The six offenses examined for each country are burglary, vehicle theft, assault, robbery, rape, and homicide. In addition to individual essays on each country, with England and Wales addressed together, an introductory essay provides an overview of the volume, and three essays consider cross-national patterns in crime rates, cross-national measures of punitiveness, and cross-national comparisons of crime rates in four countries: England and Wales (combined), the United States, the Netherlands, and Switzerland. Trends in the commission of each of the six offenses are examined for the years 1981-99. Data on each offense are derived from both police records and victim surveys. The "punishment" for each offense considers conviction rate, prison sentence, sentence length, and time served in prison. Each essay also considers issues in relation to the impact of the risk for and severity of punishment for the six offenses. Data tables, figures, and references accompany the essays.