As with much else in Britain, the 1980s marked a watershed in the politics of crime control. This article traces the role of criminological research, developed and articulated by governmental social scientists, in the evolution of penal policy around the (then) innovative idea of engaging the community in the prevention of crime. Its central theme is that although the raison d'être for crime prevention policy and practice, then as now, can be found in a concern about the deficiencies of the statutory police in addressing crime, shifting the locus of social control towards the institutions of civil society was, and remains, a contested project.

Empirical victimology is concerned both with the study of people's experiences of crime victimisation and of the people who experience crime victimisation (i.e. victims). As such, it is fraught with conceptual problems, though many of these often tend to be overlooked or remain unexamined in empirical research. Most forms of social activity involve people interacting with their environment, and crime victimisation is no exception. Each crime victimisation event is embedded within, and sets in train, complex webs of social action and meaning, stretching backwards and forwards in time for the people involved, and intersecting with the lives of others. Crime events also occur in specific instances of space-time – including 'cyberspace'. Yet we cannot readily observe the complexities and ramifications of these events and their settings – not just in the sense of being unable to observe people's motives towards them or their interpretations of them, but even being able to capture the full complexity of the systems of social interaction that converge upon and are brought about by the act itself. So, the data that we have to work with are typically only partial selections from these complexities, focusing on limited slices of time-space in which such events occur and, at any one time, usually upon only one of the many parties to the event – in this case, the crime's immediate victim. Inevitably, then, there are considerable difficulties of interpretation and inference, including problems of partiality, bias and distortion, raised by the essential selectivity of the available data.

This title was first published in 2000: The papers in this volume are concerned with the prevention of crime. Like other books in the International Library, the text is intended primarily for reference by those who need to reflect upon what criminology has had to say about important, contemporary concerns of criminal policy. The papers present a kind of history of ideas which together trace the emergence of some key components of contemporary thinking about reducing crime.

Crime surveys are conducted to record crimes by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) in the United Kingdom every year. They contain rich information about crime. They record the crimes that are not reported to the police. However, their exploitation for gaining a better understanding of crime activities is limited. When used, traditional statistical models and descriptive statistics are adopted. The data they contain is very complex and changes from one year to the other. In this paper, we report the preprocessing activities that were performed on survey data to allow their use with data mining models. We reported the results of early analysis of the survey data using decision trees and the users' interpretation of these results.

Abstract This chapter focuses upon understanding the data-generating process that gives rise to the frequency distribution of crime victimization count data sampled from the British Crime Survey (BCS). Having described the form of this data, it introduces the problem of explaining the overdispersion of the distribution. It discusses and compares various models of the data that make assumptions about the data-generation process, including risk-heterogeneity, state-dependency, conditional probability, the double hurdle model, and the spells model. Its principal conclusion is that the crime victimization frequency distribution found in BCS data is the heterogeneous product of the mixing of two probability distributions: one concerns victim-prevalence, where zero-inflation predominates; the other concerns victimization-frequency, expressing the long-tail of high-frequencies. This conceptualization sheds new light on some persistent difficulties that might point the way towards future progress in understanding and remedying the distribution of crime victimization among citizens.

As part of our Justice Matters initiative we are challenging people to think about a criminal justice practice, policy or institution to abolish or abstain from, here contributors offer their choices…

Tests the idea that the frequency distribution typically observed in crosssectional crime victimization data sampled from surveys of general populations is a heterogeneously distributed result of the mixing of two latent processes associated, respectively, with each of the tails of the distribution. Datasets are assembled from a number of samples taken from the British Crime Survey and the Scottish Crime Victimization Survey. Latent class analysis is used to explore the probable, latent distributions of individual property crime and personal crime victimization matrices that express the frequency and type of victimization that are self-reported by respondents over the survey recall period. The analysis obtains broadly similar solutions for both types of victimization across the respective datasets. It is demonstrated that a hypothesized mixing process will produce a heterogeneous set of local sub-distributions: a large sub-population that is predominantly not victimized, a very small 'chronic' sub-population that is frequently and consistently victimized across crime-type, and an 'intermediate' sub-population (whose granularity varies with sample size) to whom the bulk of victimization occurs. Additionally, attention is paid to the position of very high frequency victimization within these sub-populations. The analysis supports the idea that crime victimization may be a function of two propensities: for immunity, and exposure. It demonstrates that zero-inflation is also a defining feature of the distribution that needs to be set alongside the significance that has been attached to the thickness of its right tail. The results suggest a new baseline model for investigating population distributions of crime victimization.

‘It is criminality, pure and simple’; so said the Prime Minister in his Statement to Parliament on 11 August 2011 following days and nights of rioting and looting across London and other English cities. As most of us usually concern ourselves with issues of criminal and social justice, we are more likely to agree with Oscar Wilde than David Cameron; that the truth, about rioting as much as crime and justice, is rarely pure and never simple.

Of the Three Rs, how good has New Labour been with the arithmetic of crime? The answer depends upon who is doing the marking. By self-assessment, it felt it had done remarkably well: We have had te...

AbstractThe notion that criminological ideas provide the discursive conditions for the governance of crime has featured prominently in criminological scholarship. In the matter of government, thinking about crime coalesces into official criminologies that function to justify and validate state policies and practices of crime control. In representative democracies, these official criminological discourses are ‘public’ and, in principle, take their place alongside others, including those of lay people, the media and politics generally; as well as the criminology produced by academics. As a form of knowledge, official criminologies are definable by the purpose to which they are put. This chapter discusses the problem of causation for official criminology, the problem of prediction, and the problem of selection. It further asks whether official criminology is a science and whether official criminology is political.

Social cues, such as eye gaze and pointing fingers, can increase the prioritisation of specific locations for cognitive processing.A previous study using a manual reaching task showed that, although both gaze and pointing cues altered target prioritisation (reaction times [RTs]), only pointing cues affected action execution (trajectory deviations).These differential effects of gaze and pointing cues on action execution could be because the gaze cue was conveyed through a disembodied head; hence, the model lacked the potential for a body part (i.e., hands) to interact with the target.In the present study, the image of a male gaze model, whose gaze direction coincided with two potential target locations, was centrally presented.The model either had his arms and hands extended underneath the potential target locations, indicating the potential to act on the targets (Experiment 1), or had his arms crossed in front of his chest, indicating the absence of potential to act (Experiment 2).Participants reached to a target that followed a nonpredictive gaze cue at one of three stimulus onset asynchronies.RTs and reach trajectories of the movements to cued and uncued targets were analysed.RTs showed a facilitation effect for both experiments, whereas trajectory analysis revealed facilitatory and inhibitory effects, but only in Experiment 1 when the model could potentially act on the targets.The results of this study suggested that when the gaze model had the potential to interact with the cued target location, the model's gaze affected not only target prioritisation but also movement execution.