Forensics - defining and measuring crime

psychology

Define crime

Any Illegal act punishable by Incarceration or any other type of punishment after consideration from a judge & jury at a legal trial.

Crime - Historical issues

what was once a crime in the past may not be considered a crime now according to modern standards. e.g. homosexuality only being illegalised in the UK in 1967, through the Sexual Offences Act of 1967

Crime - cultural issues

what is normalised in one culture may be considered a crime in the other. e.g smacking a child seen as discipline but in other cultures seen as abuse. - smacking a child so that a mark is left is now punishable by law, according to the 2004 Child’s Protection Act.

what are the three main methods of measuring crime

Official Statistics

Victim Surveys

Offender Surveys

Official statistics

Official Statistics describe the number of crimes reported to and recorded by the police, which have been processed and published by the Home Office on an annual basis.

Victim surveys

Victim surveys involve 50,000 randomly selected households to self-report the number and types of crimes which have been committed against them during the past year, and is published by the Crime Survey for England and Wales annually.

offender surveys

offender surveys target a randomly-selected cohort of criminals, who give details of the types and frequency of crimes they have committed across a set time period.

recorded by The Offender Crime and Justice Survey.

This is particularly useful for governmental organisations as a view of the patterns and risk factors for crime at a national scale, and so can be used to inform crime prevention/management strategies.

Evaluation

A particular problem associated with official statistics is its susceptibility to concealing the ‘dark figure’ of crime

-75% of crime goes unreported

• This may be due to a lack of standardisation of police recording policies in relation to crime, as well as the victim fearing revenge/retribution or feeling untrustworthy of the police. The effects of these indiscrepancies was demonstrated by Farrington and Dowds (1985) who found that sudden increases in incidence rates of theft could be explained by a change in police recording policies, where thefts under £10 were recorded. This therefore suggests that official statistics may be an inaccurate representation of crime

Evaluation

Victim surveys have the advantage, over official statistics
-that the ‘dark figure’ of crime is less likely to be concealed or evident due to the self-report technique, where individuals may feel that there are less repercussions for their actions.

Definition

Evaluation

However, victim surveys suffer from the serious methodological problems associated with self report techniques

• specifically, the idea of ‘telescoping’, where the victim may mistakenly believe that a crime had been committed against them significantly more recently than it actually had been, due to the trauma and distress associated with it. Therefore, victim surveys may be no more accurate than official statistics.

Evaluation

Offender surveys have been particularly useful in informing crime prevention

• and management strategies due to showing the patterns and risk factors of offending behaviour. Therefore, this demonstrates a real-life practical application.

Evaluations

On the other hand, the data collected from Offender Surveys may be distorted or biased because it has been collected from offenders.

• These offenders may want to over-exaggerate their crimes to give themselves a feeling of accomplishment and grandeur, or under-exaggerate their crimes to diminish responsibility. This means that too much reliance cannot be placed upon the honesty and integrity of offenders in self-report measures.