Measurement of Crime and Crime Decline

Lesson Overview

The purpose of this lesson is to learn about how crime is measured by criminologists, and how rates of crime (crime trends) have changed over time. This first lesson provides a discussion of how crime is tracked and measured and thus provides the student with an essential “first step” in understanding crime trends (in the following lesson). Understanding crime measurement (and the limitations of these crime data sources) will also help to inform the rest of the course by allowing students to more effectively evaluate theories of crime, and particularly those theories that were developed based in part on analyses of these sources of crime data.

In regard to the second lesson (rates of crime and crime declines), the trends allow for an identification of factors that drive rates of crime and an understanding of how myriad diverse factors work in unison to shape empirical phenomena such as crime rates. An identification of crime rate trends and how they have changed over the past several decades also allows for an understanding of how criminal justice policy developed, and the subsequent impact of criminal justice policy ideas on crime rate trends. For example, we will learn that many of the criminal justice policies endorsed today were implemented in the 1970s, and in some instances have led to unintended consequences (such as the dramatic expansion of the use of prison as a correctional option to address even minor violations of law, such as in cases of drug possession, or technical violations of probation). Alternatively, other factors impacting the level of crime in the society have nothing at all to do with law or criminal justice policy.

This lesson is aimed at introducing the student to two of the major data sources used in criminology to understand the dispersion of crime in the society, and to understand the strengths and weaknesses of these data sources, and how they can be used to identify crime trends- which provides opportunities to develop new theories of crime, or revise existing theories.

Lesson Objectives

By the end of this lesson, you should be able to:

• Define the two major data sources criminologists use to assess levels of crime and crime trends.
• Identify the limitations of these two data sources, as well as what they are particularly good for.
• dentify the causes of the crime decline that began in the early 1990s.
• Understand and describe how changes in crime rates are the result of an amalgam of other changes in the social body.
• Recognize the importance of some of these factors for developing theories of crime causation, as well as policy prescriptions that might be logically suggested by these factors.

Please complete the readings and assignments outlined in the course schedule for this week.