One of the main purposes of this series of Information Papers is to respond to the concerns of older people as expressed to the Forum. There is no doubt that crime and fear of crime are amongst the most frequent worries of older people in Bristol.

For example, our last Members’ Survey (2006) showed that 83% of nearly 800 of our members who replied to our survey felt that crime was one of the biggest problems facing older people in the city. This ranked third in order of importance, behind high council tax and high public utility bills. Amongst the stated concerns of new members joining the Forum between 2004 and 2006, crime and anti-social behaviour ranked fourth in frequency of unprompted mention, behind pensioner poverty, poor bus transport and high council tax.

But crime and its causes represents one of the most complex and far-reaching issues we could choose to address, encompassing in the broadest sense the whole of the relationship between the individual and the society in which he or she lives, as well as the what and why of dysfunctionality in human society - in other words, why society doesn’t work as well as it ought to, or, in some respects, as well as it used to.

We have to simplify, but the aim nevertheless is to include as much as possible that will enable older people to form a better understanding of these problems, and to help them participate more effectively in public discussions about what should be done to tackle them.

Problem 1: Crime is committed by people, and people are obviously the first problem. Some would argue that people are the only problem, and that all crime is a matter of individual responsibility - though this is generally considered to be an extreme view. Nevertheless in all societies there will be a proportion of people who, either by instinct or inclination or through a lack of capacity or opportunity for other pursuits, will decide that their interests are best advanced by breaking the rules and risking the consequences.

Though normally only a relatively small minority of people will be involved in criminal behaviour at any one time, over the course of their lifetimes this will include most men and a significant minority of women. For example, a Canadian study found that over 80% of adolescents committed a teenage criminal offence (usually a minor one). On the other hand, other studies suggest that over half the crime committed in England and Wales is carried out by just 100 000 young men and boys (out of a total population of 52 million).
The great majority of crime is committed by young males, and, fortunately, most of them will grow out of, or learn how to control, their aggressive, predatory or acquisitive behaviour. But a hardcore few will not, and will remain actively involved in criminality.

Between these few and the great majority will be a larger, fluctuating group (still mostly young men) who may or may not remain involved in criminal behaviour, depending on their circumstances, their experiences and their opportunities. What happens to this group is probably the most important determinant of the overall level of crime. If more of them choose criminality, the overall crime figures will rise. If more of them decide their interests are best served by abstaining from crime, at least temporarily, the overall crime figures will go down.

Problem 2: second problem is that ‘crime’ includes a very wide range of behaviour, everything from riding a bicycle without lights to mass murder. A crime is an act or omission prohibited or punished by law. It is what it is because the people who make laws say so. The very wide range of activities included in the overall definition of ‘crime’ tends to make for confusion. People are often talking about completely different things.

Your chances of being a victim of a crime in any one year are currently about one in four. But this varies enormously depending on what kind of crime we are talking about, who you are and where you live. An older person aged over 75 has about a one in 250 chance of being a victim of a violent crime in any one year. For a young man aged between 16 and 24 the chance is about one in seven.

Problem 3: the next problem is in some ways not a problem at all. It is that the opportunities for crime have increased enormously over recent decades, and the biggest reason for this is increasing affluence. Most people are better off than they used to be, and they have more personal property of interest to robbers and burglars.

It is said (not entirely consistently with the evidence), that years ago there used to be so little crime that people could leave their front doors open without worry. The riposte is that of course they could leave the door open because few people had anything worth stealing.

When large numbers of people own cars, televisions, credit cards, mobile phones, computers and a hundred and one other electronic gadgets, the opportunities for crime are much greater. And where there are new opportunities there will almost inevitably be new opportunists.

Other sources of new opportunities for crime include the complex technology of much modern commerce, which has greatly increased the opportunities for business, telephone and computer crime (a big growth area). While poor urban planning, poor building and neighbourhood design, has often encouraged and assisted criminality, for example, by providing easier opportunities for street crime, mugging and burglary. There is also the failure of many people to protect their property by using obvious and readily available security measures which neglect again provides avoidable opportunities for wrong-doers.

Problem 4: There is a very broad group of problems, which we may bring together as the increasing fragmentation of our society, which can both encourage criminal behaviour and make it more acceptable and therefore more likely amongst a larger number of people. The larger the number of people who feel excluded from the rest of society, socially, economically, culturally or politically, the greater the probability that those people will be involved in some kind of criminal activity.

The converse of social exclusion is social cohesion - the extent to which the members of a society feel bound together in sharing a common identity or moving towards some common goal or purpose. Reduced cohesion tends to result in more exclusion, more disaffection, and more criminal behaviour.

There are many reasons why exclusion has grown and cohesion has diminished in recent years:

- the rapidly widening income and wealth gap between the very rich and the rest of society;

- the marked reduction in social mobility, making it more difficult than before for most people to improve their circumstances by their own efforts;

- the growth of an excluded ‘underclass’ of low-paid or welfare-dependants, deprived of most of the advantages and opportunities enjoyed by the rest of society;

- the increasing alienation, isolation and loneliness suffered by a number of groups, but most obviously by the growing number of older and single people;

- the decline of social institutions which used to reinforce cohesion and sustain conformity with prevailing norms of good behaviour, these include organised religion and the family;

- the poor treatment and adverse experiences of our children and young people - certainly compared with most other western European countries. The UK seems to have a much higher incidence of poor parenting, inadequate education and disturbed, unhappy children;

- the greater diversity of our society (not unrelated to immigration) which (in the short term at least) reduces overall cohesion, increases fragmentation and opens the way for race, religious and hate crimes;

- the general coarsening of our society and culture, resulting in less concern for other people, and a greater acceptance of forms of anti-social, selfish, aggressive and sometimes violent behaviour which would previously have been viewed as beyond the pale;

- the decline of participatory democracy into control by self-appointed Parliamentary clique, resulting in a prevailing sense of powerlessness and hopelessness - a feeling that, whatever our troubles, nothing much can be done about them.

It is common to dismiss these social changes as excuses for criminality. But they set the background and the context in which criminality takes place, and make it more likely that criminality will occur. They are important. They are the causes of crime which the present Government used to talk about, but which they have now forgotten.

Problem 5: There are some social changes which might have been included in our list under Problem 4, but which are so significant they need a section to themselves. The growth of drugs and alcohol consumption is one of these.

Alcohol-related crime is directly related to the economic cycle. When things are tough, burglary and theft rise. When the economy is doing well, people have more money in their pockets so burglary and theft fall. But instead, in these better times, people go out more and drink more - and crimes of alcohol-related violence increase in proportion. The severity of our current problems with ‘binge-drinking’ and its related crime may be explained by this, though in the context of some of the other changes we have already described above (Problem 4). Home Office figures suggest just under half of all violent crime is committed under the influence of alcohol.

The huge increase in the consumption of illegal drugs in the past decades is something new. As it is illegal, this huge trade is controlled by people operating outside the law, by organised crime. Its value and its profits are enormous. The drugs business is estimated to be worth up to £8 billion a year, or about 40% of the value of the (legal) trade in alcohol. It is said to involve 300 major importers, 3000 distributor gangs and 70000 dealers. This is large-scale criminality in anybody’s terms.

The estimated numbers of those using the principal illegal drugs in 2006 were: cannabis 2.6 million; cocaine powder 828 000; ecstasy 567 000; amphetamines 421 000; crack cocaine 58 000 and heroin 41 000. Drug users commit 17% of all violent crime and half of all property crime.

Problem 6: Our mass media affect crime and criminality in a number of ways. They show affluent lifestyles which are not available to the great majority of people as if they are the norm - stimulating unrealistic life expectations, disaffection and envy. They also portray increasingly graphic violence in ways which have helped to make it more acceptable and more likely to occur. For example, when you have an established genre of extreme horror film called ‘torture porn’, it does make you wonder what is going on in the minds of the thousands of people watching it.

The media also has an obsession with the more outrageous crimes of violence, giving these incidents acres of media space far in excess of any possible significance, simply because this is what makes money for the media owners. This in turn gives rise to a grossly exaggerated view of violent crime and its prevalence, and is the principal reason for excessive fear of violent crime (especially amongst older people) which is out of all proportion to any likelihood of actually being a victim.

Less than half of one percent of older people over 75 were victims of violent crime in 2006. Though of course those older people who do suffer violence are much more likely to be severely injured by it than are younger people.

Problem 7: The Government ought to be part of the solution to problems of crime, but there is little doubt that it has become part of the problem. For example, the Blair Government passed 37 separate acts of Parliament affecting the criminal justice system, and one of the first actions of the new Brown Government was to announce yet another one.

This is clearly legislative diarrhoea, much of it intended to give the appearance of action rather than the substance - the latter presumably being too difficult or too expensive or both.
One other result of all this legislation is that there are now a lot more crimes which it is possible to commit, no doubt affecting the crime figures in the opposite direction to that which the Government intended.

Problem 8: One of the biggest problems of all is that the institutions of the criminal justice system - the police, the criminal prosecution service, the courts, the prisons and the various alternatives to prison - do not seem to work well, and quite frequently they do not seem to work at all. The public has increasingly lost confidence in them.

More than half the number of crimes recorded by the British Crime Survey are never reported to the police. Of the crimes which the police do record, they clear up about a quarter of them. On these admittedly very rough and ready figures, the average criminal has at least a one in eight (12.5%) chance of being caught and brought to book.

The courts are still felt by many people to be too slow, ineffective, divorced from the real world, and comparatively expensive in regard to the job they do. Cynics would suggest their primary purpose remains to provide a comfortable living for members of the legal profession rather than to do a job for society.

The number of people in prison in this country has increased from about 44 000 in 1993 to over 81 000 in 2007. We have more people in prison per head of population than any other major western country apart from the USA. We imprison more children than any other country in Europe, and the female prison population has doubled in the last ten years. It now costs about £42 000 each year to keep somebody in prison. The cost of a year in a young offenders’ institution is about twice as high as the annual fees for Eton.

But there is no evidence that this is doing anything more than merely keeping a relatively small proportion of the criminals out of circulation for a period of time. Re-offending rates are very high - 80% for those convicted of theft. And all the indications are that the main result of prison is to create more (and more effective) career criminals. Even its containment function is limited. Of the 100 000 young men responsible for half of all crime, only about one in four are in prison at any one time.

Besides there is evidence that many of those who are currently in prison would best not be there - nearly a quarter of current prisoners are former children in care; nearly three quarters of all prisoners are suffering from a mental health disorder, and most prisoners cannot read or write well enough to earn a reasonable living outside prison.

Public confidence in the prison system has been declining for some time, but there is no more public confidence in community sentences and the other alternatives to prison. This may be based in part on lack of information, together with a natural prejudice that these must somehow be a ‘soft’ alternative to real punishment. In fact the record of these alternatives in terms of successful rehabilitation and lower re-offending rates is significantly better than prison. We might all be better off if we spent more of our our money on effective non-custodial and medical responses, rather than wasting it locking up so many people with treatable mental health problems.

Problem 9: the final problem we have space to consider is that of the crime figures. The best we have are not those recorded by the police, which, despite significant improvements, still essentially measure what the police are doing rather than the overall level of crime. The best available figures are those from the British Crime Survey (BCS) - a periodic survey of the experiences of a sample of
40 000 people.

The BCS also understates the real position as it excludes ‘victimless’ crimes, crimes against children under 16 and some repeat crimes. It also excludes the majority of crimes of domestic violence (about three million each year) and the great majority of elder abuse (estimated to be suffered by nearly half a million older people at any one time). It has therefore been suggested that at least three million crimes are overlooked each year. The BCS suggests that there were just over 11 million crimes in England and Wales in 2006-07, down from a peak of 19 million crimes in 1995.

Since 1995, there has been an overall decline in the total amount of crime of 42%; burglary is down 59%; vehicle theft is down 61%; and violent crime is down 41%. The problem is that the public do not believe the figures. Four out of every five people think crime is increasing.

We now turn to some of the arguments around what should be done about crime.

Argument 1: ‘The answer to crime is tougher sentencing. We can deter criminals by making sure the courts hand down more severe punishment. Prison works’.
This has been the essential approach of both Conservative and Labour Governments for many years. It is also the approach most commonly associated with the USA - ‘catch the bad guys and lock them up for as long as possible’.

The problem is that it doesn’t work. Firstly, not much more than 10% of crime results in a conviction, so there is not much of a deterrent. Secondly, inadequate, overcrowded prisons cannot provide rehabilitation. They can instead provide superb training grounds for career criminals. Even on containment the effectiveness of prison is limited. As we have seen, at any one time, no more than one in four of the most frequent offenders is locked up.

Obviously we need prisons. There will always be some offenders for whom there is no practical alternative. But it is very doubtful if we need many prisons of the kind we have at the moment.

Argument 2: ‘If prison doesn’t work, we need to find something else which will provide effective punishment and rehabilitation’.
As in the USA, where things are of course much worse, British society is paying for addressing the problem of criminality with its gut rather than with its brain. If you have caught and convicted a serious offender, the essential need is to contain him for as long as is appropriate, depending on the nature and seriousness of the offence, but also to ensure that you use this time effectively to reduce the likelihood that this person will offend again once he is released back into the community. We don’t do that, mainly because we lock up too many of the wrong people, and we are not prepared to spend the money sorting out the problems of the ones who have to be locked up - even though the long term cost to society would probably be significantly less than we spend now.

Many of those currently in prison should instead be receiving treatment (probably compulsorily) for their drug dependence or mental health problems. For those guilty of lesser offences, community sentences and rehabilitation are the appropriate way forward, and we probably need to spend a lot more money on them than we do at the moment if they are to be as effective as they ought to be.

The current cost of the prison service is about £2.5 billion pounds each year. The total cost of crime in Britain (including direct costs and losses, security, police, hospital costs for victims, lost wages and the cost of the criminal justice system) is estimated to be over £60 billion a year.

Argument 3: ‘We talk too much about the rights of offenders. What about the rights of victims?’
The emphasis in the criminal justice system understandably tends to be with the criminal. Victims should be entitled to more help and assistance than they sometimes get at present, and their needs are too often overlooked.

But this argument is often extended to claim some involvement for victims in sentencing and punishment. Any credible system of criminal justice must strive to ensure fairness, impartiality and objectivity in its decisions. Victims in shock or distress are the last people to be able to provide that.

Argument 4: ‘You have got to make sure you catch the criminals first. What we need is more police and more effective policing’.
This is relatively uncontentious in itself. Apprehending more criminals is an obvious answer to the problem of crime. The difficulties arise in implementation. What do you want the extra police to do? What does more effective policing look like, and how do we get it? How do you avoid it becoming excessive or uncontrolled (a ‘police state’)? Where is the extra money going to come from? Can policing remain separate from the broader functions of society, the issues which are giving cause to criminality? Are these things best left to the professionals (ie the police themselves), or should there be more outside direction? Should this direction come from the Government (more discredited targets?), or is there a need for more local democratic involvement - with more local accountability - for example properly elected police authorities or elected police commissioners?

Argument 5: ‘If the experiences of children ultimately play the major part in determining the level of crime, then we have to provide better care and better education for our most vulnerable children’.
There are significant links between poverty and deprivation in childhood and criminality; between being a child in care and subsequent offending; between being a victim of sexual abuse in childhood and subsequently becoming a sex offender; between delinquent behaviour and poor diet; and between becoming an offender and having other (older) offenders in the same family.

Opinion polls consistently identify ‘poor parental discipline and control’ as one of the main causes of crime in the eyes of the public.

Research into persistent offending has emphasized the need to focus preventative efforts on the early childhood years. Birth to age 5 is the most critical time for healthy social and emotional development. In part, this has been reflected in some of the programmes of the present Government, for example, Sure Start.

It is doubtful if the scale and scope of current Government action comes anywhere near matching the level of unmet need.

Argument 6: ‘If so much crime is drug-related, surely the simple answer is to legalise the drugs? The drugs trade can then be controlled and taxed as a legal business’.
This is argued by the more extreme libertarians (who may be either left or right in their politics). The counter argument is that having a legal trade in alcohol has not done much to reduce alcohol-related violence. Indeed alcohol is responsible for far more violent crime than are all the illegal drugs added together. On the other hand, perhaps this is merely an argument for controlling the sale and availability of alcohol in a more effective fashion.

But the scale of the illegal drugs trade (£8 billion a year) and the volume of organised criminality this represents, is obviously a very big problem. Attempts to ‘crack down’ on the trade using the traditional means of law enforcement have simply failed. But we still need to do something about it.

Perhaps the first step is to recognise that it is not a simple ‘either/or’ of legality or illegality. The issue is grey rather than black and white. There is clearly a world of difference between being able to buy heroin openly across the bar in the local pub or at the supermarket check-out, and, on the other hand, making it available to registered users on vetted application and prescription in a defined place and under carefully controlled and limited conditions as part of a course of treatment.

Any alternative source of supply would mean that drug users would not have to continue with burglary and robbery on the same scale in order to feed their habit. It is estimated that nearly a half of all acquisitive crime (theft, robbery, burglary) is drugs-related. It would also begin to undermine the huge criminal enterprise which is the import and distribution of illegal drugs.

Argument 7: ‘It is very difficult to prevent crime, but at least we can make sure we provide the most vulnerable people with the maximum protection and security against it’.
Again most people would regard this as commonsense. It includes obvious measures to protect both property and the person, such as locks, chains and alarms, but also broader public issues of lighting, CCTV cameras, and the design and management of buildings and neighbourhoods. It also involves informing people about the real risks of different kinds of crime,(rather than leaving them worried by media scare stories), and assisting them financially with installing protection.

Argument 8: ‘The problem with arguments about crime is that one of the biggest categories of criminality never even makes it onto the agenda - business or corporate crime’.
There is a huge area of criminality which attracts very little attention, mainly because those who control the means of mass communication have a vested interest in avoiding most of it.

This usually involves complex cases of very large scale fraud or theft, often amounting to many millions of pounds. The pensions mis-selling frauds of the 1990s are said to have involved up to £11 billion and over two million victims. There is no doubt that the amount of business fraud has increased enormously since financial deregulation in the late 1980s, and there have been dozens of criminal cases involving huge sums of money but remaining invisible to all but the most assiduous readers of the business pages of the more serious newspapers. Needless to say, the great majority of such activity goes undetected and unpunished. The police (and the mass media) have other priorities.

Business crime can also involve violence and injury. 241 people were directly killed in accidents at work last year, and many more died because of the longer-term consequences of their employment. Breach of health and safety laws is a criminal offence. If you include work-related road traffic accidents and deaths from work-related exposure to asbestos, there are many more deaths as a result of injuries at work in the UK than there are cases of murder and manslaughter - several thousand more.

Argument 9: ‘Perhaps we do need to look again at some of those long term causes of crime’.
These are mainly the social changes set out in our (incomplete) list at Problem 4. They need to be addressed politically, and require political decisions about the kind of society we want to live in.


‘Explaining criminal behaviour is a challenge to rival the twelfth labour of Hercules. There are as many causes of crime as there are criminals and, as if to match this diversity, there are as many theories of crime as there are theorists’.
(‘Relational Justice’ - Jubilee Policy Research Group paper, 1993).