The social reality of crime in Iceland: Criminal punishment in a land with little crime.

摘要

In this study we examine the social reality of criminal law violation in Iceland, a modern society of only 260,000 inhabitants. Using various methods, available official crime data, newspaper reports, opinion survey results, Parliamentary debates and interviews, we establish an overview of the nature of the Icelandic criminal justice system. In addition we obtained an insight into human perceptions of the local crime situation. We found that even though by international standards the Icelandic crime situation may appear relatively trivial; we still found a concern with crime, especially regarding offenses related to substance abuse. This concern was moreover widely shared among the public, various legal authorities, newspaper accounts, and prison inmates themselves.; The research findings support Durkheim's notion that some crime is a necessary social behavior in any society for moral boundary purposes, though the exact nature of the criminal behavior may differ depending on the social context. We contend, as Erikson did earlier, that crime and punishment are especially important at a time of both internal and external changes, as those that have taken place in Iceland in the past few decades. Moreover, with rapid modernization, we found that crime rates in Iceland have increased as predicted by Durkheim. Also, if income differentials increase, as some signs suggest they already have, we would expect, based on the assumptions of the conflict perspective, that crime rates will continue to increase in Iceland in the future.