Crime and the Financial Crisis: Greece and beyond
By Leonidas K. Cheliotis, Ph.D.*
It is commonly assumed that the ‘credit crunch’ of 2008 has fuelled a significant rise in crime on either side of the Atlantic. Indeed, it is also commonly assumed that this rise builds on a supposed inexorable growth in crime rates over the last three decades or so.
Yet study after study reveals that the prevalence of crime has long been falling both in the United States and Britain, whilst the ‘credit crunch’ of 2008 has scarcely functioned to reverse this trend. What has actually increased in these jurisdictions over recent decades is public fear of criminal victimization and support for the harsh punishment of offenders. Indeed, there is an accumulating throng of surveys demonstrating that levels of fear of crime and punitiveness amongst Americans and Britons bear little if any connection to the prevalence of crime, and that they rather reflect spreading economic insecurity and associated frustrations.
In Greece, few have questioned the relationship between crime rates and fear of criminal victimization. Yet, as Sappho Xenakis, of Oxford University, and I have shown in our recent book Crime and Punishment in Contemporary Greece: International Comparative Perspectives, police-recorded crime rates in the country rose only modestly between 1980 and 2006, and most of this rise was due to offences of little criminological interest (for example, traffic offences such as speeding and illegal parking). By contrast, fear of crime, as well as punitiveness, have been disproportionately high amongst Greek citizens. Strikingly, ever since its inclusion in pertinent international comparative analyses in the early 2000s, Greece has ranked amongst the most crime-fearing and punitive nations in Europe and beyond. We argue that, here too, the evidence points to the role of socio-economic insecurities in triggering and inflaming fear of crime and punitive attitudes.
Of course, the biggest question today domestically is the extent to which crime rates in Greece have risen in the wake of the recent and ongoing financial crisis. This, unfortunately, is hard to determine in the absence of reliable up-to-date data. The Anglo-American experience would suggest, however, that there is no axiomatic relationship between a financial downturn and the rate of crime. Expectations of a rise in public fear of crime and punitiveness, on the other hand, sadly have a far more solid empirical grounding.
Even if data are to confirm that there has been as spike in crime rates in Greece since the onset of the financial crisis, it would be wrong to succumb to the temptation of using such data to retrospectively justify what have been longstanding trends of disproportionately high levels of fear of crime and punitiveness in the country.
* Leonidas K. Cheliotis graduated from DEREE with a BA in Sociology in 2003 and earned his M.Phil. and Ph.D. at the Institute of Criminology, University of Cambridge. He is currently Lecturer in Criminology and Deputy Director of the Centre for Criminal Justice at the School of Law, Queen Mary, University of London.