Statistics: Historical Trends in Western Society - Problems Of Measurement, Criminality In The Premodern Era, Estimates Of Crime In The Modern Era
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The extent of crime in Western societies is an issue of grave concern to public officials and criminologists alike. Those who are projecting police budgets and building prisons need to know the levels and kinds of crime to expect in future years, just as those who think more broadly about the causes of crime need to know how it has undermined society in years past. Many in the public seek information about crime trends, and many groups develop such information. The problems inherent in determining the distribution of crime in society as well as its historical trends are substantial, and before an estimate of its historical extent in Western society can be provided, the difficulties in gathering such information should be considered.
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Since the incidence of crime is largely unpredictable—like an earthquake—it can be measured only after it has already taken place. The measurement of crime, therefore, is subject to all the errors that indirect measurements entails. Attempts to measure crime omit some cases, record some that are not criminal, and incorrectly classify others. All attempts to measure crime reflect not …
Since criminal justice agencies did not issue regular reports before the modern era, knowledge of premodern criminality is limited. It is based for the most part on studies of early court records, church documents, or coroners' rolls and requires a painstaking effort to collect and infer useful data from handwritten documents. Studies of medieval European towns generally report very high le…
Early studies of property crime during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries are colored by the role of legal institutions in the community. Where the courts were merely formal instruments for carrying out the informal will of the community—or where, in addition to the courts, the church and other nonlegal institutions played a major part in sanctioning wrongdoers as in medieva…
A number of studies relying heavily on court records have focused on crime in nineteenth-century cities and nations. Police data became available around the middle of the nineteenth century, and accordingly several investigators utilized this important source as well. Virtually every study reports a steady but substantial decline in crime during the nineteenth century. In France, for example, seri…
During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, criminality in Western societies, particularly property crime, fluctuated in response to changing economic conditions. Although wars had an impact on crime rates, reducing them during hostilities and raising
them afterward, their effects were not long-lasting in America. Periods of economic distress usually resulted in higher levels of p…
With the end of World War II and the economic recovery in Europe in the 1950s, crime rates and particularly rates of violent crime began to climb once again throughout the West. In England and Wales, murder and assault cases increased from 13 per 100,000 in 1950 to 144.3 per 100,000 in 1975, for an eleven-fold increase (Gurr, p. 363). During the same period the rate of larceny-theft rose from 847 …
The discussion has identified several patterns in Western criminal behavior. First, evolving social and legal institutions in the West have contributed basically to a long-term, secular decline in violent offenses—a decline in homicide from fourteenth-century London to seventeenth-century Surrey and Sussex; a decline in violent offenses from 1824 to 1928 in Boston; and sizable declines in B…
——. Crime and the Courts in England, 1660–1800. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986. Bureau of the Census. Statistical Abstracts of the United States. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Commerce, annual, 1960–1967. Federal Bureau of Investigation. Crime in the United States. Uniform Crime Reports for the United States. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department o…
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