The History of Victim Compensation by Governments
The earliest reference to governmental compen- sation for crime victims can be found in the ancient Babylonian Code of Hammurabi, which is considered to be the oldest written body of criminal law (about 1775 BC). The code instructed territorial governors to replace the lost property of someone who was robbed if the crim- inal was not captured. In the aftermath of a mur- der, the governor was to pay the heirs a specific sum in silver from the treasury. In the centuries that followed, restitution by the offender replaced compensation by the state. But during the Middle Ages, restitution also faded away. Victims had no avenue of redress except to try to recover losses by suing offenders in civil court.
Interest in compensation revived during the 1800s, when the prison reform movement in Eur- ope focused attention on the suffering of convicts and in doing so indirectly called attention to the plight of their victims. Leading theorists in crimi- nology endorsed compensation and restitution at several International Penal Congress meetings held at the turn of the century. But these resolutions did not lead to any concrete actions. Legal historians
have uncovered only a few scattered instances of special funds set aside for crime victims: one in Tuscany after 1786, another in Mexico starting in 1871, and one beginning in France in 1934. Switzerland and Cuba also experimented with vic- tim compensation (Silving, 1959; Schafer, 1970; and MacNamara and Sullivan, 1974).
An English prison reformer sparked the revival of interest in compensation in the late 1950s. Because of her efforts, a government commission investigated various reparations proposals and set up a fund in 1964 in Great Britain. Several Austra- lian states and Canadian provinces followed suit during the next few years. New Zealand offered the most complete protection in the Western world in 1972, when it abolished the victim com- pensation program it had pioneered in 1963 and absorbed it within a universal accident insurance system. Everyone in New Zealand was covered for losses arising from any type of misfortune, including criminal acts. The nature of the event, the reason it occurred, and the person responsible for it did not affect compensation decisions (European Committee on Crime Problems, 1978; and Meiners, 1978).