Here you can find over 100 infographics, many professional but dozens of them created by myself, to help you quickly digest complex issues and share the findings in an easy visual source with colleagues or students. If you’re looking for something in particular, try the search box below.
Over recent years most US states have reduced the amount they use incarceration (driven in great part by economic concerns) and have found that crime rates have gone down. Indeed, as this infographic from the Pew Foundation shows, those states which have cut the use of imprisonment have seen their crime rates fall further than those that haven’t:
Some of the key claims made about cybercrime in the US which, unsurprisingly, appears to be growing rapidly year on year are: 378 million victims per year (includes a lot of repeat victimisation); 30,000 websites hacked every day; Mobile devices most at risk
The infographic below shows what big business private prisons have become in the USA. As you can see, the number of private prisons has grown exponentially in the last 20 years.
Y-STOP recently publicised a useful infographic showing information about the number of young people under 18 stopped and searched in the year up to March 2014. Just 11% of these stops led to arrests and the Metropolitan Police carried out 39% of all stop and searches on young people.
We know that a large proportion of women in prison in England and Wales are drug dependent – 54% female remand prisoners were addicted to drugs in the year prior to being in prison. There is a parallel situation in the USA. Women are more than 50% more likely to be imprisoned for a drug crime than men (25.7% vs 17.2%).
The Ministry of Justice has become increasingly committed to Restorative Justice over recent years. There was considerable emphasis on RJ in the recently completed Transforming Rehabilitation process with new providers urged to include restorative work and the police use of community resolutions is to be expanded.
One of the principal attractions of a good infographic is that it’s possible to assemble many pages’ worth of key facts and figures in one image. The infographic below, developed by the Top Criminal Justice Schools website, manages to pull together information about the size of the global drug market in terms of: Users; Value; Expenditure and
Kingpins (several of whom reliably make the Forbes world’s richest list every year)
The main argument in favour of allowing prisoners to vote is that we need to do everything we can to give offenders a stake in society and disenfranchising them merely adds to a general social exclusion and hinders the desistance process. But if the UK is out of step with Europe, the situation in the USA is far more extreme.
Hidden in the text of the article is the rather less sensational and more welcome finding that gun crime has been falling rapidly with only 127 shots fired in the first half of 2014 with just one related death. What is perhaps most startling is the way that the police have reduced shootings without entering into a gun battle with criminals.
This year’s (British) Crime Survey found an increase in the proportion of people using illegal drugs is rising again. This finding is in the context of a steady drop in levels of drug use over the last 15 years and it’s not clear whether the rise is merely a blip or the start of a new upwards trend.
African Americans are three times more likely to be in prison compared to their white counterparts (based on the overall make-up of the population) and even more likely to be on death row.
Although I tend to agree with the arguments of those who contend that the War on Drugs has caused more problems than it has solved, I’m still instinctively sceptical about the merits of legalising drugs on the basis that it’s always a lot harder to get the genie back in the bottle.
