CRIME AND PUNISHMENT : Interpreting the Data

Softcover. Crime and punishment statistics are subject to widely differing interpretations. At one level, they are used by the popular news media as hard evidence of a rising tide of crime and of prisons bursting at the seams. On the other hand, among practitioners and researchers, they have sometimes been considered so much subject to the vagaries and inconsistencies of their collection as to be virtually useless in assessing the real level of criminal activity, and the functioning of the criminal justice system. In this book the authors examine in detail the statistics of crime and punishment in England and Wales over the previous two decades, explaining the mechanisms by which the statistics are created and the uses to which they can realistically be put. Drawing on both official statistics and other research, they provide an extensive analysis of trends in the futures for crimes committed, cautions, arrests, sentencing, probation and other key issues, and assess what criminal statistics can tell us about crime rates and the workings of the criminal justice system. Throughout, they illustrate ways in which the information contained in official statistics is likely to mislead, and ways in which it can be legitimately used to address important policy issues. With List of Tables, List of Figures, Bibliog. and Index. 185pp. trade size softcover. Lightly browned pp., sl. patchy fading (see image), signs of b/plate removal inside fr. cover o/w Vg+ with no creasing to covers.