PART 1. STRUCTURE AND INTERPRETATION

INTRODUCTION

Annual statistical returns relating to criminal behaviour in England and Wales have been published in the parliamentary papers since 1805. In the early decades of the century they were limited in scope, but from 1857 onwards they contained the several distinct types of information which form the basis of criminal statistics even today: the numbers of indictable offences known to the police, the numbers of people committed to trial for indictable and summary offences respectively, and the numbers and personal characteristics of the people imprisoned upon conviction. These returns enable us to plot across a period of years the longterm trends and the short-term fluctuations in the incidence of criminal activity of different kinds, in England and Wales as a whole and in different parts of the country, and to say something also, with a fair degree of certainty, about the kinds of people who came before the courts.

Of the several kinds of numerical data on nineteenth-century social behaviour at our disposal, the criminal statistics are among the most comprehensive and copious. Since the incidence of criminal activity in certain forms, at different periods, and in different parts of the country can sometimes be explained in terms of the impact of social and economic conditions on the population at large, the records of crime may reflect directly on the degree of security which the English social and economic system assured or failed to assure to the mass of its people at a time of rapid urban and industrial growth.