The statistical map
Clive Emsley · 2018
Criminologists who engage in statistical debates employ criminal statistics adjusted to take account of population growth or decline and of changes in age structure. Some historians of crime in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have also used this kind of data, though there is the obvious problem of reliable population figures for the period before 1801. The chapter explains the enormous population changes of the two centuries must always be borne in mind in any assessment of the statistical pattern of crime. From 1836 the statistics of commitments to prison began to be systematised and published in an annual digest. The statistical movement generally took statistical facts to be pure and uncontroversial; by deploying these facts social investigators sought to stand aside from party but, nevertheless, to push for reforms. Statistics made crime national and made the criminal a national bogeyman.