Expressive Crimes in Post‐Socialist States of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania1

Abstract

This article presents trends in expressive crimes in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania from 1993 to 2000 and examines how demographic, socio‐economic, land use, and institutional factors relate to their geography in 2000. Geographical Information System (GIS) and spatial regression models are employed in the study, which make use of country regions as the unit of analysis. Issues concerning crime data availability and quality are discussed. While police official statistics show a significant rise in rates of expressive crime in the Baltic countries during the 1990s (with the exception of homicide), victimization crime surveys indicate that there have been no significant changes in crime levels and composition. Results also show that indicators of regions' social structure, such as divorce rate, more strongly predict the variation of 2000's expressive crime ratios than other indicators, such as land use and economic covariates. Most of these covariates function in ways which are predicted by Western literature on crime geography. 1. This paper is part of the project ‘States in transition and their geography of crime’, financed by The Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation (Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, grant J2004‐0142:1). A preliminary version of this article was presented in the 6th Annual Conference of the European Society of Criminology, Tubingen, Germany, 2006.