Crime
In the 1990s, the growth of organized crime (see Russian mafia and Russian oligarchs) and the fragmentation of law enforcement agencies in Russia coincided with a sharp rise in violence against business figures, administrative and state officials, and other public figures. The second President of Russia Vladimir Putin inherited these problems when he took office, and during his election campaign in 2000, the new president won popular support by stressing the need to restore law and order and to bring the rule of law to Russia as the only way of restoring confidence in the country's economy.
According to data by Demoscope Weekly, the Russian homicide rate showed a rise from the level of 15 murders per 100,000 people in 1991, to 32.5 in 1994. Then it fell to 22.5 in 1998, followed by a rise to a maximum rate of 30.5 in 2002, and then a fall to 20 murders per 100,000 people in 2006. Despite positive tendency to reduce, Russia's index of murders per capita remains one of the highest in the world with the fifth highest of 62 nations.
With a prison population rate of 611 per 100,000 population, Russia was second only to the United States (2006 data). Furthermore, criminology studies show that for the first five years since 2000 compared with the average for 1992 to 1999, the rate of robberies is up by 38.2% and the rate of drug-related crimes is higher by 71.7%.
Read more about this topic: Torture In Russia
Famous quotes containing the word crime:
“Is it, in Heav’n, a crime to love too well?
To bear too tender or too firm a heart,
To act a lover’s or a Roman’s part?”
—Alexander Pope (1688–1744)
“There is no society known where a more or less developed criminality is not found under different forms. No people exists whose morality is not daily infringed upon. We must therefore call crime necessary and declare that it cannot be non-existent, that the fundamental conditions of social organization, as they are understood, logically imply it.”
—Emile Durkheim (1858–1917)
“Crime and bad lives are the measure of a State’s failure, all crime in the end is the crime of the community.”
—H.G. (Herbert George)