U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government, Department of Justice.

NCJRS Virtual Library

The Virtual Library houses over 235,000 criminal justice resources, including all known OJP works.
Click here to search the NCJRS Virtual Library

Perceived Gravity of Crimes and Public Values

NCJ Number
73237
Journal
Annales Internationales de Criminologie Volume: 18 Issue: 1 Dated: (1979-80) Pages: 29-38
Author(s)
L G Gabaldon
Date Published
1980
Length
10 pages
Annotation
To establish convergences and divergences of normative values between the Venezuelan criminal code and social reaction to crime, a sample of urban dwellers was surveyed on its seriousness ranking of 20 criminalized acts.
Abstract
The survey was part of a broader investigation on public attitudes toward the criminal justice system, inspired by research conducted in the United States by such criminologists as M. E. Wolfgang and G. Newman on public knowledge and opinion about law. Twenty acts proscribed by the Venezuelan criminal code and comprising the entire range of goods protected by law, from the public good, morality, human life, and bodily integrity to property, were chosen as targets of the survey. Specifically, these crime forms were peculation, corruption of public officials, perjury, an attorney's betrayal of his client's trust for money, food adulteration, drug trafficking offenses, rape, statutory rape involving girls aged 12 to 15, female adultery, male adultery, murder in the course of a robbery, vehicular homicide, aggravated assault, malicious wounding, abortion, larceny, armed robbery, blackmail, and real estate fraud. Drawn from the lower and upper socioeconomic population strata of the city of Merida, the respondents to an anonymous, self-administered questionnaire ranked the 20 crimes on the list in decreasing order of seriousness by assigning to each a prison sentence calculated in months. The penalties given by the respondents were then compared to the actual sentences prescribed by the penal code. The findings indicated convergences between citizens and law only for drug trafficking offenses and larceny; substantial divergences were revealed for all remaining crimes. For example, the law ranked property crimes as more serious than crimes against persons, except for homicide in the course of a robbery, whereas citizens took the opposite view. Many other surprising divergences are reflected in the two numerical tables included in the text. An appendix gives the brief legal definitions of the crime included on the questionnaire. Nine endnotes include bibliographic references.