The Importance of the Dark Figure While Examining Statistics on Crime - Essay Example

Order 514151 Topic: What do you understand by the “dark figure” of crime and why it is important to consider this when examining statistics on crime? The purpose of this essay is to define the meaning of “dark figure” of crime. It will also mention about white-collar crime. This paper will present research that establishes the difference between “dark figure” of crime and white-collar crime and its relation to gender. The analysis of the essay is achieved in three main sections. Firstly, “dark figure” of crime is defined as crimes that are not reported to or recorded by the police’ (Jansson 1982). Furthermore, Sutherland defined ‘white-collar crime as a crime committed by a person of respectability and high social status in the course of his occupation.’ Finally, the relationship of these to gender and their importance in the examination of statistics is investigated before concluding. In 1981, British Crime Survey (BCS) estimated around 11 million crimes in England and Wales. But there were only less than 3 million crimes recorded by the police. The gap between the estimated and the actual number recorded by the police is called “dark figure” of crime. The common reasons given for not reporting crimes are that the incidents involved no loss or are too trivial, and believed that there was nothing the police can do. According to authors Hough and Mayhew, ‘for those categories for which comparison was possible, the survey indicated a considerably greater number of incidents than did Criminal Statistics. Only for one category – thefts of motor vehicles – were the figures similar. For example, the survey indicated twice as many burglaries as were recorded by the police.’ BCS is a victimisation survey that measures the amount of crime in England and Wales by asking people about crimes they have experienced in the previous year. Aside from the BCS, the police also have recorded crime figures that provide a measure of crime in England and Wales. ‘For the crime types it covers, the BCS provides a better reflection of the true extent of crime because it includes crimes that are not reported to police. The BCS count also gives a better indication of trends in crime over time because it is unaffected by changes in levels of public reporting and police recording’ (Jansson 1982). The first victimisation surveys were done in the 60s and 70s and were designed to examine the crimes that were not reported to or recorded by the police or what we call, the “dark figure” of crime. Over time BCS has upgraded their methods and system. Other key questions such as worry about crime and contact with and perceptions of the police have also been included in their query. The interviews now are carried out using laptop computers instead of pen and paper. They also included additional samples of young people and people from Black and Ethnic Minority backgrounds to ensure sample sizes are large enough to provide reliable estimates. ‘Following a review in 2001, BCS figures have been published alongside police recorded crime figures to provide a complementary and more comprehensive account of crime in England and Wales’ (Walker 2006). On the other hand, Sutherland first mentioned white-collar crime in his speech to the American Sociological Association on December 27, 1939. ‘He used this concept to challenge conventional stereotypes and theories. During that time crime was generally seen as the work of disadvantaged young men from broken homes and decaying neighborhoods’ (Weisburd). Through films and books the criminal was portrayed as a tough guy growing up on the wrong side of town. Such stereotypes were not limited to popular images of criminality. In a series of enduring empirical inquiries, sociologists at the University of Chicago in the 1920s and 1930s emphasized the link between social disorganisation and poverty in areas within a city and high rates of criminal behavior. In Sutherland’s major book which was written in 1949, he analysed the crimes committed by American corporations and executives and pointed out the bias inherent in statistics such as UCR that lacked data of white-collar crime. He raised doubt about the reliability and validity of conventional data and claimed ‘white-collar offences should be included in the data analysed by criminologists, just as juvenile offenses are included in those data’. He believed that ‘conventional generalisations about crime and criminality are invalid because they explain only the crime of the lower classes, at most’ (Sutherland 1949). The white-collar criminals he identified were often middle-aged men of respectability and high social status. They lived in affluent neighborhoods, and they were all respected in the community. White-collar crimes include embezzlement, bribery, extortion, larceny, fraud (e.g. health care, tax), environmental law violations, price fixing, racketeering, loan sharking, black market operations, obstruction of justice and perjury, identity theft, computer fraud, etc. In Sutherland’s view, poverty and social disorganization could not be seen as the primary causes of crime, if crime could also be found among people who grew up in “good neighborhood and good homes” and lived in situations of authority and privilege. He believed that much could be learned about the crime problem by focusing on the category of white-collar crime. White criminals has for the most part been treated as a deviant case, invoked primarily to provide a contrast to the common crimes and street criminals that continue to dominate research and theory about crime. ‘Criminologists agree that the gender gap in crime is universal: Women are always and everywhere less likely than men to commit criminal acts’ (Steffensmeier 1996). Patterns of offending by men and women have similarities and differences. Both men and women are more involved in minor property and substance abuse offenses than in serious crimes like robbery or murder. However, men offend at much higher rates than women for all crime categories except prostitution. This gender gap is greatest for serious crime and least for mild forms of law breaking such as minor property crimes. The research comparing men and women criminal careers is limited to violent career offenders and has found substantial gender variation. Females participate in substantially less violent crime than males during the course of their criminal careers. The careers of violent females both begin and peak a little earlier than those of males. Females are far less likely to repeat their violent offenses and females are far more likely to desist from further violence. Females are more likely than males to be solo perpetrators or to be part of small, relatively nonpermanent crime groups. When female offenders are involved with other, particularly in more lucrative thefts or other criminal enterprises, they typically act as accomplices to males who both organise and lead the execution of the crime. Perhaps the most significant gender difference is the overwhelming dominance of males in more organised and highly lucrative crimes. Female offenders are often involved in relational concern – she did it all for love. Rising crime rates are not an inevitable or universal phenomenon, but almost everyone knows that there was never a time when crime rates were not getting worse. Criminology has been haunted by the so-called “dark figure” of unrecorded crime. What is commonly called the crime rate is labeled more accurately in the Home Office statistics as “notifiable offences recorded by the police. They are based on police reports but the problem is that they have usually been treated as if they were a measure of all criminal behaviour. However, many offences are only known to their perpetrators or willing associates and victims frequently do not report offences to the police. Thus, many crimes are not known to the police. ‘A less frequently discussed leakage from the crime statistics is that many crimes which are not known to the police are not recorded by them, or are recorded in different ways from the victim’s or perpetrator’s perception. To a large extent, the better name for “crimes recorded by the police” might be “crimes which the police wish to make known”’(Reiner). Manipulation of the crime figures to suit police and Home Office interests has been common practice, and arguably still is. There have been occasional scandals about data rigging by the police, most notoriously in the late 1980s in Kent, and recently in Nottinghamshire. A recent historical study indicates ‘extensive Home Office and police machinations to achieve the crime rates that suited their changing agendas’ (Taylor 1998a and b 1999). In the last thirty years, there have been important developments in criminological research methods aimed at probing the “dark figure” of unrecorded crime and find supplementary estimates to the dubious official statistics. For crimes with individual victims, the regular British Crime Survey provide an estimate of the extent of victimisation that can be compared with the police recorded figures to assess change over time. Recent British crime trends show the implications of the new data for the validity of the picture given by official statistician is mixed. With regard to the overall increase in recorded crime since the early 1980s, the BCS suggests an ambivalent conclusion: the glass can with equal justification be described as half full or half empty. Between 1981 and 1992 recorded crime more than doubled, but has fallen to just under double the level of the early 1980s. By contrast BCS crimes increased by 49% between 1981 and 1997’ (Mirrlees-Black1998). The bottom line thus seems to be that the recorded increase in criminal offending and victimisation and an increase in the proportion of crimes recorded by the police. The picture becomes more complicated when variations between different kinds of offence and different sub-periods, are analysed. By the early 1980s when the BCS was launched the proportion of the most common property crimes reported to the police by victims was virtually at saturation point, largely eliminating the possibility of further rises through reducing the “dark figure”. Although violent crime measured by the BCS went up substantially (21%), this was much less than the recorded increase of nearly 100 percent. This suggests that much of the recorded increase in violence was really shrinking of the “dark figure” More victims reported attacks and the police recorded more of these offences. Overall, it seems that much of the rise in recorded crime before the early 1980s was a recording phenomenon: greater reporting diminished the “dark figure”. During the 1990s there has been a drop in recorded crime for four consecutive years, a phenomenon without precedent for most of this century. Both Conservative and Labour governments have not hesitated to claim the credit for this as a vindication of their law and order policies. However, the implications of other data sources are vaguer. The 1991, 1993 and 1995 BCS results showed the level of victimisation as continuing to rise. Only the 1997 BCS shows a fall: 14 per cent since 1995, roughly paralleling the decrease in the recorded crime rate in those years. During the 1990s as a whole the decline in recorded crime figures is primarily the result of recording changes, not a fall in crime. The ‘dark figure’, which fell throughout the 1970s and 1980s, exaggerating the increase in crime, now began to rise again, creating a misleading picture of declining crime. Throughout the 1990s the BCS indicates a falling proportion of crimes being reported to the police by victims, declining from 49 per cent in 1991 to 44 per cent in 1997. This itself is attributable to the paradoxical effects of a high rate of crime, which generates disincentives for victims to report offences: for example, adverse effects on their insurance, such as higher premiums or more onerous reinsurance conditions. The proportion of crimes which the police choose to record has also fallen according to the BCS: from 62 per cent in 1981 to a low of 50 per cent in 1995,with arise to 54 per cent in 1997 (Mirrlees-Black et al. 1998: 22–3). A plausible explanation is that the police are increasingly pressured by the new regime of ‘businesslike’, performance-indicator-driven policing to present falling crime levels and higher clear-up rates (Reiner 1996; Davies 1999). It is not quite what they promised, but the government has certainly got tough on the causes of recording crime. But who commits crime? The official crime statistics are not merely problematic as a guide to trends in crime levels. They also present a dubious picture of who commits crime. Analysis of the characteristics of the prison population, or of people stopped and/or arrested by the police, suggests that they are a highly unrepresentative sample of the population. They are overwhelmingly young, male, economically and socially marginal, and black. In a nutshell, the ‘rich get richer and the poor get prison’ (Reiman 1990). It is extremely unlikely that this fully mirrors the characteristics of those who commit crime, as opposed to the institutional biases of the criminal justice process (with the exception that most offenders probably are male). The Home Office regularly produces statistics on what it calls the ‘attrition’ rate, showing that of all offences measured by the BCS only about 2 per cent result in the conviction of an offender and just under another 1 per cent lead to a caution (Home Office 1995: 25). Thus in nearly 98 per cent of crimes the offender is not known (or at any rate not officially identified). This bleak statistic itself overlooks the vast array of offences with no individual victim, which cannot by definition feature in a victimization survey like the BCS. Since this includes most ‘white-collar’ crimes, as well as vice offences which are probably engaged in by a wider range of people than the ‘usual suspects’, the official data omits almost all the offending perpetrated by people higher up the social scale. Making sense of human rights then becomes much more about understanding how justice and equality are defined and enacted in society. In his sociological reading of human rights, (Woodiwiss 2005) neatly sums this up when he states that the ‘coverage, content, inclusions, and exclusion of rights tells us not only who is protected against what, but also the sort of people and the aspects of social relations that are especially valued (or not) by the governmental body responsible for constructing, approving and enforcing the regime’. If having access to one’s human rights is about confirming our civilized condition then focusing on the human rights of all citizens is an important project, offenders included. The power of a human rights approach might lie in its capacity to provide redress for those experiencing social exclusion and who lack the power or necessary agency to change their disadvantaged status. The extent to which human rights legislation is capable of improving the lives of those who experience social exclusion – in this case of those who come into contact with the criminal justice system – remains to be seen, but the sales pitch accompanying the Human Rights Act 1998 has indeed been impressive so far. It has been described as having the potential for being one of the most fundamental constitutional enactments since the Bill of Rights over 300 years ago. In December 1996, Jack Straw, the then Shadow Home Secretary,and Paul Boateng MP (Straw and Boateng, 1996), produced a consultation paper, Bringing Rights Home, which set out the Labour Party’s proposals to incorporate the Convention rights into United Kingdom law. The paper is infused with optimism, claiming that the human rights act would ‘nurture a culture of understanding of rights and responsibilities at all levels in our society’ and ‘result in a human rights culture developing across all countries’. In the opinion of the Joint Committee on Human Rights (2002), the government’s case was that the Act would ‘help to inaugurate a gradual transformation of civil society’, create a ‘more humane society’ and would work to ‘deepen and widen democracy by increasing the sense amongst individual men and women that they have a stake in the way in which they are governed’. Summing it up, there are pros and cons in the existence of “dark figure” of crime. Its existence provides a complementary and more comprehensive account of crime. More reported victim attacks shrinks “dark figure” and it will reveal the true crime picture of the country. However, it will generate a high rate crime scenario which is disadvantageous on the part of the people. High rate crime disincentives the victims, affecting their insurance as insurance companies would impose higher premium condition. Also, the diminishing of “dark figure” of crime would affect the statistics of the performance of the police as higher crime rates would be revealed. The falling crime levels and higher clear-up rates would impose difficulty of realisation. As to the gender issue, men and women alike are at risks of committing crime be it large, petty or white-collar crimes. What is important is their resolution to change and desist from repeating the mistake. And most of all, they should be treated with equality. References Jansson, K1982, British crime survey: Measuring crime for 25 years, U.K. London . Mirlees-Black, C1999, Domestic violence: Findings from a new brtish crime survey self completion questionnaire, Home Office Research Study 191, London. Reiman 1990, The rich gets richer and the poor get prison, New York, MacMillan. Reiner, R, Crime and Control in Britain, London, The London School of Economics and Political Science. Silvestri, M & Crowther-Dowey, C2008, Gender & Crime: Key approaches to criminology, Steffensmeier, D1996, Gender & Crime: Toward a Gendered Theory of Female Offending, Annual Reviews, Inc. Sutherland, E1949, The white collar crime, New York, Halt, Rinehart & Winston. Taylor, I1998a, ‘Crime, Market-Liberalism and the European Idea’, The New European Criminology, London. Taylor, I1998b, ‘Free Markets and the costs of crime: An adult for England and Wales’, The New Criminology Revisited, London. McMillan. Walker, A, Kershaw, C & Nicholas, S2006, Crime in England and wales 2005/06 , London, Home Office Statistical Bulletin. Weisburd, D & Waring, E, White-collar crime and criminal careers, Cambridge org. Read More