Gregory A. Fossedal, Direct Democracy in Switzerland, 2002.13
CrimeSwiss crime rates are not the lowest in the world, but they are close. Japan suffers fewer murders per capita. Scotland is more free of (reported) cases of rape and other sexual assault.
As in many other fields, then, Switzerland cannot quite claim to be number one. But the country ranks near the top in the effectiveness of its criminal justice system on all measures. And it performs respectably, indeed well, over a number of different crimes and crime measurements, as Figures 13.1, Figure 13.2 and Figure 13.3 suggest
The Swiss disagree about what causes these statistics, though the discussion is a happy one. Some stress societal factors. Switzerland enjoys high employment that has exceeded 98 percent for most of the century. The people have an ethic of citizenship and cooperation that all countries strive to instill, but Switzerland seems to succeed in instilling this ethic to an unusual degree.
These factors, though, are to some extent products of the regime and of policy: We see the hand of political institutions, though indirectly. Economic performance is partly a function of tax, monetary, social welfare, and other policies. Swiss citizenship is partly a traditional and historical phenomenon, but also a result of such institutions as the national militia, the schools, strong local government, and direct democracy. The army, with its universal male service, may play a double role. On the one hand, this is a society in which a large share of the population owns and maintains a firearm and knows how to use it responsibly. Guns are taken seriously, but they are a part of life; nearly every Swiss male between twenty and fifty years old has his rifle ready at home and practices regularly. The army also serves to tighten the bonds of citizenship and friendship, of community and shared duties. This will be less so as the services reduce their size and extent in the years to come, but is still a factor. While it is not impossible that people in this relationship would commit crimes against one another, it stands to reason that such individuals would be less prone to crime.
Likewise, the high degree of racial and religious harmony in Switzerland does not result from lack of diversity, but from the way the country deals with diversity. In the United States, two-thirds of all arrests for violent crime are among blacks, Hispanics, or Asians, whereas they constitute less than a quarter of the population. Indeed, a large share of U.S. violent crime, tragically, involves blacks attacking other blacks. Switzerland offers a nice refutation of the idea that Western European countries have been able to achieve low crime rates, particularly for violent crimes, only because of their ethnic homogeneity. While there are European countries with strong ethnic or language uniformity, Switzerland is not one of them. The Swiss do have a problem with foreigners and crime, particularly in the drug area, where about 60 percent of arrests are of nonnative Swiss. And it has some racial overlap -- many arrests and deportations are of Dominicans, or Moslems from various Eurasian countries. But there is no major linkage between crime and race per se. Minorities do not feel the system is stacked against them as minorities, and the white majority, by and large, does not fear that certain racial groups are violent or criminal as such.
Others stress the contribution made by the courts and justice system directly. These must have some importance. Switzerland's court system is not as distinctive in structure and operation as are its executive branch or its legislative processes. There are, however, important differences between the Swiss system and other European countries, and these are somewhat sharper still compared to the United States.
The Swiss, for example, make use of the jury, but not as frequently as the United States and Great Britain. It is one of the few areas in which the Swiss system is markedly less populist than the rest of Europe and America, in the literal sense of relying on the people to render decisions. In most features, however, the Swiss legal system remains highly dependent on the wisdom and initiative of citizens as such, and somewhat less reliant on the expertise of attorneys and magistrates than is common in Europe and the United States. If juries are less frequent, so are appeals from ajury's or judge's decision in the lower courts. A comparison of the Swiss appeal rate for major criminal cases with that of the U.S. illustrates the slightly different spirit that animates the two systems.
In U.S. federal and state courts, felony convictions are appealed some 60 percent of the time. In some states and in serious cases (drug cases and murder in New York and California, for example) the figure approaches 90 percent. About four in five decisions are eventually upheld. But more than 15 percent of convictions are, in fact, sent back or "overturned." And even those that are not sent back are subject to extra delay and expense. The original trials themselves, too, are affected. Judges and attorneys on all sides must take extra steps and put in many hours of work in an effort to avoid having key parts of their case thrown out -- or to lay the foundation for later appeals that will undermine the case of their opponents.
In Switzerland, about one-third of convictions for serious crimes are appealed -- and generally to the cantonal, not the federal court. This not only removes one layer of likely complication, but also makes the system more intimate. The judges and magistrates of the local courts know the thinking and the tendencies of their cantonal supreme court members personally and well -- certainly somewhat better than, say, a typical U.S. judge would be acquainted with his federal circuit court of appeals judge, or still less, a justice on the Supreme Court.
Furthermore, since each canton makes its own rules of procedure, there is more intimacy within each canton among the judges and attorneys. The practice of law is somewhat more local in character, somewhat more specialized by geography and people than by area of expertise. An attorney who wanted to make a career of filing boilerplate lawsuits or criminal appeals on a certain narrow set of issues would find herself or himself needing to study the differing laws of many different regions.
The U.S. and other European court systems, to be sure, have decentralization and diversity of their own, and Switzerland has some uniformity. As a matter of degree, however, the Swiss system is substantially more dispersed than the U.S. This is probably one of the prime causes of the different nature of the appeals process, and the large disparity in the frequency with which it is used. A Swiss lay judge who was on the community insurance court, Fred Isler, told me that his court's decisions were only rarely overturned -- "it happened about as often as we have strikes in Switzerland," which is to say, once or twice a year, and in some years, not at all. A justice on the cantonal supreme court for Aargau Canton, Ernst Roduner, did not remember a case in which any of his court's decisions had been appealed to the federal court on grounds of procedure. "They really leave it to us," he said -- meaning the cantons. Although the federal supreme court can strike cantonal laws if they contradict the federal constitution, they cannot, as mentioned earlier, do so with federal laws. As a result there is a more humble approach to the cantonal laws as well, an ethos of lawyerly restraint toward the laws the people have made that one sees throughout the court system. "I am familiar with the practices in the United States, France, and some other countries which are more centralized and uniform," continued Justice Roduner, "and there are many advantages to this. It is not our system, however."
The Swiss, in fact, not uncharacteristically, are somewhat concerned that their system may be out of step with Europe and the United States. Some believe it has too many idiosyncrasies and contradictions to function smoothly. There are repeated appeals, as in the education field and among tax authorities, to bring greater uniformity to the code. Judges and lawyers from different cantons meet periodically and have made some strides at bringing greater order to the system, particularly within the three language blocks. Valais, Geneva, and Vaud, for instance, three of the French-speaking cantons, have coordinated their procedure laws, as have Zurich, Aargau, and Luzern, to a lesser extent, in the center-east. Still it remains a highly divided system of unique components. Even the language barrier, while not huge in absolute terms for most Swiss, is a subtle factor in reinforcing the decentralization of the courts. In the end, the dominance and differences of the cantons may be a blessing, though a mixed one.
Thus the Swiss court system places a heavy trust in the people, and relies on them to perform competently. Once a decision is reached, either by a jury, judge, or magistrate chosen directly or by a highly accessible assembly, the system is loathe to overturn it. It is not impossible for a judge to reverse what the people have decided, but it is less likely. When this system is abused, the remedies are themselves, likewise, popular in nature. "We have to be reappointed," Roduner points out. "The laws we implement are subject to the direct democracy." In this way too, the system is highly citizenbased.
The influence of initiative and referendum on the legal profession is also apparent. Because of popular participation directly in the legislative process, the laws have an added aura of legitimacy and invincibility. To go against or ignore or overturn them, judges would be going just a little bit more against the people themselves, the very source of the state's authority. What the people have made, to a greater extent, is more difficult to break. This is not to say that a good judge in the United States or Germany or France will overturn the laws of the representative assemblies for light or capricious reasons. There is, however, somewhat less of a stigma attached to this than there is in Switzerland, and somewhat more of a feeling of independence from the popular check.
Another aspect of the system's populism is its reliance on sheriffs and the courts, much as the Swiss education system relies on teachers, to make decisions and administer laws with little review by higher bureaucratic authorities. Swiss police spend more than half their time on crime prevention, and little of it filling out forms or defending decisions to review panels. In the United States, by contrast, according to the Department of Justice, "police spend one-third of their time on crime prevention," and comparably more responding to other authorities within the system. To my surprise, Swiss attorneys report that the initial trial phase for a serious crime is not significantly shorter than in France, Germany, or the United States, and slightly longer than in Japan. Once a trial is over and sentencing occurs, however, generally a matter of nine to twelve months for major offenses, the process is generally at an end, whereas in many Western countries there would follow a long cycle of appeals.
The value and reliance the Swiss place on police can be measured by the relative salaries and composition of the system. In Zurich, a judge's salary is approximately twice the average salary of a cantonal police officer. In most U.S. and British cities, the judge's salary is more than triple the police officer's. There also appears to be a higher population of police officers compared to judges in the Swiss system, although statistical comparison is rendered difficult by the fact that Switzerland has very little by way of a federal police force, almost none, leaving law and crime matters to the cantons. A typical Swiss judge has far less administrative support staff than a U.S. judge. The cantonal judges who spoke with me typically had a secretary working for them -- whose labor they shared with another judge or two in the more austere cantons. In the United States, it is not infrequent for a federal or state appellate judge to have three or four clerks, themselves lawyers or law students, plus administrative staff.
The professional background and demeanor of judges is likewise less formal. In the U.S., one rarely encounters a judge who does not have a law degree. Only one-third of all U.S. judges are "lay judges" as a whole, and even fewer at the federal and state appellate courts. In Switzerland, there are 751 "professional judges" and 1,672 "lay judges." There is significantly more turnover among the Swiss judges, none of whom have life tenure. In a random survey of cantonal and community judges, the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution found that less than 10 percent served in their position for ten years or more. This is very different from the ratio of the United States, where the U.N. reporting methodology for such matters calculates there are 889 professional judges and 467 lay judges.
The Swiss make extensive use of professional arbitrators, and in fact the civil regular courts operate in a manner similar to a U.S. or British arbitrator. Courts that allowed me to visit both in Ticino and Aargau, including a branch of the Aargau cantonal supreme court, had small panels of judges seated around a table. There is a rough resemblance to Japanese practices as described by the U.N.'s international crime reports:
In Japan, active public cooperation is indispensable to effective functioning of the criminal justice system. In addition to the above mentioned field of police work, there is, in the field of prosecution, a unique system called Inquest of Prosecution which was designed to reflect the opinion of lay citizens in handling public prosecutions. Laymen can also take part in court proceedings. One of the examples is the laymen counsel in criminal cases before the Summary Court, Family Court and the District Court. A defendant can select a person or persons, who are not qualified attorneys, to be their own counsel by permission of the court.In the Swiss courts we visited, the judges (two men and one woman in Aargau, one man and two women in the Ticino) wore business suits, not robes, and sat on the same level as the attorneys and the defendant. This may seem to have only symbolic importance, but represents an important psychological difference of the British and U.S. practice in which the judge sits up on a kind of throne behind a great podium-like desk. Likewise, the Swiss court buildings are restrained, with no great statues and none of the quotations from great supreme court judges of the kind one sees etched on court buildings in the U.S. or even Germany. The Ticino and Aargau courts had no pillars or such material at all, and even the federal supreme court houses in Lausanne and Luzern (insurance) are understated by Western standards. The building that housed the Aargau court looked more or less like an administration building on a modest U.S. campus or a federal or state regional office building in the U.S. In short, the architecture, dress, protocol, and the other arrangements of the Swiss courts seem to give a quiet message that the courts exist not to house great legal minds or construct brilliant arguments and theories, but to render decisions.
Police, judicial, and related functions are conducted on a more decentralized and local basis in Switzerland than in most other developed countries. Comparisons must be made carefully because of Switzerland's size and population -- about one-tenth the population of Germany, one thirty-fifth that of the United States, and an area the size of the state of Connecticut. This means, on the one hand, that all scales are reduced: The Swiss "federal" government is no larger, and no more remote probably, from its people, than that of Cook County, Illinois, or the cities of Berlin, Paris, or New York. It may even be more "local" in character than these. Likewise, such U.S. states as Indiana, Minnesota, and Missouri have larger populations than the entire country of Switzerland, and are many times its physical size. Yet administratively, these states are the equivalent of the Swiss cantons -- standing under the federal government, but above the cities and counties. When comparing the activities of different levels of government, is a U.S. state the equivalent of a Swiss canton, or of the Swiss federal government? Is the Swiss canton of Zurich, with a population of several hundred thousand, closer to the state of Virginia, or to that state's Fairfax County, with similar size and geographic size?
Table 13.1 compares spending on police and the courts by various levels of government in the United States and Switzerland. The layout of the table goes from highest unit of government to lowest, placing the cantons of Switzerland as closer to the federal center than a U.S. county, but somewhat farther and less similar to it than a U.S. state. The result is a kind of graphic top-down effect that gives us a feel for the extent to which criminal justice functions, as measured by spending, are carried out at the top, middle, and bottom of the system.
As a general matter, the U.S. column has more numbers and larger numbers bunched toward the top and middle; the Swiss places most of its chips in the middle and lower portions. If we compare what the federal government of Switzerland spends on police and court functions to what its smallest and most intimate level of government spends, the result is a ratio of somewhat more than six to one. For the United States, the ratio is only two to one -- a much stronger federal presence, and weaker local one.
Of course, this leaves the cantons out of the picture, which is a serious problem for comparing Swiss government to other states. If we consider the cantons and communes to be roughly comparable to U.S. counties and municipalities, we see that in Switzerland, the local character of justice administration is 94 percent of the spending, in the U.S., 54 percent. This probably overstates the disparity somewhat -- but not much. The state of California is roughly ten times the population and extent of Switzerland; the government in Sacramento is at least as remote and imperial as the government in Bern. One can parse the data, but the general picture remains one of greater federalism in the Swiss system, and this reflects the reality. In their function and level of accessibility, the cantons are much closer to a U.S. county, and the states of the U.S. are not terribly different from the Swiss federal government. Each government has an added layer of administration when making comparisons then -- the U.S. federal government is a unit of size and complexity that has no analogy in the Swiss system, and the Swiss communes have an intimacy and level of responsiveness seen only in the smallest U.S. towns.
All this, of course, expresses only the economic relationship. As the Swiss towns and cantons have much greater authority and autonomy vis-a-vis their federal government, the resulting statistical picture if anything understates the decentralized nature of Swiss criminal justice. The states of Europe are generally in between, with France close to the U.S. and perhaps even exceeding it in degree of centralization; Germany and Britain in the middle.
This system would appear to be open to abuse by local judges and sheriffs, who have great discretion compared to a modern-day judge in the U.S. or most of Europe. What is to prevent a judge or sheriff in Eastern Glarus, or along the road leading to the Gotthard pass, from becoming a kind of Macon County kingpin or Mexican patrol officer -- abusing his authority to squeeze fines and bribes and worse out of suspects? There are in fact some complaints among the Swiss, and more from foreign visitors, about traffic policing both along the Northern highway system and in the Southeast passages. For the most part, however, the Swiss seem to have avoided any severe conflicts between citizens of the different cantons or the cantons themselves.
There are several reasons for this. First, the Swiss courts do not attract men and women whose ambition is to rise to great power, or acquire riches, through the legal system. The pay forjudges remains as low as it did, in relative terms, in the 1920s, when Lord Bryce noted that there were periodic difficulties fdling some vacancies on the bench. As well, the presence of so many lay judges and volunteer administrators throughout the commune governments, and of part-time lay persons even at the cantonal level, gives the whole system a broad base of people and economic interests. The insurance judge who in fact is an executive at the local textile company sees his position as a voluntary gift to the community, not a sinecure. He was probably appointed by a cantonal legislature of housewives, part-time professionals, and other citizens, or asked to fill the job by a town council. He works with a group of similar volunteers and underpaid de facto volunteers. Few or none of the actors in this drama want anything so much as to render a fair decision and get home. It would not be impossible for them to favor their own neighbors in a dispute, and, in fact, they would have a natural inclination to do so. But it would be nearly impossible to systematically do so, and very difficult to do so for gain.
Thus, while the Swiss system is open to such abuses of locality, they do not appear to have become a serious problem yet. The courts, though not formally composed of temporary juries as such, tend to function somewhat in the manner of juries. The Swiss courts are a half-way house between juries and legal experts, with a bias toward the popular jury side.
This metaphor may explain how the Swiss are able to mitigate another obvious defect of their legal system -- its lack of professional expertise and considered legal opinion. "There is no doubt that Switzerland does not have the practicing lawyers and judges with the knowledge and experience of the U.S., Germany, or other countries," a Swiss attorney concedes. "But the system does draw on expertise from outsiders." For example, lay judges frequently are experts in their own field of cases, which in the cantonal and federal supreme courts are divided by area of knowledge -- insurance cases, intergovernment disputes, contract issues, and so on. Of course, there is nothing to stop a judge in Germany or France from soliciting a formal or informal opinion from an expert, in court or as a consultant -- and many do. In the Swiss system, this process is more regular. Leaders from very different walks of life are integrated into the legal profession, both directly, when they serve as judges, and indirectly, as their presence leavens the legal community as a whole.
The result still leaves the Swiss short of the kind of broad, deep pool of legal brilliance that one sees in the United States. The system is particularly weak at the top and in the intellectual realm. There are few legal journals, and the writing and research in them does not rise to the level seen in American, French, and German journals. In international legal disputes, where one would think the Swiss would excel by virtue of their multilingualism and cultural adaptiveness, Swiss attorneys have a relatively poor record in representing both their government and their large banking and other commercial firms. If one needed to litigate a case or defend one's self of a murder charge, one would almost certainly want an American attorney, and might hope for a British or German judge. For brilliant reasoning about the theories underpinning the dispute, one might turn to the French or the Americans. If one were able to choose any venue in the world for the case to be tried, however, one could do worse than to select any of the Swiss cantons at random.
A Swiss attorney who practices now in the United States put it this way: "Swiss law does not lend itself to the cutting-edge hairsplitting argumentation and drafting seen in the United States. Swiss law and jurisprudence often take the approach of stating a broad principle and leaving it to the good common sense of legal practitioners to fill in the details. In other words, the law says, "A," ergo the more direct applications of "AA," and "a," and "aa" are covered. A Swiss lawyer trying to argue that "aa" is not covered simply be-cause it was not stated in the explicit language of the "A" statute would be laughed out of court. In the United States, an attorney not arguing that "aa" was left uncovered by the broad principle "A," despite the common-sense application, would probably be vulnerable to a malpractice suit." These observations have special application to contract law, but their spirit applies to criminal law differences between the U.S. and Switzerland as well.
The Swiss, in other words, may have an inferior system, at least at the higher reaches of law. But the Swiss system is able to function as a whole because of the work and the generosity of its citizens; it is a justice system not only for, but of and by, the people. If we consider one of the system's great failings in recent years -- the growth of Zurich into a great center of drug trafficking in the 1970s and 1980s -- then we see an interesting illustration of the system in action.
Rita Fuhrer does not look like the person who busted up the Zurich drug runners. Her face is soft and round, her eyes sympathetic. Bangs and medium-length hair gently wrap around the side, completing the effect. Frau (Mrs.) Fuhrer, as she prefers to be called, wears a tweed business suit that is neat, but not padded or sharply angular. She smiles and apologizes her English "not very good," which given Swiss standards means she has roughly the fluency (in this, her third tongue) of the median graduate of a U.S. high school.
Fuhrer was elected to her post in 1995. One assumed she had some background as a prosecutor or an attorney, but when asked her profession, she answers, "housewife." Her answer had the feeling, through the slight language barrier, of someone who still considers herself primarily a wife and mother -- and wants to be seen as such, in ever-so-slightly a counter-cultural fashion. ("Being a housewife is a profession" -- she did not say this, but seemed to convey it by her understated manner.)
On further probing, however, it appears the answer was not merely attitudi-nal, but accurate, and even illustrative. Prior to her election to this post, Mrs. Fuhrer served on the cantonal council, one of the many important but low-paying positions occupied by many women in Switzerland. (Women constituted 23 percent of the cantonal legislatures in 1998.) As well, she worked briefly as a newspaper reporter. But there are no advanced degrees, no years as a litigator or high-profile political activist. Mrs. Fuhrer was an attentive mom who did public service for modest pay and decided she might be able to do something to help the police make Zurich a safer and better place to live.
In her present office, Fuhrer has implemented what amounts to a two-point program. "I was not trained for it," she admits. "But I like to talk to people, different people. I talked and listened." The program she implemented was not original, and not even controversial -- it represented the trend in thinking in the city when she took office. But Fuhrer saw the wisdom of it, and put it into practice.
First, she had the cantonal police clamp down on drug dealings at the Zurich airport, the train station, and the nearby park, Platzspitz, that became almost synonymous with drug dealing during the 1980s and early 1990s. ("Platzspitz" translates into English as "Poined Square," though it soon became known as "Needle Park") Dealers of even small amounts were arrested, as were their customers. The federal government shared information and manpower -- a rarity in Switzerland, but possible in this case because of the canton's request for such help. With the assistance of the canton, the city police of Zurich implemented essentially the same measures, and the two units cooperated in a way they previously had not. Arrests for drug possession and trafficking shot up for two years as the Polizei cleaned up the streets, then tapered off as the population of criminals shrank. The amounts of heroin and cocaine seized by the police moved in a similar pattern, rising sharply and then falling with the declining incidence of drug use. Figures 13.4 and 13.5 nearby show these statistical trends.
Second, Mrs. Fuhrer worked with the city and canton to increase and upgrade facilities for treating addicts -- helping them get off drugs. The canton and city expanded existing facilities and set up new ones. Spending on these programs and their associated capital budgets increased. Addicts were encouraged to sign up for programs voluntarily even when suspected of possession and therefore vulnerable to arrest. City and canton district attorneys arrested addicts to avoid prosecution if they entered a detoxification program. Judges in the canton were encouraged to sentence only the most stubborn addicts to jail terms. Swiss judges were already lenient when measured by the length of sentence typically imposed for major crimes, although given the high rate of apprehension and conviction achieved by the Swiss courts, and the low rate of successful appeals, the overall deterrent impact was as high or higher than many other Western countries. 1
The program appears to have worked. From 1985 as a base year, the number of drug addicts estimated in Zurich tripled. Since 1995, it has fallen by half. Entrants into treatment programs surged, thanks almost entirely to the arrest referrals and sentencing. Of the entrants, "about one third" kick their habit immediately, Fuhrer says. "Another third have some repeating, but are able to give up the drugs after several tries. Another third" -- she pauses, looks to the side -- "cannot be reached." Overall, the program's office says, 65 percent eventually kick their habit.
These program statistics, of course, suffer from lack of time. The policy has been in place only a few years, making judgments about its long-term effectiveness tenuous. But the tentative figures above are borne out by related measures of drug use and crime. Zurich's rate of such crimes as robbery and burglary fell by more than 10 percent, largely due to the decline in the number of addicts needing to supply an expensive habit. Albeit a grim statistic, a good index of drug usage is simply the number of deaths by overdose or improper use. These fell from a high of 92 such deaths in 1992 to 89 in 1994, 65 in 1996, and 58 in 1998.
Which part of the program was most important -- the police crackdown, or the focus on treatment?
Mrs. Fuhrer gives a sincere answer, but also the politically astute one: "You need both. I think we might have made some progress with just the arrests, cleaning out the park, or with just the treatment."
Yes, Mrs. Fuhrer, but many members of your party -- she belongs to the SVP, the Socially Conservative Party of Switzerland, roughly equivalent on many issues to a Pat Buchanan or Jesse Helms in the United States, or perhaps an Ariel Sharon in Israel -- would like to see the expenditures on treatment cut back, and the police approach toughened even more. Would that be a mistake?
"Let me say -- I think both are useful and important. But if I had to keep one, if I had to say one was more important, I think the treatment approach has done more good. There's a very simple reason: The treatment program has reduced the population of people addicted substantially. This helps rob the traffickers of their sales.
"But I would want to keep both parts of the program. They work together. If someone wanted to do away with either one, I would try to persuade them not to, whether it was the treatments or the arrests, and whether they were from my party, or some other."
With this answer, of course, Mrs. Fuhrer establishes a slight distance, perhaps, from her party on a matter of rhetorical emphasis. Yet she defends its core idea that a reduction in drug trafficking, including arrests of users and suppliers, is a public good that should be pursued. And she stubbornly (and intelligently) keeps it Bundled into part of a program that has blended the approach of different partisans in the drug issue into a coherent whole -- a whole that has worked for Zurich.
Many, perhaps most, professional politicians in the United States or Europe would probably answer the question in roughly the same way. But Mrs. Fuhrer is not a professional politician -- she's a professional housewife. The Swiss system makes it possible for the head of one of the country's largest police departments to credibly call herself that. And herein lies one of the sources of its vitality.
Note 1. For example, of all Swiss men convicted of rape, only 35 percent are sentenced to jail. This is low compared to the United States (more than 80 percent), Sweden (71 percent), and Japan (65 percent.) On the other hand, the Swiss system catches, tries, and convicts a larger percentage of offenders than many countries. Of all reported rapes, a culprit is convicted in Switzerland more than 20 percent of the time. This is significantly more than in the United States (5 percent) and Sweden (8 percent), though less than Japan's 39 percent rate. About 10,000 persons in Switzerland are sent to a prison each year for all offenses but sentences of several months are the norm, and of more than five years, extremely rare. There is no death penalty. The number of Swiss assigned a life sentence has averaged 1.8 persons per year over the last two decades; now and then a year goes by in which there is no assignment of a life sentence at all. Punishment for crimes in Switzerland is thus less severe per conviction than in many countries, although what punishment there is is swift and certain.