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Questions by the public regarding offenders, the sanctioning methods of judges, and the general level of punitivity have played a prominent role in recent years throughout the West. These social changes have mainly affected the middle and eastern European countries that abandoned the socialist system in favor of a Western-style democratic system as well as open borders. One result in these Eastern countries was a pervasive sense of uneasiness. The old order was overthrown, but a new order had not yet been firmly established, but in the transition many changes and failures spawned a general sense of insecurity. In the midst of this anomie, a new, well-organized criminality emerged that took advantage of the new freedoms and moved easily throughout eastern Europe. The former Eastern bloc countries had had relatively low levels of criminality, in comparison with the West, because of their rigorous official and unofficial social control measures and their politically strict orthodoxy. Today, however, these same countries must deal with a significant increase in criminality, partly because of trepidation within their justice bureaucracy. After the collapse of communism, they were seen as a remnant of the hated, repressive regime that managed social life. To be sure, criminality in most Eastern countries remains as before less than in West European industrial nations and in the United States (see Kury & Obergfell-Fuchs, 1996), but, nevertheless, the rapidly escalating increases in crime from earlier low levels provoked a massive sense of insecurity and, above all, a fear of crime. In addition, the press, which formerly had been controlled by the regime and reported little about crime, now was free and under growing competitive pressures, inevitably shifted to sex and crime reporting, according to the motto "report what sells." Crime and its development was one of the favorite themes, and crime "dramas" were reported nearly daily. These reports were often inaccurate and unreliable, but they fomented an even greater fear of crime. They inspired campaigns by the public for more police and more drastic measures by the state, including harsher justice, but from the politicians came the same simple solutions. No wonder broad segments of the population overestimated the actual level of criminal activity and the risk of victimization. No wonder they pushed for sharper punishments for offenders. No wonder support for resocialization measures of offenders evaporated.
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