PART I: POSITIVELY UNDERTAKEN

compilation for official police recording purposes (see Seidman and

Couzens [1974] for a particularly illuminating account).We return to
this point below in relation to the work of Meehan (2000).

Deploying crime statistics for reasons of state

We began by saying that both administrative and correctional crimi-

nology are built on the foundation of official crime statistics. There
would be nothing wrong with this if correctional criminology
attended to the actual methods by which, and the uses for which,
the statistics were assembled in the first place. But, as we have said
above, this has simply not been the case. Rather, closeted by Matza’s
set of component assumptions set out above, correctional criminol-
ogy has been seduced by the desire for scientific certainty and social
usefulness and its embedded craving for generality to adopt the view
that the figures measure (even if only estimate) something imagined
to be real crime and are thus suitable for the purpose of theoretical
explanation. This methodological mindset has persisted throughout
more than a century of critique, the response to which has been to
make methodological innovations (like the self-report and victimiza-
tion surveys) and carry on. Insofar as the critique has been made in
terms of the reliability, validity and generalizability of the statistics
as measures of the putative real-world phenomenon thought to be
crime, then, of course, the critique itself shares in the same scientistic
assumptions that Matza identifies. As one of us noted at the end of an
earlier review, “despite strenuous efforts at constructing, reconstruct-
ing and deconstructing them, the sociology of official statistics is yet
to be written” (Eglin 1987: 210).
What needs to be kept firmly in mind here is that official crime
statistics are collected and analyzed by the state for its administrative
purposes. They are not in the first place scientific data and were not
produced for theoretical purposes. They are management tools to
be used for the state’s practical purposes of social or public admin-
istration. When we say that the sociology of official statistics is yet
to be written, it is in just this sense that this is meant. With a few
exceptions (notably Meehan 2000; see also Bottomley and Coleman
1981), including Gusfield’s (1981: 55–60) brief “social history of [the]
dramatic fact” of “ten million alcoholics” in the United States, soci-
ologists have not described just what happens to these tools once they

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