The social context of

crime
Dr. Angel Thomas
Senior Consultant
Dept of Clinical Psychology
Mar Sleeva Medicity, Palai
 Sources of Information about the extent of
crime
• Many sources provide information about crime in society. For example, the mass media

devote substantial amounts of space to crime and the criminal justice system. Government

crime statistics are frequently presented as news items. For many of us, family, friends and

acquaintances are additionally sources of information about the nature and levels of crime.

Personal experience as a victim of crime or even a perpetrator can also contribute to our

knowledge and beliefs.

Personal experience of crime victim
Personal experience as a perpetrator
Surveys of the general public’s experience of crime in a
particular year- usually known as victim or victimisation
surveys.
• In this type- members of the public are interviewed about their
experience of crime in the previous year.

• They are subject to problems of recall and accuracy over the period in
question.

• Such surveys tend to produce the highest estimates of the rates of

crime and victimisation.

• Crimes for which the victim is corporate (a big company) or for which
there is no obvious victim (such as vandalism in the public park) are
likely to be omitted from the data collected.

• They may include events that may well not lead to a conviction by a
court of law.
Aggregate data of crimes recorded by/reported
to the police.

• These are affected by reporting biases. For example, some victims may decide not to go to the police. The police may decide that

certain events are best ignored and no attempt made at arrest (e.g. racist chants at a football match). The police may choose to see

the events as not being a crime for some reason. How the police classify events as crimes or not crimes and particular types of crime

may affect the overall pattern. Crimes recorded by the police are not the same as crimes reported to the police. When a victim

reports a crime, the police may decide that it is not appropriate to record it as a crime.
Court Statistics
• Court statistics that codify the numbers
and types of offences being processed
in a given year and the outcomes in
terms of sentencing of these different
cases. The obvious biases here are in
terms of the factors that lead to
prosecution as opposed to no charge.
Prison Statistics
• Prison statistics provide
breakdowns of the numbers
in prison at any one time,
their offence categories, their
sentence and so forth. Biases
here may be due to
sentencing policies at the
time. For example, a
concerted clampdown on
burglary may lead to an
increase in the numbers of
burglars in prison.
General Population Offender Surveys
• General population offender surveys have recently been developed in which members of a random sample

of households are interviewed about the crimes they have committed ever in their lives and/or recently, say,

in the previous year. This is likely to include at least some crimes that would be ignored by the police and

other components of the criminal justice system as being too trivial to warrant prosecution. Furthermore,

there is probably a bias against the more serious crimes since those who have committed the more serious

crimes may well have been arrested, prosecuted and sent to prison, so that they are excluded from such

surveys.
The extent of criminality
• white-collar or middle-class crime.
• The extent of potential criminality in behaviour can also be seen from studies of youngsters.
• For example, Wilson (1980) took samples of 10- to 17-year-olds living in deprived housing estates in inner
city or suburban settings. Evidence concerning their criminality was obtained directly from police records of
convictions and cautions:
• Twenty per cent of the boys had a record of crime.
• Theft and burglary were the commonest offences. This should be contrasted with their self-reported misbehaviours. Crime is much more
common in terms of self-reported offences rather than criminal convictions – over 40% had shoplifted, 67% had drawn graffiti in the street
and so forth.
Violent Crimes
The extent of criminality in the population is
remarkably high.

• The figure is 11% for men but only 2% for women.

• A black person has a 19% chance compared with 3% for white people.

• The figure for black men is 32% as opposed to 6% for white men. That is,
nearly

• one in three black men will spend time in prison!

• Over 64% of jailed persons were of racial or ethnic minority origin in 2001.