Tags are keywords. I put tags on every post to help you find the content you want. Tags may be people (Dominic Raab, say), organisations (The Howard League, PRT), themes (women offenders, homelessness) or specific items (heroin, racial disparity, ROTL). If you’re looking to research a particular issue, they can be invaluable.
The debate about whether crime is falling or rising is complicated by the large numbers of hidden computerised offences of fraud and theft. Last week’s theft of $500 billion worth of cryptocurrency was not an isolated event.
Intriguing study finds that twitter can reliably indicate prevalence of certain crimes, although only in low-crime London neighbourhoods.
But the interesting part of the story is that even after crime had been falling steadily for over 15 – 20 years, just 1 in 5 American or English people thought this was the case with only 4% Japanese believing that public safety had improved.
Harvey Redgrave of Crest Advisory analyses the new crime statistics and explains why the rise in recorded violence matters
A Crime Harm Index is a low-cost, easily adoptable barometer of the total impact of harm from crimes committed by other citizens, as reported by witnesses and victims.
While there are plenty of things to complain about in our justice system, it seems churlish not to celebrate the continuing fall in youth crime and the reduction in the numbers of young people drawn into the system.
The homicide rate for England and Wales has fallen sharply since 2002/3, and we are one of the safest countries in the world.
We know that crime rates have been falling steadily over the last 20 years but what about other trends in the criminal justice system. The MoJ has just (21 May 2015) published its report on activity in the criminal justice system for 2014. The total number of individuals dealt with formally by the CJS hit an all time low at 1.73 million.
New analysis undertaken by the report’s authors idntified the ageing population, changes in income and decreased alcohol consumption as factors reducing crime.A review of past research indicated that consumer confidence and inflation also seem to have contributed to crime reduction.
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:
This latest set of MoJ statistics adds power to the recent argument made by Professor Sean McConville (With Lois Blom-Cooper) that if we really want prison reform, we have to sideline politicians and have a Royal Commission.
The most convincing aspects of Morgan’s hypothesis are the way that is able to match local crime rates with peak levels of heroin use (although, unfortunately, he has to use the now-defunct Addicts Index as the indicator of heroin dependency). Atypical areas where heroin use peaked earlier (Merseyside, Edinburgh and the Republic of Ireland) or not at all (Northern Ireland) show very close correlation between the rise and fall of crime rates.
