Patterns & Trends in Crime

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  • Created by: nelliott
  • Created on: 30-09-21 10:24

Social Class

  • Sutherland (1949) pointed out that criminal statistics show that crime is higher in the lower class than in the upper class
  • Despite an unemployment rate of 5% in the general population, the research showed that 67% of the prison population had been unemployed before imprisonment, and 32% had been homeless, compared to 0.9% of the general population 
  • Williams (2012) also found that other factors found more frequently in prison included
  • 1.Having run away from home
  • 2.Experienced violence and/ or drug and alcohol misuse from school
  • 3.Being excluded from school
  • 4.Having no qualifications
  • Data from self-report studies show that the difference between offending rates for working- and middle-class people is not as high as figures suggest
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Gender

  • Data from the Ministry of Justice shows that females accounted for only 18% of arrests and 25% of convictions in 2013
  • Though girls may continue to offend in their teens, offending drops after this, whereas offending for males does not decline significantly until well into their 20s
  • In 2010-2011, female offenders were more likely than male offenders to be on benefits before and after their caution, conviction, or prison sentence, whereas in the general population, males were more likely than females to be on benefits
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Age

  • Gender differences can be seen in youth offending: males aged 10-17 were found to be responsible for 20% of all police recorded crime in 2009-2010 and young women responsible for only 4%
  • Juvenile offenders are more likely than adult offenders to receive a caution rather than a conviction for their first offence, with females (83%) more likely to receive a youth caution than males (75%) in 2013
  • McVie (2004) argued that in reality, the data is often grouped into age-bands, which may hide more precise trends
  • Home Office data often groups everyone over 21 together, making it impossible to identify trends in adult offending, and the age groupings for teenagers often differ, making comparisons difficult
  • Soothill (2004), found that the peak age of conviction for some crimes, such as burglary to be around 16 or less, whereas motoring and drug offences peaked between 21-25 before declining
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Ethnicity

  • According to Ministry of Justice data, black people were stopped and searched seven times more than white people in 2009-2010
  • The overall number of arrests decreased by 3% in the five years to 2010, but arrests of black people rose by 5% and arrests of Asian people by 13%
  • Bowling and Phillips (2006) point out that the Crown Prosecution Service is more likely to drop cases put forward by the police involving black suspects, suggesting that the police charge black people more frequently based on inadequate evidence, than they d with suspects from other ethnic groups
  • A report from the Association of Chief Police Officers in 2008 found that, despite newspaper headlines linking new migrants to crime, offending rates among mainly Polish, Romanian and Bulgarian communities were in line with the rate of offending in the general population
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