Crime in 20th Century Britain

The history of crime in the twentieth century is inevitably dominated by the explosion of criminality in the last thirty years. In the first half of the century the level of crime recorded by the police grew at a much more moderate rate, extending a pattern of slow growth since the 1870s. From 1900 to 1914, the crime level remained constant. Recorded crime in- creased by 5 per cent a year between 1915 and 1930; by 7 per cent between 1930 and 1948 (compared with a post-war annual growth rate of 10 per cent and more). The main increases in these early decades occurred in theft and breaking-in offences, reflecting the growing opportunity for larceny in a more affluent society. Drunkenness offences, in contrast, declined steeply, owing to tighter licensing laws and changing leisure habits, while at the other extreme, the number of murders was lower in the inter-war years than in Victorian times. It all suggests that the major economic and political crises of the period – the First and Second World Wars, the General Strike, the mass unemployment of the Depression years – had little impact on criminal activity.

It would be false, however, to portray the pre-Second World War period as a 'golden age', when working-class communities reared children with a sense of respect for other people's property. Such nostalgia for the 'British way of life' is understandable in light of present fears about a seemingly irreversible crime wave, but it squares with neither the social reality nor the social perceptions of crime in the earlier years. The myth of Edwardian order is refuted by gangs of 'hooligans' and their violent resistance to police arrest. The fear this aroused fed into the discourse or 'boy labour', or the moral decline of city-bred youths employed in 'dead-end' jobs, which, in turn, was part of the larger debate about national and imperial decline. Between the wars, policy-makers, criminologists and law enforcers argued over the increase in recorded delinquency, with those convinced that it was a real upsurge in lawlessness laying the blame on lenient juvenile courts, parental neglect and 'Americanised' entertainment.

Yet it is true that no significant 'law-and-order' campaign reared its head in these years. Those magistrates and policemen who sought harsher penalties for crime failed to cow the 'child-saving' lobby or to undermine the reformative emphasis of penal policy. Improvements to the prison regime were slow in coming, to judge from the testimony of conscientious objectors like Fenner Brockway, imprisoned during the Great War, and from the Dartmoor prison 'mutiny' of 1932, sparked off by poor food and living conditions. But some of the Victorian cruelties – the silence rule, punitive labour, the broad arrows on the prison uniform – were mitigated in the 1920s, and won applause from across the political spectrum. It required the more substantial upswing in the crime rate of the post-war years for the 'law-and-order' lobby to find an attentive audience, and for the cross-party consensus on the treatment of crime to disintegrate. It is to the post-war crime wave that we turn.

The yearly figure for indictable (or serious) crimes recorded by the police in England and Wales rose from 100,000 in the first decade, to 300,000 in the late 1930s, to half a million in the mid-1950s. From that date the upward trend of crime accelerated: one million crimes by the mid-1960s, two million by the mid-1970s, and three-and-a-quarter million crimes in 1984. When the growth in population is allowed for, the pattern of increase in crime is as shown in Figures 1 and 2. A rate of 249 crimes per 100,000 population in 1901 rose to 2,374 crimes in 1965 and 6,674 crimes per 100,000 in 1984. The upward trend started during the First World War and has continued ever since, apart from a brief period (1946-55) following the Second World War, and in a few years (1972-73, 1978-79) since then. Much less academic and press attention tends to be given to the rise in non-indictable (or less serious) offences. The annual average number of persons found guilty of non-indictable crime was around 650,000 in the first decade of the century; by the mid-1970s, nearly two million persons were found guilty and another 136,000 were cautioned. Changes have taken place in the types of non-indictable offences, reflecting changes in social and economic conditions. The largest single group of non-indictable offences in the Edwardian years for which persons were found guilty was drunkenness; since the 1950s it has been motoring offences.

The vast majority (over 90 per cent) of indictable crimes recorded by the police has consistently been offences against property, notably theft and handling stolen goods and burglary. Violent and sexual offences and robbery, although receiving most publicity, have generally accounted for only 5 per cent of all crime. This distribution of the main categories of crime has remained much the same throughout the century. In the post- war years, however, crimes of violence and the more organised crimes against property (robbery, burglary) have increased at a faster rate than that of crime in general. Within crimes of violence, the most rapid increase in recent decades has been in malicious woundings, associated with pub brawls, domestic disputes and violence amongst adolescents. The trend in homicides (including murder, manslaughter and infanticide) has also been upwards since the early 1960s. From around 300 homicides each year in the early 1960s, the current average is around 600. The death penalty was abolished for murder in 1965, and the periodic parliamentary attempts to bring it back have been resisted, despite the crime's increased incidence. In over 40 per cent of homicide offences in 1983, the victim was a member of the suspect's family or was the suspect's lover or co-habitant, a figure which has stayed the same for many years. In 1984 there were eleven victims of homicide per million population, making the risk of being a murder victim roughly 25 per cent lower than it was a century ago. Recent crime statistics reveal a 29 per cent increase in rape in 1985, part of which is perhaps attributable to greater public willingness to report rape, in view of more sympathetic police procedures. There were 1,842 recorded rapes in the entire country last year, suggesting that Britain is not a rape-torn society, although estimates differ on the degree to which official figures understate the incidence of rape. More encouraging is that burglary crimes fell by 4 per cent last year (and by 11 per cent in London).

The general trend in the number of offenders annually found guilty of, or cautioned for, indictable offences has followed a similar pattern to that of indictable crime recorded by the police. But the proportionate increase has not been as great as that of the number of crimes recorded by the police, owing to a declining rate of crime detection. A 'clear-up' rate for all crime of 50 per cent in 1938 was down to 35 per cent in 1985.

The vast majority (around 85 per cent) of offenders found guilty of indictable crimes are males; the figure is even higher for robbery, wounding and murder. Most crimes are the work, moreover, of males under 21 years of age. In 1965, for example, young offenders aged 10-21 accounted for 51 per cent of male offenders found guilty of indictable offences. As Figure 3 shows, the crime rate both for boys aged fourteen and under seventeen and for young adults aged seventeen and under twenty-one has increased faster than for other age groups. Other statistics indicate that these younger age groups have contributed significantly to the increase in conviction rates for crimes of violence, robbery and breaking and entering. Some of the offenders aged seventeen to twenty-one, furthermore, display serious degrees of recidivism (or repeat criminality), and do so in relation to the gravest offences. It should be noted, however, that the massive increase in police cautioning in recent decades, rather than 'diverting' young offenders from the courts, has 'widened the net' as is clear from the fact that the numbers both convicted and cautioned have increased. The police are obviously arresting youngsters who previously they would have treated informally. To some degree, therefore, the rise in juvenile crime in the post-war years is due to the official processing of a wider range of delinquent behaviour. Finally, it should also be noted that female delinquency is generating greater cause for concern, and that most young people evidently grow out of crime, much as they grow out of' spots and pimples.

The upward trend of officially recorded crime is not necessarily an accurate reflection of the 'real' level of crime or the 'real' rate of its increase. Variations in recorded crime rates can often reflect the processes by which crime is reported and recorded. Most crimes which become known to the police are reported by the victim or by members of the public who witness the crime. Victims often do not report offences, however, either because they believe they are trivial (and around one in four burglary victims loses nothing of value) or because they think the police will be unable to make an arrest. In contrast, F.H. McClintock argued in Crimes of Violence (1963) that more of the 'dark figure' of unreported crime was corning to police attention because violence was less tolerated by the community than formerly. The level of official crime can also be affected by the efficiency of police recording of crime and by the pattern of law enforcement. Indeed, the American criminologist, Thorsten Sellin, once declared that 'all criminal statistics are in fact statistics of law enforcement'. Views differ, in short, as to whether or not the official statistics can be used to measure criminality. Some say yes, on the assumption that recorded crime is a constant proportion of 'real' crime; others say no, on the grounds that the criminal statistics disclose move about the mentality and methods of those responsible for law enforcement than about the incidence and pattern of crime.

Disenchantment with the official statistics has led to self-report measures of criminality, most notably the British Crime Survey. This showed that the number of crimes was far higher in 1981 than that recorded by the police. There were three times as many thefts, twelve times as much vandalism, three times as many sexual offences, nine times as many robberies, and twice as many burglaries as the official statistics recorded. In general, the less serious crimes had the largest 'dark figure'. 10 per cent of households, for example, believed that milk bottles had been stolen from their doorstep during the year, 'making this one of the most common if least serious, single crimes in Britain today' (British Crime Survey). One-third of the property offences revealed by this survey of victimisation involved theft of or from motor vehicles, or vandalism to vehicles. In all, the survey revealed a sizeable 'dark figure' of crime which remained outside the official count. But should we conclude from this that public fears about crime are justified?

Not entirely, the British Crime Survey concluded. A lot of law- breaking was clearly quite petty. Rape, serious wounding and robbery were still a small, if important, percentage of the total. The increase in some types of crime, moreover, may not be as dramatic as police statistics indicate. These reveal that the number of burglaries increased by 100 per cent between 1972 and 1983. The British Crime Survey (when allied to other evidence) pointed to only a 20 per cent rise in burglary over the twelve year period. The remainder was a function of greater public willingness to report burglary, perhaps, in part, because of the growth of house insurance. The conclusion to the survey, therefore, was that 'there is still room for surprise at the extent of conformity to the law'. This comforting judgment seems belied, however, by smaller-scale surveys, like the recent one done in the London Borough of Islington, which indicate that the fears of inner-city dwellers are realistic, one third of all households having been touched by serious crime (burglary, robbery, sexual assault) in the preceding twelve months.

The upward trend in crime in the twentieth century has coincided with a shift in penal philosophy from punitive to reformative. Some have argued that these developments are associated, a less deterrent response to crime resulting in more criminality. The impetus to a new penal policy came initially from the Gladstone Committee on Prisons of 1895, which recommended greater individualisation of treatment, in place of the mass uniformity of the Victorian prison system. Two of the Committee's ideas came to fruition in 1908: preventive detention for habitual offenders and borstal reformatories for young adults. At the same time, the juvenile court was introduced and the probation system enlarged. Later, in 1933, the Children and Young Persons Act laid down the principle that the welfare of the young offender was the paramount consideration of juvenile justice. The Criminal Justice Act of 1948 consolidated this shift towards the 'rehabilitative ideal', which promised through treatment and training (based on modern psychiatry) to reduce recidivism. But to what extent was this development connected with the rise in crime as cause and effect?

The evidence is not that strong. Most adult convicted offenders have been dealt with either by discharge or by a punitive sanction (fine or imprisonment) and not by reformative measures. The latter have been used more for young offenders. Hence, the 'rehabilitative ideal' has had a limited application. Anyway, the leniency of penal policy has probably been less influential on the upward trend of crime than the growth in immunity of offenders from detection and, thus, from conviction and sentence. If the annual number of solved crimes has risen in the post-war period, suggesting an increase in police effectiveness, the overall national detection rate has slumped. Only 22 per cent of robberies, for example, were cleared up in 1985. This immunity doubtless contributed to the growth of crime, since certainty of detection and punishment seems to be of greater deterrent value than severity of punishment.

The 1960s was the last decade in which the 'rehabilitative ideal' held sway. Since then disillusionment with the promises of the 'treaters' has set in. This was caused by the continuous decline in the success rates of even the most reformative place (with over two-thirds of borstal boys, for example, reconvicted within two years), and to a barrage of research studies demonstrating that it made little difference to reconviction rates whether an offender was fined, put on probation, or given a prison sentence. It was caused, also, by severe overcrowding of an outdated penal estate. The daily average population in penal institutions (including prisons, borstals and detention centres) has risen from about 11,000 in the mid-1920s to 27,000 in 1960, 39,000 in 1970 and 48,000 in the summer of 1985. In spite of the biggest prison building programme for a century, over one-third of the prison population share cells, particularly in local and remand prisons. The resulting 'penological pessimism' has led to many favouring a criminal law which is openly penal in outlook, and which does not hide behind the benevolent rhetoric of treatment and training.

If penal philosophy and the types of punishments used have had but a marginal impact on the volume of crime, what about larger social and economic forces? London and the big provincial cities and towns accounted for over 40 per cent of crime annually recorded by the police in the 1950s and 1960s; rates of crime per head were much higher in urban areas than in rural regions. Urbanisation, however, has increased little since the 1930s and, hence, can hardly account for the post-war rise in crime. Indeed, a substantial and growing amount of crime has occurred in small towns and country areas. Crime is often thought to be associated with poverty or social disadvantage. But since improvement in living conditions over the century, and increased affluence in the post-war decades, have not led to a decline in crime, must we conclude that poverty does not predispose to crime'? Not necessarily, since the absolute level of income is not as crucial as the inequalities of income, which are as marked as ever. The numbers 'feeling' poor is what counts. Moreover, a sizeable proportion of children and young persons have always been found in families whose standard of living is below average. If not poverty per se, what of the criminogenic impact of unemployment? Most criminologists have regarded the alterations in unemployment levels over the century as unrelated to the main changes in the crime rate, particularly the rise in delinquency in the 1950s and 1960s, years of full employment. However, the high level of unemployment in the 1930s, especially amongst young people between fourteen and eighteen years of age, has been associated with the upward curve of criminality. It remains to be seen whether the present high rate of unemployment will worsen the post-war trend in crime.

Times of war have had little immediate effect on the total annual volume of recorded crime, although both world wars led to a marked increase in juvenile delinquency (induced by absent fathers, working mothers, evacuation and a disrupted educational system), and the last war led to an increase in the proportion of females amongst the total number convicted of crime. Has immigration affected the historical trends in crime? Many Asians and blacks from the New Commonwealth came to Britain at the time of the most dramatic rise in the crime rate. The evidence proves no direct link, however. J.R. Lambert's study of Birmingham, Crime, Police and Race Relations (1970), showed that first- generation immigrants, adult and juvenile, were no more delinquent than the indigenous white population. Whilst this finding applies still to Asian immigrants, the crime rate among second and third-generation West Indian youths has risen, especially as regards robbery, violent theft and assault. It can be argued, however, that the police discriminate unfairly against young blacks, liberally using 'stop and search' tactics. The inner-city civil violence in London, Liverpool and the Midlands in 1981 certainly arose from the fusion of frustrations born of discrimination, with a rupture of police-public relations born of 'hard' policing. It also has to be remembered that the rise in the crime rate has applied to non-immigrant areas to the same degree as immigrant areas.

Finally, what of the association between social class and crime? Most studies conclude that there has been and remains a close association between lower-class status and crime, whether officially recorded or self- reported. It could be, of course, that, given the class bias of police procedures, there is a higher probability for working-class people to be caught in the criminal justice net. Moreover, the nature of the class-crime relationship might well be different (at least for adults) if we were to include 'white-collar' crimes (embezzlement, fraud, price-fixing), a disproportionately middle-class phenomenon. One thing is certain, however: the presumed link between class and crime has formed the basis for most of the main sociological theories which have sought to explain the etiology of juvenile delinquency.

Early sociological theories took for granted that delinquency was concentrated in lower-class groups. R.K. Merton's general theory of deviance, in Social Theory and Social Structure (1957), argued that delinquency resulted from the strain caused by the gap between the cultural goal of material success, to which all social groups aspired, on the one hand, and the lawful means (education, jobs, investment) for achieving that goal, on the other. The lower class, lacking the legitimate means to secure the rewards of economic success, turned to illegitimate or criminal means. Upon this theory of 'anomie' a number of 'subcultural' explanations of delinquency were built, stressing the role of delinquent gangs in the transmission of delinquent values. Some saw the delinquent gang as a reaction to failure in the classroom, endorsing values which were the exact inverse of values, such as respect for property, taught by the school. Others saw the gang less as a turning away from middle-class values and more as an attempt to live up to values (like 'toughness', 'excitement' and 'autonomy') of the working-class community. British evidence, however, has failed to sustain these theories based largely upon American society. Structured delinquent gangs are uncommon, and most delinquent acts have not been committed by organised gangs. Evidence that working- class people are far from tolerant of most delinquency also runs counter to subcultural explanations of crime.

The attempt to find the cause of crime in subcultural value systems has ceased to be the predominant concern of sociologists. Instead, the social and legal processes by which some individuals get 'labelled' as criminal have come under scrutiny. Variously known as the 'interactionist' or 'labelling' theorists, these sociologists rejected the positivist's view of criminals as identifiably different from non-criminals. They urged the need to look at the law-maker and law-enforcer as much as the law- breaker. Their argument was that the reactions of the police and the courts, at times exacerbated by press and public fears, confirm and amplify an offender's deviance. As such, criminality is not an inherent property of an individual, but a property conferred by society.

Labelling theory has, in turn, been criticised by 'radical criminology' for failing to explain the origin as opposed to the development of delinquency, and for presenting criminals as passive victims of official labels, with neither consciousness nor choice. It has also been criticised for engendering a criminology which, through its emphasis on the marginal world of drug users and homosexuals, fails to deal with the mass of property crime. This 'new criminology' favours a shift from studying the 'criminality' of the poor to a concern with the structural framework, particularly the capitalist economic system, which determines the genesis and enforcement of laws, and the definition of criminality. It is committed to an analysis of the ways in which criminal laws are deployed to maintain class inequalities in society. It is a 'critical' as distinct from a 'correctionalist' criminology.

Criminologists have also tried to find the causes of crime in the physical and psychological characteristics of individuals. 'Biogenic' explanations have ranged from criminals as people of inferior intelligence to criminals as males with an extra chromosome in their genetic make-up, which predisposes to delinquency. Such biological factors are probably most influential with regard to the small minority of persistent offenders. 'Psychogenic' explanations have potentially wider application. If early childhood 'socialisation' distorts the development of a stable personality, it can, it is believed, result in anti-social conduct. Delinquency is a consequence of the 'acting out' of guilt and frustration caused by these early experiences. John Bowlby's main hypothesis, for example, was that the experience of separation of an infant from its mother explained some cases of delinquency. H.J. Eysenck brought biology and psychology together in his hypothesis that criminal and psychopathic behaviour is related to genetically-determined personality attributes, namely a mixture of extraversion and neuroticism. Finally, criminologists have put forward a number of psycho-social explanations of delinquency, concerning the family, the school and films and television. The problem with all these attempts to pinpoint the causes of crime is that none explain why most of the people exposed to a broken home or to a heavy diet of television violence do not commit crimes.

The search for predisposing factors in the genesis of delinquent behaviour will continue. What other avenues should future research go down?

More attention should be given to the times (particularly between 1946 and 1955) when the rise in crime slackened or was reversed. More work is needed on groups amongst whom crime has remained comparatively rare, like females, and on groups who have been relatively overlooked, like white-collar criminals. The search for the effect on delinquency of increases in affluence or of movements in the unemployment level in previous decades should continue, although improved research strategies are probably required. And, lastly, the essentially historical questions posed by the 'new criminologists', including the processes by which criminal laws and policies are enacted, and the contrasts in the criminal codes of different socio- economic systems, must be confronted in order to uncover the structural forces in the creation of crime.