5.2.1 Collective experience of crime
There is consensus among criminologists that the USA has experienced a general crime drop since the mid 1990s (Berg et al. 2016; Pinker 2011). In Europe the situation appears less definite. First of all, crime trends seem to be varying by offence category: in a pooled analysis of victimisation surveys as well as police recorded crimes in 14 European states between 1988 and 2007, Aebi and Linde (2010) found that prevalence and incident rates of theft and homicide have been falling since about 1995. At the same time drug-related offences, assaults and robberies have been on the rise according to the authors.24 Trends not only differ across crime type, but also across countries. In Europe there appear to be as many countries with stable or increasing rates of assault and robbery as countries with decreasing rates (Killias 2010).
Research specifically concerned with differences between countries presents con-tradictory results (Tseloni et al. 2010): in a sample of 26 countries, the majority of which are situated in Europe, no country-specific differences between trends in residential burglary, various types of theft, and assault were found as all crime types unanimously declined in the authors’ sample countries.25 This result finds support
24Aebi and Linde’s (2010) findings in relation to drug related offences should be treated with caution, as the authors do not validate these police figures with findings of victimisation surveys (due to lack of questions about drug use in the ICVS).
25The paper by Tseloni et al. (2010) is also the only one which applies statistical trend analysis, i.e. tests as to whether a rise or fall in figures represents a statistically significant trend or ‘just’
through consistently decreasing residential burglary rates identified by Rosenfeld and Messner (2009).
Since some of these studies use police recorded incidents to measure crime, these trends possibly just reflect changes in reporting as well as recording mechanisms and public sensibilities. This potential bias in the data, however, illustrates additional aspects of the processing of crime in societies: reporting behaviour by the public and responsiveness of authorities. Hence, the aforementioned studies might also imply that official engagement with certain crimes has gone up, while having declined regards to violent and property crimes. There are no cross-national comparisons of reporting behaviour over time, but trends within individual countries suggest that victims of crime nowadays are more willing to report crimes to the police than they were at the beginning of the 1990s (Tarling and Morris 2010). Reporting is highest in mature and affluent democracies (van Kesteren, van Dijk, and Mayhew 2013: 59).
Have attempts to pre-empt crime altered in accordance with an increased will-ingness to report it? To be sure, Europe has witnessed an unprecedented growth of publicly installed CCTV cameras and an increase in the market for public and private security equipment (Loader and Walker 2007). Have private households jumped on the bandwagon in regards to installing security measures? Again, the prevalence of special door locks and burglar alarms varies strongly by country, with both measures being more frequently used in affluent nations (van Kesteren, van Dijk, and Mayhew 2013). Overall, however, ‘the percentage of households with bur-glar alarms, special door locks and other security measures has constantly increased from 1988 to 2007’ (Aebi and Linde 2010: 267). Amongst other things the increased prevalence of special door locks and burglar alarms serves as an explanation for falling burglary rates across Europe (van Kesteren, van Dijk, and Mayhew 2013:
57-58).
Alongside private securitization, official efforts to curb crime have also been expanded. The number of police officers in Europe has increased by six percent between 2001 and 2010 when measured as a European aggregate (Lindstrom 2013:
321; see also Hinds 2005: 57). Simultaneously, the private security industry has increased in terms of financial turnover as well as staff employed throughout Europe (Loader and Walker 2007; de Waard 1999; for a case study of England, see c.f. Jones and Newburn 1998). Despite its increasing importance, reliable data for robust in-ternational comparisons are lacking and there is a scarcity of comparative studies on developments in the private security industry (de Waard 1999: 145). The empirical work that is available, however, suggests that there has been an overall increase in the number of people employed, as well as in wages, within the private security
a variation in the data.
sector, albeit with considerable variation by country (van Steden and Sarre 2007).
In fact, Hinds (2005: 58-60) attributes the moderate increase in custodial sanctions in Europe compared to the United States to Europe’s and the USA’s different place-ments on a ‘crime control continuum’. While the USA focus on crime control at the back end of the criminal justice system, European countries seem more devoted to social control through police and private securities than custodial control in penal institutions.
Is this assumption supported by existing research on punitiveness in Europe?
Several studies point to the very important fact that any claim made about increas-ing or declinincreas-ing punitiveness heavily depends on how it is measured (Frost 2008;
Hamilton 2014; Kutateladze 2009; Tonry 2007). In this vein, by mainly criticising the lack of a clear conceptualisation of the concept of punitiveness, Matthews (2005) argues that contrary to popular scientific belief, there was no rise in punitiveness in the USA or Europe during the 1990s. However, analyses suggest that incarcera-tion rates in Europe have risen over the past two decades (Lappi-Seppälä 2011: 304;
Muncie 2008; Neapolitan 2001: 692). European countries have also witnessed policy changes related to juvenile offenders, for which the term punitiveness seems appro-priate: reduction of the age of penal responsibility from 12 to 10 with a simultaneous three-fold increase of youth detention places since 1990 in the Netherlands, curfew alongside zero tolerance policing and referral of juveniles to adult courts in Belgium, so-called ‘warning shot arrests’ in Germany, and the treatment of juvenile recidivists as adult offenders in France (for a more comprehensive list see Muncie 2008). These indications of punitiveness are not limited to juvenile offenders. The average time served in jail for various crime types also shows an upward trend in adult courts (Blumstein, Tonry, and Ness 2005: 374). So there are developments to suggest that criminal justice responses to offenders have become more severe in Europe. When compared with the USA however, Europe is still ‘resisting punitiveness’ (Snacken 2010). Moreover, the Netherlands and Denmark have even experienced significant declines in their imprisonment rates between 1990 and 2005 (de Koster et al. 2008:
727; van Kesteren 2009: 26). Furthermore, van Kesteren (2009) finds that public opinion in Europe actually favours the use of noncustodial sentencing to punish recidivist burglars.
Increasing imprisonment rates as an indicator of punitiveness have often been at-tributed to neoliberal policies (Wacquant 1999 and Cavadino and Dignan (2006a)).
Yet, the link does not appear to survive empirical scrutiny: in analysing the con-tent of government parties’ manifestos, de Koster et al. (2008) find that increases in incarceration rates are unrelated to neoliberal manifesto content. Rather, increased discourse about strict enforcement of law and order policies and a political culture
around the new right which condemns left-libertarian politics best explain the in-creased numbers of inmates (de Koster et al. 2008: 723). This inin-creased attention devoted to law and order in manifestos of European government parties is also docu-mented by Wenzelburger (2015). Governments’ stronger focus on problems of crime and public order and safety however is not reflected in their expenditure on law and order as in OECD countries financial allocations to public order and safety seem to have experienced little variation over time (Norris 2007). European trends in the fear of crime in society are not available, but comparative studies indicate that fear of crime is associated with higher levels of crime as well as perceptions of disorder (Brunton-Smith 2011; Visser, Scholte, and Scheepers 2013). Consequently, fear of crime should have decreased alongside crime rates in Europe.
5.2.2 Solidarity
‘European welfare states in their various and differing ways have developed a range of policies designed to meet the social risks encountered in the normal life-course (loss of income due to unemployment, sickness, retirement, ill-health, education for children and so on), with some expenditure on benefits to reduce poverty’ (Taylor-Gooby 2010: 40). Yet, allegedly there is a rhetorical shift in Western countries’
perception of poverty, which is increasingly seen as the fault of the lower classes for lack of self-discipline, effort, and an accumulation of poor life choices (Andersen 1999). This rhetoric indeed seems to be accompanied by a more liberal approach to redistribution. This implies a passing on of responsibility from state to individuals, and an increasing contingency of access to benefits on proactivity of recipients and their prior contributions on the labour market (Taylor-Gooby 2010: 40). These developments are perceived as threatening the traditional solidarity promoted by a strong welfare state (Peeters 2013; Room 1999). Thus, there appears to be a qualitative transition in almost all welfare states in Europe: encouragement of active labour market participation, introduction of elements of competition, and spending constraints (Taylor-Gooby 2010: 456).
How do these changes materialise in different indicators of welfare solidarity?
As expressed in the Lisbon and Maastricht Treaties, the European Union aims to harmonise the welfare models of its member states, and it would appear that indeed social expenditures have been converging since the 1980s (Caminada, Goudswaard, and Van Vliet 2010: 530). This dynamic of assimilation consequently implies restric-tions of welfare state activity in some countries and expansion of benefit provisions in others. Nevertheless, at the beginning of the 21st century aggregated social expen-diture and the percentage of workers’ income paid out by pensions and benefits were consistently higher in Europe than in 1980 (Caminada, Goudswaard, and Van Vliet
2010: 535-536, 540, 546). This can mostly be attributed to increased spending for old age and pensions caused by demographic changes in the European population.
Incapacity and health related expenditure however have gone down, while other benefits for family support or active labour market programmes have reported no changes. Despite increasing social expenditure for old age and pensions, the benefit generosity (i.e. the degree to which an individual can maintain a livelihood indepen-dent of the market (Vis 2010: 48)) for pensions tightened in two thirds of Europe between 1985 and 2000 (Scruggs and Allan 2006: 892). The same is true for sickness benefit generosity, while unemployment programmes seem to have become more gen-erous in almost all of Europe. Yet, scholars warn that ‘rollbacks of the welfare state have been more widespread than aggregate spending patterns reveal’ (Swank 2005:
184). Individual support for the welfare state as well as compassion for recipients who suffer from benefit cutbacks appears to counterbalance welfare state retrench-ment. When there are low levels of institutionalised solidarity through the welfare state as well as economic downturns, citizens’ endorsement of institutionalised sol-idarity of the welfare state is higher (Clery 2012). These different developments in regards to social welfare have meant that, as of 2005, no systematic convergence between the welfare models of European states were observable (Swank 2005: 184).
In contrast to divergent paths of institutionalised solidarity exerted by the welfare state, the situation in terms of voluntary solidarity of individuals seems to be more homogenous. de Beer and Koster (2009: 36) report that, on the whole, individual performance of solidarity such as volunteering show a positive trend between the 1980s and the mid-2000s.