Comparative Criminal Justice: Beyond the Ethnocentrism and Relativism

Analyzing David Nelken's, Comparative Criminal Justice:

Beyond the Ethnocentrism and Relativism

Crime remains the most pressing problems of all times presenting the biggest challenge to the development of all nations. In the article read, Comparative Criminal Justice: Beyond the Ethnocentrism , author David Nelken took on the task of comparing and contrasting our ways of acknowledging crime and learning what is done about it to those practiced elsewhere. Although, to me atleast, his implications weren't always straightforward, I will do my best to shed light on the things that were most clear to me.

In this article, David Nelken expresses how it is extremely important that , in all efforts to compare prison rates ,we must first ask ourselves these questions: "Are the crime levels the same in each country compared ? What do prison rates refer to? Do the prison rates only reflect factors internal to the countries concerned?" At this point, Nelken does an excelled job at making one consider our approaches to even begin to think about comparing incarceration rates. I especially enjoy this part because it shed's light on how incredibly biased incarceration percentages are when no one is considering factors as to why one country could be having an explosive rate of incarceration compared to others.

In light of these questions, the endeavor of Nelken masterminding an compiling argument and it made me start to think about all of the concerning problems. Firstly, I believed there was a fundamental problem with producing the comparing prison rates due to the issue of gathering data. Information cannot be trust especially for those whom's developing countries are poorer than others and also due to the fact that cultural differences between countries have a huge impact on how crime is define. Different legal codes tend to have a huge impact on how crime is defined,