Crime and Social Policy

Dr Mike Stephens, Mike Stephens, Pete Alcock, Professor Peter Alcock (S Ed), Pete Alcock, Professor Peter Alcock (S Ed)

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781135898731
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Médecine
• Subtopic: Théorie, pratique et référence de la médecine

Crime and Social Policy discusses the criminal justice system in England and Wales in an accessible and engaging manner. This title guides students through the system's complexities, reviewing its history, highlighting current problems, and offering recommendations as to where and how it can be improved.

Crime and criminal justice in context

1

Outline

Many people are rightfully fearful of becoming victims of crime.

Among those most at risk are poorer people living in inner-city areas and run-down estates.

Many others, influenced by exaggerated media coverage of crime (especially of the violent kind), overestimate their chances of being victimized.

Most people have a poor factual knowledge of the true extent of crime.

CRIME AND SOCIETY

Crime, like poverty, is always with us. Indeed, the two are interrelated. Of course, it is individuals who commit crime, but there are societal patterns of crime that we must also take into account. The link between crime and poverty may be expressed in a number of ways, but one of the most revealing is the manner in which, after a suitable time-lag, certain kinds of crimes either increase or decrease following a change in the fortunes of the economy. The Home Office’s Director of Research, Christopher Nuttall, has argued that ‘the largest single determinant of the crime rate is the state of the economy’ (The Independent, 18 September 1998, p. 13). Thus, when the economy is doing badly, there are more people out of work, and poverty is on the increase, property crimes, such as burglary and theft, tend to increase. When the economy is doing well and there are more people in work who have more money to spend, there is an increase in crimes of violence – largely as a result of more young men being able to go out more regularly, drink more alcohol, and more frequently become involved in various kinds of altercations.

Another link between crime and poverty can be found in the fact that ‘the most crime-ridden communities tend also to be the poorest’ (Wilson and Ashton 1998, p. 8). Moreover, both the official police-recorded statistics and the British Crime Survey showed that crime rates were much higher in lower income, urban communities whose inhabitants were also likely to become repeated victims (James and Raine 1998, p. 7).

Wealthier areas are not, however, immune to crime or to the fear of crime, since middle-class suburbs are frequently the target for burglaries. Fear of crime may also have devastating effects on people’s lifestyles, with some individuals choosing to lock themselves into homes that have become mini-fortresses, and avoiding certain areas altogether – or deciding not to go out at night. In addition, crime is a costly business – and not just in terms of the financial and psychological costs that victims may incur. In 1994, crime was estimated to have cost £24.5 billion per year (Davies et al. 1998, p. 67).

THE PROBLEMATIC NATURE OF CRIME

Crime is not as straightforward as one might think; nor is it always as bad as media coverage might suggest. Previously many kinds of activities were illegal and severely punished. What is officially classified as a crime is not a fixed phenomenon; rather it evolves -sometimes indirectly according to public demands and the lobbying of interest groups, or directly according to the will of Parliament. For instance, not so many years ago everyone could drive their motorbikes legally without a crash helmet, whereas today it is illegal and clearly accepted as such by almost everyone, (including Hell’s Angels). What is or isn’t legally defined as a crime may alter over time according to different social and political circumstances. This not only makes it more difficult to define the exact nature of crime, it also creates difficulties in measuring how much crime has occurred – especially if the measurements span a lengthy period of time and one is trying to make comparisons. Despite these difficulties, England and Wales currently have two main ways of measuring crime, each with their own further problems. They are the annual official statistics of crime recorded by the police, and the biennial British Crime Survey. The Home Secretary, Jack Straw, indicated in 1997 that in future a more robust measuring system would be introduced to provide a more accurate picture of the extent of crime, which (on paper) will probably result in a significant increase in the recorded figures. Given the sensitivity surrounding crime figures in this country and the tendency to turn the issue into a moral panic, it will be most interesting to see how the media and politicians react to any such increase.

Measures of crime

(See the Appendix pp 132–135 for recent crime statistics)

The official crime figures recorded by the police contain a number of flaws. Clearly, many crimes go unrecorded because victims feel that the loss is too trivial to investigate, or that the police are powerless to help. On the other hand, the reporting of crime may significantly increase following a concerted advertising campaign, (for instance, to clamp down on burglary), and a similar increase in reporting may occur where the public hold ‘new for old’ insurance policies that encourage people to report thefts. In neither case will the real rate of crime have necessarily increased, but the reporting of it certainly will have (Wilson and Ashton 1998, p. 3). People may report crimes to the police, but for a variety of reasons the police may not record them as crimes and, therefore, they cannot appear in the official statistics. A ‘no-crime’ may be recorded by the police if the offence is trivial and the chances of solving it are not good. Moreover, recording practices differ considerably between police forces – as do their respective clear-up rates. Racially motivated crimes may now be separately classified, but the rigour with which police forces accurately record such offences varies greatly and, accordingly, the number of officially recorded crimes with a racial element is likely to be seriously underestimated. Finally, crimes involving a number of victims are often recorded as one crime instead of several – a practice the government intends to discontinue.

As a result of these kinds of difficulties with official statistics, the British Crime Survey (BCS) was first conducted in 1982 by the Home Office as a different approach to the measurement of crime. Essentially, the BCS is a random sample of almost 15,000 people aged 16 and over. Respondents are asked about any crimes to which they have been subject in the previous 12 months, irrespective of whether these offences were reported to the police. By virtue of the fact that the BCS includes both reported and unreported crimes, it is considered to be a fairer reflection – if still not a completely accurate measure – of the number of crimes in England and Wales. By comparing the BCS’s figures with those of officially recorded offences, one can estimate the so-called ‘dark number’ of crimes; that is to say, the number of crimes that are hidden because they go unrecorded (Wilson and Ashton 1998, p. 5). The BCS does not cover all crime – for instance, corporate crime is excluded – but its latest figures for 1998 do suggest that about four times the amount of crime takes place than is indicated by the official statistics. In short, the BCS is a good indicator of the frequency of the most common crimes and how the levels of these change over time (Mirrlees-Black et al. 1998, p. 78).

Crime figures

While the BCS’s larger figure for crime won’t allay the fears of some members of the public, the BCS has tried to inject some rationality into the debate over crime and the chances of becoming a victim. Whereas police statistics may be used to compare crime rates in different police-force areas, they cannot easily demonstrate the variation in risks for different types of communities and individuals. The BCS does, however, gather data on the risks of victimization (Wasik et al. 1999, p. 1). The 1998 survey found that compared with property crime, the risk of becoming a victim of violence was low. Whereas, on average, 5.6% of all households in 1997 were subject to an attempted or successful burglary, only 1% of adults became the victim of a wounding (i.e. serious injury from an assault). Moreover, the highest risks of being burgled were associated with specific kinds of households with one or more of the following characteristics:

The head of the household is young.

The head of the household is unemployed.

The household unit is a single family.

The household enjoys only a low income.

The property is rented accommodation, either privately or from the council.

The property is left empty for 3 or more hours during the day.

The property is a flat or is located at the end of a terrace.

Locality, too, is a factor in victimization risk. The risk of burglary is greater in an inner-city area, on a council estate, and in an area characterized by physical disorder (Mirrlees-Black et al. 1998, pp. 28–30).

Despite the BCS’s estimate of nearly 16.5 million crimes against adults in 1997, the 1998 survey showed that there had been a fall between 1995 and 1997 in almost all categories of crimes – with burglary decreasing by 7%, violence by 17%, and thefts from vehicles by 25%. Overall, this amounted to a 14% decrease since the last BCS, which was the first occasion the survey recorded such an overall fall in crime. It also confirmed the downward trend in recent years in officially recorded crime figures (Mirrlees-Black et al. 1998). The decrease in violent crimes reported by the BCS can be contrasted with the 5% increase in offences involving violence against the person recorded by the police for 1997–1998. However, the police statistics also showed decreases in the number of robberies, vehicle crimes and domestic burglaries of 13%, 12% and 14% respectively. Overall, there was an 8% fall in the level of all recorded crimes – the largest of the consecutive falls in the preceding 5 years.

Despite these falls, there is still a serious crime problem in England and Wales. The official crime statistics for the period April 1997 to March 1998 indicated that 4.5 million crimes were recorded by the police (Povey and Prime 1998). Most were committed by men whose peak age for known offending was 18 (i.e. they committed the highest number of crimes in their lives when aged 18). Moreover, about 3% of offenders were estimated to have carried out approximately 25% of all offences (Home Office 1995). Furthermore, the link between drug abuse and crime has become clearer, with many crimes being committed by those needing to fuel their drug habits. Added to the high crime figures is the police’s modest abilities to solve them. In 1996–1997 the average clear-up rate for all crime among the police forces in England and Wales was 24% (Audit Commission 1998b, p. 13). Furthermore, if one takes the BCS figures for the amount of crime and compares them with the official statistics for those appearing in court, it becomes clear that, ‘on average, only about 2% of crimes committed actually result in a conviction’ (Wasik et al. 1999, p. 7).

CRIME, FEAR OF CRIME AND MORAL PANICS

There has never been a Golden Age in which crime rates were so low that citizens had little or no fear of crime and in which friendly bobbies patrolled their patch keeping order and providing help in a paternalistic fashion. Yet, many people look back nostalgically to an age when property crime and violence were much lower. I remember that when living in South Wales in the 1950s, it was common to leave one’s front-door key under the door mat, so slight was the expectation that one might be burgled. The perception that one’s community was a relatively safe place persisted in the minds of many people during the 1950s, despite the fact that crime had already begun to grow rapidly. This is not the place to enquire in detail as to why so much more crime occurs today than in the 1950s, but certainly society has undergone a startling transformation in the intervening decades – and especially between 1979 and 1992, when recorded offences rose from 2.4 million to 5.4 million (James and Raine 1998, p. 6). Moreover, ‘current levels of recorded crime are nearly 10 times greater than the level of recorded crime in the 1950s’ (Wasik et al. 1999, p. 4). The 1992 figure was the highest ever figure for officially recorded crime an...