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General Introduction | xv • Diff erent legal defi nitions of off enses make it diffi cult to compare specifi c off enses across nations. • Diff erent reporting and recording practices of the police who generally have fi rst offi cial contact with a crime make comparing statistics from one coun- try to another unreliable without knowledge of these practices. • Diff erent legal systems may aff ect the fi nding of guilt, recording and classi- fi cation of off enses, and recording of arrests and convictions. • Inconsistent classifi cations of crime records and frequent changes over time make it diffi cult to compare trends in crime or punishment. • Diff erent bureaucracies and government departments within each nation that collate and publish crime and punishment statistics may produce dif- ferent statistics. For example, city- or state-level collection of crime rates or prison rates may diff er from collection at the federal level, as in the United States. • Inadequate infrastructure for collecting and processing crime and justice reports, including information technology, may hinder the amount or accu- racy of criminal justice data. • Lack of professionally trained crime analysts and statisticians may limit the reliability and depth of statistical data available. • Local events or conditions may infl ate crime and punishment statistics, such as genocidal events that may or may not be recorded as murders. • Changing government policies about making crime and justice statistics public may aff ect trends and the amount and type of data made available. There have been instances where countries have revealed crime and justice statistics to the United Nations, but not to their own citizens. The reverse is also true. There was a time, for example, when the Soviet Union rou- tinely collected crime statistics for its internal use but offi cially denied to the United Nations that there was any crime at all in the Soviet Union, because there could be no crime in a true communist society. • In large populous countries, there may be vast diff erences within those coun- tries. For example, the levels of crime and punishment vary enormously throughout the United States some states still retain the death penalty, and many do not. There may also be huge diff erences in amounts and kinds of crime between urban and rural regions. There may even be diff erent legal systems operating within the same country, such as, for example, Quebec in Canada or the several customary, Islamic, and civil law systems operating in Timor-Leste. If one must make comparisons—and most people are unable to resist it—the best way to overcome these pitfalls is to make sure that one knows as much as possible about the historical and social context within which the statistics are col- lected. Crime and Punishment around the World provides just that context. This encyclopedia describes in detail the crime and punishment practices of each coun- try and, in some instances, specifi c regions. The four volumes off er a glimpse of the ways in which all the nations around the world try to solve the basic problem