Providing criminal law enforcement

The United Nations Commission on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice recommended the Ninth Congress to consider:

1. The potential of traditional and non-traditional mechanisms of justice and social control, such as processes of mediation, social reconciliation, restitution, compensation and non-custodial measures, in inspiring new strategies for preventing and controlling crime, reducing prison overcrowding and strengthening support for the criminal justice system;

2. Recent developments in the functioning of criminal justice and police systems, in particular the mobilization of law enforcement arrangements and new cooperative law enforcement arrangements, and to explore ways of improving the relationship between the police and the public, for example by ensuring an equal balance between the various sectors of the population in police forces and by developing community policing;

3. Recent trends in criminal justice as the privatization of certain police and correctional functions, the excessive use of pre-trial custody, prison overcrowding, and the development of alternatives to incarceration;

4. Dispatching prisoners to their countries of origin and ways to speed up the corresponding procedures, with the consent of the offenders, in order to enable them to serve their sentences in circumstances that would promote their reintegration into their own societies;

5. The process of needs assessment; the conditions of successful computerization; and a mechanism for identifying needs for the creation of statistical infrastructures where these are essential to improving national statistical reporting systems;

6. Issues such as the compatibility of criminal statistics, support systems, computers as an investigative tool, and cost-effective ways of promoting the availability of data, assessment analysis capabilities and the exchange of information; and consider controls and legal measures to safeguard respect for privacy and to prevent data from being used for purposes incompatible with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, bearing in mind data protection principles relating to personal privacy.