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xiv | General Introduction comfort of living in an ordered society. Its universality certainly attests to the truth of this assertion. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that getting reliable information about such a touchy subject—essentially how a society, nation, or culture main- tains order in the face of a populace that may secretly or even openly resent its imposition—is very diffi cult. Nations can be very secretive about their crime rates and their punishments, not to mention their procedures for fi nding guilt and their manner of interrogating suspects. Various organizations have set themselves up to monitor the most egregious violations of individuals in the name of order, such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, but there is a far larger part of the maintenance of order and the processing of law- breakers by nations and regional governments that also needs constant scrutiny. Violations of human rights in the name of order may easily be hidden inside the bureaucratic inertia and practices of even the most “enlightened” societies. To admit to having a very high rate of murder or incarceration—perhaps one of the highest—of its citizens is not something of which a nation can be espe- cially proud. Such statistics say something about that nation, though what that something is, unfortunately, can be easily misinterpreted. For example, some countries may be criticized for having very high imprisonment rates, but their retort may be that this is because they have very high crime rates, to which it may be asked, but why do you have such high crime rates? The reply may be, “Because we have strict laws that are strictly enforced, which is for the good of our citizens, who are kept safer than those in other countries whose administra- tion of criminal justice is too lax.” Provided here is just a taste of the controver- sies and disagreements concerning the diff ering levels of crime and punishment in diverse countries, as well as the puzzling relationship or lack thereof between prison rates and crime rates. The riddle can be stated thus: more punishment should reduce crime, but more crime requires more punishment. One would think that the costs in public relations to a nation would be far too high to allow for the publication of crime and punishment statistics. So it is an amazing achievement that the United Nations World Crime Surveys, whose mis- sion is to collect the offi cial statistics on crime and justice from member nations, have shown steady and signifi cant increases in the number of countries submit- ting their statistics since they were fi rst collected in the 1970s. From a handful of countries in the beginning, the number providing crime and punishment statistics had grown to about 50 as of 2005. That is the positive spin. In fact, this is only 50 out of 190 member UN nations, and there are signs of decreasing reporting by countries in recent years, according to Jan Van Dijk, author of The World of Crime and former UN expert on international crime and justice. Although it is true that nations are reticent to make public their crime and punishment statistics for reasons of public image, there are many technical dif- fi culties in making comparisons of offi cially collected crime and justice statistics across countries. Many of these diffi culties are serious, and the reader is warned to use considerable caution in making such comparisons across countries . These tech- nical diffi culties include the following: