Two things happen when you convert from raw to JPEG....
1. Bit depth gets reduced from 12 or 14 bits to 8 bits per channel, so you lose the finest subtleties in tonal gradation;
2. The file is further compressed to discard "unimportant" information, but you can compress to different degrees, some of which look fine and some of which just look plain awful.
So, when you crop a raw file and then output to JPEG you only "suffer" one round of image damaging compression. If you were to output a full res file to JPEG and then open that JPEG file, crop it and then save again you would risk a further loss in quality from the second compress/save operation.
Now, with that in mind I believe you can get "lossless" cropping, which does not recompress the file on the second save, but does literally simply crop off the surplus pixels. This would work in the same way as "lossless" rotation. However, I suspect there are certain rules that need to be adhered to, such as pixel dimensions must be in multiples of 8, and, of course, your cropping software must implement lossless cropping as an option.
Irfanview can perform lossless cropping -
http://www.downloadatoz.com/manual/ir/irfanview/hlp_jpg_lossless_crop.htm. As for other software, I have no idea.