PERCEPTIONS OF CRIME SERIOUSNESS: A SYSTEMATIC REVIEW

The development of penal codes has historically attempted to represent the views of the general public with regards to the control of deviant behaviors and their respective punishments. This is certainly a difficulttask, because the community tends to hold heterogeneous perceptions in these matters. A bibliometrica nalysis was performed upon scientific articles dealing with issues related to the perceptions of crimeseriousness that were found using the PsycINFO, WOS and Scopus databases. The inclusion criteria for articles was that at least one of the following expressions were found either in the title or in the keywords: "crime seriousness", "crime severity", "offense seriousness", "offense severity", "delinquency seriousness" and "delinquency severity". In total 152 references were analyzed considering: year of publication, country, language, journal, most prolific author and most cited articles. Furthermore, a content analysis was performed upon the keywords and abstracts of these references. Results and their implications are discussed.