Western Democracy & Critique On It

All Western democracies collect data on immigrants and more generally on noncitizens living within their respective boundaries, although these data cannot record the significant number of illegal immigrants. It is thus possible for these countries to collect justice statistics on the very general basis of who is a national citizen and who is not when having a brush with the penal system. However, these statistics are not further broken down according to racial and ethnic origin. Even if state immigration departments keep tabs on where immigrants are coming from, this kind of information is not recorded by other departments. Consequently, justice statistics are generally not discriminant with respect to ethnicity and race. In continental Europe, such discriminant statistics would seem a throwback to pre-Second World War racism and bring back the yellow stars nightmare. In other countries such as Canada, ethno-racially discriminant statistics are believed to violate basic civil rights, with the exception of data on Aboriginal people, which have traditionally been collected because First Nations are endowed with a special legal status. However, there are two countries where justice statistics sensitive to race and ethnicity are collected. The first is the US, where such data have been collected for a long period of time, and the other is the UK, where a 1995 Home Office letter to Chief Constables required them to introduce a system of ethnic monitoring of suspects and offenders. The UK also conducts victimization surveys that discriminate between ethno-racial groups either as victims or offenders.