IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/zbw/gigawp/104.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The Culture of Fear and Control in Costa Rica (I): Crime Statistics and Law Enforcement

Author

Listed:
  • Huhn, Sebastian

Abstract

The Costa Rican talk of crime is fundamentally based on the assumption that crime rates have increased significantly in recent years and that there is today a vast and alarming amount of crime. On the basis of this assumption, fear of crime, the call for the 'iron fist', and drastic law enforcement actions are continually increasing. While crime statistics are the logical basis for the hypothesis on the far-reaching extent of delinquency, they are used in a problematic way in the talk of crime. In this paper I discuss Costa Rican crime statistics, their development, and their utilization in the talk of crime against the background of criminological theory. The theses of the paper are that a) the informative value of crime statistics regarding Costa Rican reality is far more questionable than the common utilization of them implies and b) when they are used as argumentation, these crime statistics do not provide evidence of the oft-proclaimed rising crime wave.

Suggested Citation

  • Huhn, Sebastian, 2009. "The Culture of Fear and Control in Costa Rica (I): Crime Statistics and Law Enforcement," GIGA Working Papers 104, GIGA German Institute of Global and Area Studies.
    • Handle: RePEc:zbw:gigawp:104
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/47726/1/610153331.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Huhn, Sebastian, 2008. "A History of Nonviolence: Insecurity and the Normative Power of the Imagined in Costa Rica," GIGA Working Papers 84, GIGA German Institute of Global and Area Studies.
    2. Huhn, Sebastian, 2009. "Contested Cornerstones of Nonviolent National Self-Perception in Costa Rica: A Historical Approach," GIGA Working Papers 101, GIGA German Institute of Global and Area Studies.
    3. Huhn, Sebastian, 2008. "Discourses on Violence in Costa Rica, El Salvador, and Nicaragua: Social Perceptions in Everyday Life," GIGA Working Papers 81, GIGA German Institute of Global and Area Studies.
    4. Peetz, Peter, 2008. "Discourses on Violence in Costa Rica, El Salvador, and Nicaragua: Youth, Crime, and the Responses of the State," GIGA Working Papers 80, GIGA German Institute of Global and Area Studies.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Huhn, Sebastian, 2009. "The Culture of Fear and Control in Costa Rica (II): The Talk of Crime and Social Changes," GIGA Working Papers 108, GIGA German Institute of Global and Area Studies.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Huhn, Sebastian, 2009. "The Culture of Fear and Control in Costa Rica (II): The Talk of Crime and Social Changes," GIGA Working Papers 108, GIGA German Institute of Global and Area Studies.
    2. Peetz, Peter, 2008. "Discourses on Violence in Costa Rica, El Salvador, and Nicaragua: Laws and the Construction of Drug- and Gender-Related Violence," GIGA Working Papers 72, GIGA German Institute of Global and Area Studies.
    3. Oettler, Anika, 2008. "Do Qualitative Data Help in Addressing Central American Violence? Research Note on Data Collection," GIGA Working Papers 76, GIGA German Institute of Global and Area Studies.
    4. Huhn, Sebastian, 2008. "A History of Nonviolence: Insecurity and the Normative Power of the Imagined in Costa Rica," GIGA Working Papers 84, GIGA German Institute of Global and Area Studies.
    5. Shahram Habibzadeh & Farhad Poufarzi & Mohammad Mehrtak & Saied Sadeghiyeh-Ahari & Mehdi Jafari-Oori & Karim Hajizadeh-Bastani & Arezoo Azari, 2016. "Pathology of Social Violence Phenomenon in Ardabil Province: A Qualitative Study," Global Journal of Health Science, Canadian Center of Science and Education, vol. 8(10), pages 1-15, October.
    6. Huhn, Sebastian, 2008. "Discourses on Violence in Costa Rica, El Salvador, and Nicaragua: Social Perceptions in Everyday Life," GIGA Working Papers 81, GIGA German Institute of Global and Area Studies.
    7. Peetz, Peter, 2008. "Discourses on Violence in Costa Rica, El Salvador, and Nicaragua: Youth, Crime, and the Responses of the State," GIGA Working Papers 80, GIGA German Institute of Global and Area Studies.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:zbw:gigawp:104. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/dueiide.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.