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Text Box: Matthew G. Yeager Carleton University Imagine receiving a letter from the United Nations inviting you to attend an international gathering on the subject of crime prevention and offenders, held only once every five years, and in Vienna at that? Considering that you are just a regular, journeyman criminologist with meager leftist credentials, you are quite surprised (we don’t get a whole lot of invitations these days) and admittedly flattered. So, in a flurry of paperwork worthy of any budding grantsperson, you manage to get your financing in order and reply, “Why, yes, I will be attending.” Your status is that of an individual expert observer, which means that you have no voting status at the official plennaries. No worry! You’ll just mingle and meet others criminologists from around the world. Before getting into the main and ancillary arguments of this short piece, it may be useful to sketch the organizational layout of the United Nation’s recent 10th Congress on the Prevention of Crime and Treatment of Offenders, held in Vienna, Austria, from April 10-17, 2000. You arrive at this huge (and I mean really huge) convention center in Austria attached to the United Nations Secretariat. All of the formal sessions were conducted in three amphitheaters. Most of the main plenary was devoted to the topic of international co-operation in combating transnational crime. In each of the two other amphitheaters, workshops were held on combating corruption, promoting the rule of law and strengthening the criminal justice system, women and the criminal justice system, effective crime prevention, offenders and victims, and crimes related to computers. Now, it should be said that generally speaking, only member delegations (states) had any voting rights and any right to speak at this formal sessions. Their speeches were, almost without exception, reflections of government policy as opposed to critiques of UN policy or the policies of other delegations. Most of us individual expert observers found them exceedingly dull and boring (yawn!), and it was not unusual to find the amphitheaters almost empty, with very few delegations attending the meeting (at least this pertained to the four scheduled workshops). The real action took place in what was euphemistically called the “ancillary” meetings. These were small group presentations hosted by a variety of NGO’s, and they covered a range of subjects from prison overcrowding (Prison Reform International) to restorative sentencing (Prison Fellowship International). Here, you not only listened to other individual expert observers present a synopsis of their latest book or research, but commentary from the audience was invited. Why, there was even considerable debate within these discussions! In contrast, most of the formal sessions were accompanied with a written, policy summary prepared by the UN secretariat. There, the discussions were top-down. You listened to a highly-structured presentation by invited experts and delegates in which there was little debate, hardly much controversy (who can be

Text Box: against crime prevention?), and few listening if judged by the attendance levels. Hence, most of us spent our time attending the ancillary meetings, bumping into old and new acquaintances, and taking lunch with colleagues to discuss our own research and interests. At the outset, this “structure” calls for some reform, or at least, some attempt to “liven up” the proceedings. For a brief moment, there was an effort by the NGO’s to make a formal motion to amend the official U.N. Declaration on Crime and Justice. However, this effort fizzled for lack of interest and, I suppose, a fit of fatalism. It was never clear whether our presence at this Congress was simply designed to add some legitimacy to what had already been decided months earlier in closed-door meetings. As well, it would probably be more interesting if NGO’s were given some status at each of the formal sessions – minimally to provide some “outside” perspective on the subject at hand. Last, each formal session could benefit from a period of “live, unscheduled” debate in which the delegates would be encouraged to respond to the presentations. As Anthony Platt (1971) and others have commented, these international gatherings subsume a certain ideological perspective. They are dominated by liberal ideology to the extent that inequality and poverty are mentioned in the various UN publications, by the invited experts, and even some of the delegations. But there is almost no analysis as to why you have such disparate levels of inequality and poverty in the world. To quote the Report of the Secretary-General on the “State of Crime and Criminal Justice Worldwide:” (UN. Congress, 1999a: 3) [O]ver the past three decades, the income gap between the wealthiest 20 percent of the world’s population and the poorest 20 percent has more than doubled. Similarly, globalization has had an impact on criminality at the national and international levels. In yet another publication on the subject of crime prevention, research is cited listing various “interrelated” factors causing crime (U.N Congress, 1999b: 6): Poverty and unemployment deriving from social exclusion, especially for youth; Dysfunctional families with uncaring and inconsistent parental attitudes, violence, or parental conflict; A society that accepts or promotes a culture of violence; Discrimination and exclusion based on gender, race, or other unjust grounds; Degradation of urban environments and social bonds; Inadequate surveillance of public places and property; Availability of goods that are easy to