "politics of fear" have less effect when there's less to fear.  However, Krugman also pointed to Gallup results indicating that Democratic and Republican perceptions of changes in crime rates have diverged recently.  I'll consider that issue in my next post.  *I'm following the analysis in a post from 2014, in which I said I "used the last three years rather than the last year because I figured people probably didn't take the time frame all that literally."  That is, I just picked it because it seemed reasonable to me, not because I found it fit better than other possibilities.[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]

On August 11, the last day of the ongoing session of Parliament, the Indian Government tabled a notice that it wished to introduce three new bills on the Floor of the House for consideration. These were proposed statutes to replace the holy trinity of Indian criminal law: The Indian Penal Code of 1860, the Criminal Procedure Code of 1973, and the Indian Evidence Act of 1872, were to be replaced by the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, the Bharatiya Nagrik Suraksha Sanhita and the Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam respectively. Even though the reform was marketed as an attempt to break from the colonial origins of criminal law, it actually represents a resurgence of the colonial-style authoritarian approach, rather than an effort to build upon the relatively modest progress made half a century ago in advancing individual freedom and civil rights.

Doron Teichman (Hebrew University of Jerusalem - Faculty of Law) has posted Evidentiary Graded Punishment: A New Look at Criminal Liability for Failing to Report Criminal Activity (Criminal Law and Philosophy, (Forthcoming)) on SSRN. Here is the abstract: This Article...

 In my last post, I said that perceptions of change in crime rates responded to actual conditions.  This post looks as party differences.  The proportion of Democrats and Republicans who think that crime is increasing in their area (independents are in between--I leave them out to make the figure more readable):Under Biden, there's been a large partisan gap, with Republicans more likely to believe that crime has increased.  But a partisan difference existed before then--the average perception of an increase by administration:                      Dem         Rep              DifferenceGHW Bush    54%         46%                     -8%Clinton           38%         41%                     +3%GW Bush       45%         36%                     -9%Obama           42%         53%                     +11%Trump            40%         37%                     -3%Biden             41%         70%                     +29%The party difference was positive (meaning Republicans were more likely to see an increase) under all three Republican administrations and negative under all three Democratic administrations.  That is, people see things as better when their party is in power.  But the effect seems to be bigger for Republicans.  This is clear when you look at years when party control changed*:                      Dem     Rep    Ind2000-2001     -2%        -17%     -5%2008-9           -1%        +13%    +7%2016-7           +4%       -18%      -3%2020-21         +3          +29%      +9%In previous posts, I found that with  views about the future of the next generation Republicans were more affected by party control than Democrats were, but that with  ratings of current economic conditions Democrats and Republicans were about equally affected.  If views are affected by both partisanship and actual conditions, that raises the question of whether the affect of conditions differs by party.  I couldn't get any definite results on that point.  *There was no survey in 1993, 1994, or 1995, so it's not possible to judge the Bush-Clinton transition.  

The modern way to find many of the services, trades, and products we need to buy is to look online. It's quick, easy and you can do it from the comfort of your own home. But it is a minefield …

Lessons from the International Criminal Court and the Special Court for Sierra Leone

Conference
3,4 May 2012
Freetown, Sierra Leone

International criminal justice has become a weapon in political struggles in different African states. International court and tribunals, whilst often portrayed as legal bastions immune from politics, have proven to be inherently political. Depending on the definition of what counts as 'political', the politics of international criminal justice can be found at different levels. For instance, international criminal courts are created by political decisions, adjudicate crimes which are frequently related to politics, and depend on a mysterious and seemingly magical 'political will' for the enforcement of their decisions. Moreover, recent studies have shown how the International Criminal Court has become implicated in political struggles by making a distinction between the friends and enemies of the international community which it purports to represent.

This conference studies the politics of international criminal justice at these different stages. Some of the main questions include:
• How should the politics of international criminal justice be conceptualized? What theoretical approaches are helpful in articulating the political aspects of criminal courts and tribunals?
• What lessons can be learned from experiences in countries affected by interventions of international criminal courts? What is the political role of international criminal courts in countries such as Sierra Leone, Uganda, Congo, Sudan, Central African Republic or Kenya?
• How can we improve the accountability of those engaged in the politics of international criminal justice?

The conference brings together academics from different disciplines, including international law and political science, and practitioners in the field of law and politics (including diplomats, politicians, judges, legal counsels). While its main focus is on the International Criminal Court and the Special Court for Sierra Leone, contributions from other areas of international criminal justice are welcomed as well.

Submissions and selection
If you would like to participate in the conference, please send us a 500-750 words abstract of the paper you plan to present before February 1st 2012. We will select a maximum of 10 papers that can be presented at the conference. Early submissions are welcomed. If you are invited to present, we would like to receive a short position paper two weeks before the conference. The position paper should be max. 2500 words, outlining the main argument.

Please send your paper proposal to:
Prof. dr. W.G. Werner
w.werner@rechten.vu.nl

Conference fee
The fee for the conference is 100 Euro. The money from the fees will be used to provide financial support for scholars or practitioners from (West-)African countries coming to the conference. If you would like to receive such support, please let us know before February 15th 2012.
Attendees from African countries are entitled to a waiver of the fee.

The post International Criminal Tribunals and Domestic Accountability appeared first on Völkerrechtsblog.

Mikkel Jarle Christensen (iCourts - Danish National Research Foundation's Centre of Excellence for International Courts) has posted The Elites of International Criminal Justice: Complementing and Challenging the State (Forthcoming in Social Forces) on SSRN. Here is the abstract: Criminal law...

Federico Picinali (London School of Economics - Law School) has posted Evidential reasoning, testimonial injustice and the fairness of the criminal trial (Quaestio Facti. International Journal on Evidential Legal Reasoning (open access)) on SSRN. Here is the abstract: The article...

On 1 February 2024 Armenia became the 124th State Party to join the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC). Located in The Hague (the Netherlands), the ICC's mandate is to prosecute individuals for the most serious crimes of international concern, such as genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and the crime of aggression, […]
La entrada The budgetary instrumentalisation of international criminal justice se publicó primero en Elcano Royal Institute.

As most of Republican Gov. Jeff Landry's criminal
justice reforms as legislation
heads to his desk for his signature into law, Louisiana's political left is
working overtime to cast aspersions on measures reversing the ethos behind
changes predecessor Democrat Gov. John Bel Edwards had enticed, despite data showing
very much such assertions are baseless.

In essence, Landry's increases severity of
sentences for some crimes, for 17-year-olds convicted of some crimes, and
lengthens incarceration time for many convicts. Edwards' had done the opposite,
on the theory that the existing measures were cost ineffective, or that any
reduction in crime was more than offset by costs involved. Indeed, more vocal
advocates of the so-called "smart on crime" approach actually argued that you
could have it both ways, reduced crime and costs.

At the
very least, the left wishes to delegitimize Landry's restoration with
claims along the lines that being "tougher" on crime won't make much of a
difference, if not make matters worse, and certainly would cost more. A typical
leftist view on the philosophy behind his package is "there is no firm
empirical evidence that confirms" that "more stringent punitive measures [are] a
criminal deterrent."

That view betrays ignorance, whether willful out
of a desire to cherry-pick evidence to support views often limited to those of researchers
with a compatible agenda (and much
of it flawed), of the actual data. In reality, the most comprehensive and
recent analysis demonstrate that more and longer incarceration as a whole
reduces crimes.

Penalties create two disincentives to criminal
behavior. One is deterrence, by increasing the expected cost to a miscreant for
such behavior. The more severe the penalty, in terms of sentencing conditioned
by time actually served and in prison, all other things equal the less of that
behavior occurs.

However, "all other things equal" rarely are and
can be extremely difficult to disaggregate in analyses of deterrence.
Principally, variance occurs around the probability of apprehension and prosecution
to the fullest sense of the law. Capital punishment provides an excellent
example of the latter and how that can affect analyses of its deterrent impact.
In the aggregate, research provides somewhat of a mixed picture for whether
executions prevent murders (by legal definition, premeditated and heinous).

But that's because of the guerilla warfare that
has developed by anti-capital punishment interests to prevent executions deliberately
designed to water down the deterrent effect, essentially vacating the sentences
and breaking society's pact with victims to carry out that punishment. Parsing out
that – in other words, when authorities are able and willing to carry out death
sentences in a reasonably timely fashion – the evidence is quite clear: executions
save innocent lives.

Yet perhaps more trenchantly, punishment is but
the output of a criminal justice system. The input is prosecutorial conduct.
For example, "progressive" prosecutors willing to file less severe charges
and/or ask for less severe sentencing, if they even bother to prosecute,
entirely subvert the deterrence impact of sentences written into law.

In short, the presence of such confounding
variables makes it difficult to assess empirically any relationship between
sentencing and crime commission. Still, behavioral theory dictates that there
must be casual covariance where stiffer punishment reduces criminal activity.
After all, if jaywalking is made a capital crime, even as people know it is rarely
reported and even more rarely enforced, the penalty is so severe that in terms
of expected outcomes it will deter jaywalking, for the penalty is so harsh that
for many even the tiniest odds of being caught don't reduce the expected negative
value of the punishment enough to go below the expected positive value of
saving a few steps by not using a crosswalk.

Fortunately, the other disincentive is much easier
to measure: if incarcerated (unless corrupt authorities are involved), a person
cannot commit criminal activity among the public. Simply, as data show and especially
for serious crimes, most of those incarcerated will commit more crime when
not imprisoned. By keeping them imprisoned for longer periods, through a
combination of sentencing and lower levels of reducing the time served or of
having access to parole and probation, predators are off the streets. In fact,
longer times served in prison for a crime are associated with reduced levels of
recidivism, so a double bonus is enjoyed by society.

And, as
crime data show, after Edwards' changes went into effect, in Louisiana
crime increased relative to the rest of the country and region. Costs may
increase with Landry's agenda in place, such as by keeping more convicts imprisoned,
but the payoff in reduced crime will be worth it.

Landry's restoration from these solidly follows
the evidence (as it does also with the issue
of charging 17-year-olds as adults and making it administratively easier to
carry out capital sentences). Suggestions to the contrary don't inform, but instead
mislead.

By Joanna Larmour, deputy director of the Environment Agency's National Enforcement Service Waste crime has been going on for too long – and the Environment Agency is taking action. That's why we're committing more resources than ever to find, identify …

At Hampshire & Isle of Wight Constabulary, our dedicated Rural and Wildlife Crime Team, Country Watch, have been working closely with partner agencies and other local policing teams to tackle the scourge of waste crime.

Karen E. Woody (Washington & Lee University School of Law) has posted Corporate Crime and Cooperation on SSRN. Here is the abstract: Over the past few decades, the Department of Justice (DOJ) has regularly issued guidance about how companies could...

Guest post by María José Méndez This post is part of a series on illicit economies, organized crime,…