LA POLÍTICA DE RESTRICCIÓN DE IMPORTACIONES

To study criminal trends over time, longitudinal datasets of criminal offending are necessary to examine the patterns of offending behaviour that occur. There are various types of data sources that can be utilised which have numerous strengths and weaknesses. Typically, criminal behaviour is examined using the collection of data from three main sources; official data (e.g. police recorded crime), victimisation surveys and self-report offending surveys. As this thesis is primarily concentrated on criminal careers and patterns of offending behaviour, discussion will focus only on official data and self-report surveys.

Self-report surveys, such as the Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development (West

3 DATA SOURCES AND LONGITUDINAL DATASETS

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and Farrington, 1973), provide a wealth of information on offenders and their criminal activity. Information about the individual characteristics and background factors, such as social environment, social economic status and family situation, can all be gathered from these types of surveys. They are able to capture a larger proportion of the true number of offences committed and provide a more realistic representation of criminal career features (Farrington et al., 2006). Self-report offending can help shed light on the “dark figure” of crime by allowing offenders to reveal the offences that have not been brought to the attention of law enforcement. In contrast to official data which tends to record more serious crime, self-report data can capture information on a much wider range of offences including those which are considered much less serious.

Although there are several benefits to self-report offending surveys, there are unfortunately disadvantages. Firstly, the validity of the information provided is problematic due to offenders either over or under reporting their criminal activity. Some offenders may lie about the offences they have committed, either

exaggerating the amount or withholding information about all crimes they have been involved in (Thornberry and Krohn, 2003). Also self-reported offences are based on the individual’s own interpretation of their offences. This can lead to misleading information as offenders could be mistaken when they report offences in survey’s. Self-report data is subject to respondent biases, where individuals omit less socially acceptable behaviour such as sexual behaviour. It also can be biased due to recall errors. Individuals may have trouble recalling offences they committed in the past, particularly older offenders (Piquero et al., 2014). Self-reported offending surveys are subject to biases, which are affected by lack of respondents, as they rely greatly on voluntary participation.

Often the sample of offenders in a self-report offending survey is small and not representative of the offending population. Self-reported offending surveys are very

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time consuming and expensive, and often subject to validation issues (Farrington, 2001) . There are also issues with the type of questions being asked. Closed questions are easier for quantitative analysis but can hide or limit information, whereas open questions allow for a more informative answer but are more problematic to analyse quantitatively.

Official data is a popular choice for researchers to examine trends of criminal activity over time and much of the knowledge discovered about criminal careers has used official recorded data sources (Farrington, 2001). Unlike self-report data, official data sources often cover long periods of time making it ideal for studying long term criminal patterns. Such data (e.g. police recorded crime or court conviction records) is systematically recorded and the classification of offences is based upon definitions provided by the criminal justice system.

The sources of official conviction data being used in this thesis provide over 40 years of data on criminal offending and cover a wide range of offences, making it an ideal source of data for studying criminal careers.

Just like self-report data, official data also has its disadvantages. As with all official data on convictions, the true figure of crime is not realistically represented. This is because not all offenders are caught, arrested and found guilty for the crimes they commit. This means many offenders will not receive convictions for all of the offences they have committed.

A further problem is with police recording practices and the discretion of police officers when it comes to recording crimes. In 2002, The Home Office tried to standardise the counting rules for recording crimes to ensure that all crimes from all police forces were being recorded properly and consistently across the country. This means that crimes recorded from 2001/02 to 2003/04 saw an increase overall in the recorded crime rate, but this did not necessarily mean that crime was increasing. The

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rise in the overall recorded crime rate was probably due to better recording practices by police forces following the implementation of the new counting rules (Simmons et al., 2003). This has potential implications for the analysis of crime over time as it may give misleading results. Therefore comparing recorded crimes prior to the

implementation of the new counting rules to crimes recorded after, should be done with caution as they are not directly comparable.

In addition to this, official crime data is also subject to data entry errors when recording, for example some individuals may be recorded as multiple offenders, when they are not. This therefore can impact the data recorded on repeat offenders which is of high value to law enforcement agencies who are trying to target chronic offenders. There is also no control for the decision of victims to come forward to report crimes and this again contributes to the ‘dark figure’ of crime (Coleman, 1996).

Conviction data, however, is also problematic. There is the issue of pseudo-

reconvictions. These are convictions that occur after the recorded conviction which were committed prior to the conviction date, but are related to the offence or

offences(Howard and Kershaw, 2000). This can occur when there are several trials against an offender for numerous offences committed over a series of dates.

Therefore, pseudo-reconvictions can give a false representation of the actual rate of reconvictions and make it rather complex when looking at comparisons between reconviction rates for different disposal methods.