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Lecture 2
Timothy Mason (cv)
Université de Paris 8
Official statistics & the Dark Figure
Recap
I suggested last week that there were several different ways of looking at crime. We read an extract from D'heim's 'Règles de la méthode sociologique' in which he argued that crime, a normal phenomenon in all societies, was necessary to the health of any social system. Not all observers would agree; for some, crime and delinquency cause a great deal of unnecessary misery and despair. Their interest in criminology stems from an ameliorative desire to neutralize the criminal and to reduce criminality; criminology as a specific discipline, emerged as the scientific arm of the repressive agencies of the state - the great criminologists were civil servants attached to the Ministry of the Interior, rather than university dons. Criminology began as an applied discipline rather than a theoretical one
This meant that, to a large extent, they took the criminal law as given : a system of rules which objectively differentiated between the honest and the criminal. The work of the criminologists was to study the latter, and discover what differentiated it from the former, so as to be able to predict, prevent, and, if possible, cure. The criminologist could work with two kinds of information - first, he could study the statistical corpus constituted by the official crime figures; this would tell him something about the overall social conditions that lead to more or less crime.
Durkheim's comment that crime levels could reach unacceptable levels, pointing to some social crisis, such as an economic slump, is close to this way of thinking. Second, he could look at the individuals or groups who were responsible for the crime figures. Find your criminal, study his physiognomy, his mind, his habits, and you would be finding out more about crime. Furthermore, it was not difficult to find the criminal. He was a law-breaker, and law breakers were to be found in prison. Study the prison population, and you would have a representative sample of villains.
Sounding out crime
What I want to do today is to show how this approach has been brought into question over the last few decades, to such an extent that it is probably no longer possible to work in that way. I wish to show that neither the crime statistics, nor the prison population can be treated as representative of any activities or populations prior to the social process which constructs them. No account which sees the activities of what I shall call the Criminal Processing Institutions as being purely reactive can grasp the fully social nature of crime. The activities of the police, the legislature, the courts and various pressure groups contribute to the constitution of criminality, both as a matter of definition, and as a matter of fact.
Let us look first at the crime statistics. If you look at the figures in front of you, you will see that the British crime rate has risen regularly since the end of the Second World War. Most people would see here evidence that behaviour has worsened over the last fifty years, and they would search for explanations in changes in the family, changes in the educational system, changes in the population of some kind. What I shall claim is that, although it may indeed be true that behaviour has worsened over that period, and that people may well have become more violent and less honest, the figures themselves cannot prove this to be so.
The first reason is the very simple one that definitions change. Take the example of 'Criminal damage' - vandalism. As we can see from the table, the cost of damage, measured in £s, necessary for an offence to enter the statistics changed radically between 1971 & 1988. The change was, of course, necessary, in order to take account of inflation, but this in itself points to the difficulty of comparing the figures for one year with those of the next. The definition may, then, change because the legislators decide to change it, or it may change because the referents employed in the definition itself change - in this case, the value of money. What we are saying here is that a definition is and cannot be given once and for all, but is subject to slippage and to renegotiation. In the case of criminal damage, of course, this change in definition appears, on the surface, to underline the growth in behaviour of this kind. However, things are not as simple as they may appear.
In order for an item of behaviour to become included in the statistics, it must go through a long and hazardous process.
1. First of all, it must be witnessed, either at the time of the event or subsequently. This may not always be the case. A barman who short-changes a drunken customer counts upon the customer's being incapable of knowing what is happening to him, and the customer's memory of events the next morning may be so vague as to prevent his ever recognizing that he has been robbed.
Even very serious crimes may go unnoticed ; as we have had occasion to see several times over the last few years, the fact that a man or woman has been murdered may go unnoticed for several years. For example, the serial killer Dennis Nilsen, who preyed on young unattached males, was able to assassinate a number of them without their disappearance being noticed. Large sums of money may disappear in frauds without anyone suspecting what has happened. So we may conclude that many behaviours which could be considered proper candidates for labelling as criminal simply do not come to light at all.
2. Secondly, the witness to the behaviour must decide that the behaviour can be defined as criminal. Here, very often, we find that definitions may conflict. In the 18th Century, artisans who worked with gold believed that any waste material belonged to them. The master goldsmiths, of course, did not hold the same beliefs. In the world of work, many employees define as 'perks' behaviour which, strictly speaking, is illegal. Definitions of these kinds are open to evolution - what was acceptable yesterday is less so today.
Take the case of physical violence ; according to the reminiscences of retired police officers, physical violence of a quite savage kind was an everyday occurrence in the East End of London in the years between the two world wars, and was simply not seen as anything other than a perfectly normal and acceptable way of settling disputes. Even today, a Saturday evening fight between adolescent working class boys in the rough areas of the inner cities will be no cause for adverse comment. Or take the case of relations between the sexes ; wife-beating has become less and less acceptable over the last 20 years or so - we have come a long way since a London police officer was able to say :
'There are only about 20 murders a year in London, and not all are serious - some are just husbands killing their wives' - Scotland Yard official, 1954
Up until two years ago, it was impossible for a husband to rape his wife - the law has now been changed. We can see then, that
a) legal definitions of crime are not always the same as informal definitions
b) both formal and informal definitions may change over time.
We could also cite here what are sometimes referred to as 'victimless crimes' - the consumption of drugs, or prostitution, where the criminal - the drug user or the prostitute - does no harm to anyone other than, perhaps, themselves. Very often, in such cases, neither the criminal, nor witnesses - who may be other drug users, or the prostitutes clients - may consider that there has 'really' been a crime.
3. In the third place, the witness or witnesses must decide to report the crime to the police. The witness may, after weighing up the pros and cons, decide that it simply isn't worth his while. The witness to a Mafia killing may decide that it is better to remain silent - this is indeed what happens in Southern Italy. Only when the police have managed to demonstrate that they are capable of protecting their witnesses will any be likely to come forward.
Or the witness may decide that the bother of having to go to the police station, and then subsequently to court, is just too great - if someone has stolen your bicycle, and you know that your chances of getting it back are virtually zero, you may decide simply to write the loss off and buy another one, or to use the bus in future.
Again, it may be that the criminal is a close friend or relative of yours, and you decide that friendship or the relationship is more important than the accuracy of the official crime figures. Wives often refrain from reporting physical violence on the part of their husbands, because they wish to remain married to them, and still have positive feelings despite the physical abuse. A mother whose adolescent son steals large sums of money from her purse will not usually report the theft to the police, nor will she report the fact that her son is a drug addict. Children who are sexually abused by their parents may not wish to tell anyone what is happening because they still love the parent.
Witnesses may also decide that they can themselves deal with the offence in a more satisfying manner than the police could ; the brother or father of a raped girl may decide that he should avenge her himself, rather than subject her to the indignities of a court appearance.
It seems likely that people are more willing to report a crime if they have a financial incentive to do so. If your house is broken into and the thieves run off with your stereo equipment and the television, your chances of getting the goods back are extremely low. You will, however, probably report the loss, because the insurance company insists on the crime having been reported to the police before they will pay compensation. Indeed, it has been suggested that part of the growth in figures for burglary through the 60s was due to a reporting phenomenon linked to the growing number of people who insured their houses against the crime.
4. Let us assume, then, that a behaviour has been witnessed, that the witness has defined it as criminal, and that the witness has also decided that for one reason or another he should report it to the police. Does this mean that the behaviour will necessarily be added to the official statistics? It does not. For the police have to agree that there is a good foundation for the report. There are several reasons why they may decide not to do so. Observers have noticed that police are less likely to register a complaint if the complainant is abusive and hostile. They may also decide that it is a matter that can be settled more easily outside the formal system - a juvenile may simply be allowed to get away with an informal warning.
The police may also be reluctant to add the behaviour to their list of crimes simply because they do not believe that they will be able to solve it. This means that their clear-up rate will be lower, and they may feel that if the clear-up rate is too low, they will lose public support. This appears to be something of a problem for the police - on the one hand, if the statistics show that they are being successful, it is difficult for them to justify any greater investment - new personnel, or more up-to-date machines - whereas if the statistics are showing that they are being unsuccessful, they may lose the support of the public, and of the government. Their willingness or reluctance to accept the reporting of crimes which are difficult to solve petty theft, housebreaking, or some forms of robbery - may vary with the political and social climate, leading to fluctuations in the crime rate that have nothing to do with changes in the behaviour that is being reported to them.
Once the police has recorded a crime, then this will be added to the statistics, and these figures, are, in turn, collated by the Ministry for the Interior, or by the FBI, and are then published as the official crime rate. As we can see, there are many reasons to believe that they vary for other reasons than variations in criminal behaviour. Most criminologists would now agree that the official crime figures are a very poor index of real criminal activity. The institutionalist concludes not that the crime figures are wrong, but that they are the result of a series of face-to-face negotiations, set within a particular social structure, with its specific ideological and class formations. How they are constructed is sociologically interesting in its own right and does indeed tell us something about the social construction of criminality. The realist, on the other hand, recognizing that the statistics cannot reflect the 'true level' criminal behaviour, constructs a theoretical device - the dark figure and a set of investigation procedures - self-report and victimization surveys - which are intended to complement and correct the official figures.
Thus, for Radzinowicz, there exist a set of real crimes which are not reported to the police - these constitute the Dark Figure. The problem now remains of discovering the relationship between the official figures and the Dark Figure. First, the realist stresses that the Dark Figure is far larger than the official figures - by anything between 6 & 10 times larger. In a moment, we will see how this calculation is made. Next, he tries to estimate whether this relationship has changed through time : after all, there are at least three possibilities
a) - the relationship between the official figures and the Dark Figure remains more or less constant through time, so that a rise or a fall in the official figures can be seen as an index of a real rise or fall in criminal activity
b) - the official figures rise because, through police efficiency, or changes in the reporting behaviour of the public, a greater percentage of criminal behaviour is actually reported to the police. The steady rise over the last few decades can mostly be explained in terms of changes in the CPI, rather than in terms of changes in criminal behaviour.
c) - the Dark Figure rises faster than the official figures - this may be because social breakdown, and the spread of antisocial behaviour is so rapid that the police cannot keep up with it, and come more and more to see their task as simply containing criminality, and ensuring that it remains within reasonable bounds, rather than trying to eliminate it. Thus, it may be that in the ghettos of American inner cities, the police have to a large extent given up on the formal prosecution of young criminals, and allow them to deal in drugs and form gangs so long as they keep within the specific areas allotted to them.
So as to increase our knowledge of the Dark Figure, criminologists have developed two kinds of survey.
1. One of these is the self-report study. Generally, this involves asking a sample of young people to look at a list of behaviours, and to admit to any which they themselves have indulged in over a given period of time. We will need to look at the results of these surveys more closely on another occasion; for the moment, we will simply note that they suggest that deviant behaviour is of a far greater extent, and far more widely distributed than might have been expected. We find up to 90% of adolescent boys recognising that they have behaved in ways which might have lead to their being labelled delinquent. We also find that the differences between girls and boys are less sizeable than has been thought and that girls are capable of committing a similar range of offences to boys.
2. As we shall see, these studies are not beyond criticism. Criminologists have supplemented them with a second form of investigation, the Victimization survey. In this case, respondents are asked to record crimes that have been committed against them. Once again, the results suggest that criminality is far more widespread than the official figures show. Certain particularly crimes about which victims are particularly sensitive, such as rape, are heavily underreported. Others are not reported because the victim did not consider them to be important, or did not believe that the police could or would do anything about them.
The study of patterns of victimization also demonstrates that not everyone is equally likely to be targeted by criminals. Poor people living in inner cities are much more likely to suffer than are the well-off living in residential suburbs. Young working class males are far more likely to suffer assaults than are elderly middle-class women - indeed, in so far as violent crime is concerned - particularly assault - the victims and the perpetrators are very often the same people.
Once again, there are methodological and definitional problems with this kind of survey, and we will need to use their results with caution. Because of the comparative rarity of serious crime, many of the incidents are fairly minor, and in order to get a good picture of major crime patterns, large numbers of respondents need to be interviewed. This kind of work is therefore in need of government funding, and governments are not always willing to pay out money for surveys which demonstrate that they are losing the war against crime - this is what happened to funding for American Victimization surveys when Richard Nixon was president.
Neither the Victimization nor the Self-report studies have been going long enough for criminologists to reach any conclusions as to the relationship between the Dark Figure and the official figures through time. They do apparently demonstrate that there is a large amount of unpleasant behaviour which never does reach official notice. How large a number of these behaviours would actually be recognized as criminal by the CPI if they were to reach the report stage, is questionable. For a strict institutionalist, the fact that they are never recorded as crimes means that they are not in fact sociologically speaking crimes at all. An act only becomes a crime if and when it passes through the processing institutions.
We have looked at the official crime rate today and we have found that it is indeed the product of complex social processes. It is constructed through social interaction, involving the negotiation of social reality by perpetrators, witnesses and the police, based upon their beliefs, intuitions and judgements as to what a real crime is, as to what is the appropriate action to take when a crime has occurred, and as to what interest the individuals concerned may have in taking action. However, the process of crime construction neither begins nor ends there. We will need to look at the processes by which reported crimes are or are not attached to specific individuals who come to be labelled as the guilty persons responsible for the crimes. We will also need to look at the activities of legislators and of pressure groups in the construction of the criminal law, and in the demand for new legislation, or for stricter or looser application of already existing laws.
Next week, we will look at the question of the whether we do or do not know the population of criminals - that is, whether the people who are convicted and sent to prison are in fact representative of the people who commit acts that could be defined as criminal.
1 From 'Social Trends 21', 1991, Central Statistical Office, London, HMSO, p. 196. Social Trends is a published yearly be the Gvoernment Statistical Service, and provides extremely useful information for the sociologist on many aspects of British society. 2 See 'Killing for Company', Brian Masters, Coronet Books, London, 1986.
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