af Gillian Dickinson 10 år siden
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The question covers a number of central concerns. These are:
This map relates to section B of the exam, specifically question 2. It aims to outline the reliability and validity of criminal statistics relating to the extent of youth crime contemporarily and the moral panic about youth crime despite the empirical fact that youth crime is at an all time low.
The subject is predominated with one of the main arguments being, that one of the obstacles is that there are inherent methodological limitations in collecting information about offending across the life-course and that these problems exists because of the fact the main sources of data for analysing offending are taken from two forms of statistical compilation:
Official Criminal Statistics: Police and Court records
and
Unoffical Criminal Statistics: Self Report Studies/Victiminsation Studies
Wider factors such as the media, public opinion and political rhetoric, contribute to risk averse court, probation and parole decisions and hence play a role in unnecessary system expansion.
It is hard to disentangle this noise and the legal activity generated by the system response from objexctive measures. Political deabte about youth crime has therefore created the problem it tries to address.
The changes in policy brought about by the flagship slogan, ‘No more excuses’, was ideological rather than empirical and New Labour’s penal policies have been evidence-based only when their visibility has been low. Whereas high visibility initiatives have been driven by the need to be seen to be ‘tough on crime’, whatever the evidence may advise. This view is adequately illustrated by the belief that youth crime constitutes a crisis to which tougher policies were the only solution. For example, the Crime and Disorder Act, 1998 was characterised by a preoccupation with surveillance and control which led to excessive intervention in the lives of young people and their families.
Between 1997 and 2006, some 3,200 new criminal offences were created and some 60 crime-related bills were passed (Crawford, 2009).
One major breakthrough of these cohort studies was that involvement in crime during the early stages of adolescence was related to criminal conduct during late adolescence and early adulthood (Wolfgang, Figlio and Sellin, 1972.
Therefore, they cannot be used to give an accurate representation of the extent of adult criminality. The studies require respondents to disclose truthfully all criminal activities within a specific period. Like official statistics, methodological limitations include problems with disclosure.
The police can often target specific offences, what is termed ‘target hardening’. An increase in this category of crime in official statistics can be attributed to the greater amount of police attention and not due to an actual increase in this type of crime.
The 2010/11 BCS shows that the majority of people (60%) believe crime has risen across the country as a whole in the last few years. However, this proportion has fallen since the peak seen in results from the 2008/9 and 2009/10 surveys (75% and 66% respectively). The proportion perceiving that crime has risen locally has halved, suggesting that the public have a more realistic view of crime in their local area (BCS, 2011-12).
Although recorded crime in England and Wales increased ten fold between 1950 and 1994, and crime surveys confirm a strong rise from the first year they covered (1981) up to the mid 1990's, since then all crimes, however measured, have declined.
While overall youth crime levels and prison rates have significantly declined since the mid-1990's, the public and the politically powerful continue to fear that youth crime is rising, perpetuating a distinctly punitive attitude towards sentencing.
For most of the eighteenth century (1700s) there was no concept of childhood in any recognizable modern sense. In other words, children tended to be expected to pass straight from physical dependence to something close to adulthood. The period of physical dependence was taken to last up to about age 7-10. After that most children were expected to work adult hours ... and if convicted of a crime were held fully responsible and punished as adults. In Britain and France the 1770s saw the gradual rise of the concept of an intermediate stage between physical dependence (infancy) and adulthood, namely childhood. The first books written specifically for children and some children's clothing began to appear for the first time. This development was largely confined to the middle classes, and for the poor it had to wait until well after 1850. The concept of adolescence - that is, a period between childhood and adulthood - is even more recent. I've deliberately avoided mentioning the Enlightenment, as the beginnings
that crimes committed by young people, being a large part of the problem, are also rising and that offensive but often non-criminal conduct such as deviance, is also on the increase
England and Wales have particularly high rates of youth crime, with more people in custody that other European countries comparatively. Despite this, these has been a significant decline over the last three years
