Our widespread use of statistics is usually accompanied by an almost equally widespread mistrust of them. To live in an advanced industrial society without recourse to batteries of figures on most areas of life would be, literally, unthinkable. For this reason alone it is psychologically as well as socially necessary to assume that the figures we daily consume at least approximate to what (as this is not a book about philosophy) we shall call ‘the truth’.

Most of the time this works quite well. Many statistics tell us simple, factual things: how many of us are married, own a dishwasher, intend to vote Conservative. There is no strong likelihood that we shall deceive the collector of the figures, and if the study is competently and honestly conducted the results will be good enough, even though they reflect only the ‘truth’ of a frozen moment in time. Hence the figures on marriage may be dramatically changed by a new tax incentive which encourages cohabiting couples to trip up the aisle, those on dishwashers by a health scare or those on voting intentions by a key policy change by any of the political parties.

Other kinds of official statistics are less simple, and criminal statistics are, for three main reasons, among the most misleading.¹ Firstly, most crime is a secret activity inaccessible to conventional forms of social enquiry. Secondly, variations in criminal statistics are variably, unpredictably, and sometimes only incidentally related to changes in the behaviour of the criminals. Equally if not more significant are changes in the processes which transform invisible criminality into visible crime; indeed it is these processes which the statistics measure. And thirdly, the essentially political nature of criminal statistics makes them, alongside other ‘social problem statistics’ such as health and employment figures, especially vulnerable to political manipulation. So just as a reduction in hospital waiting lists could indicate that the National Health Service was doing better or that people had so lost confidence in the adequacy of the system that they were not troubling their doctor with minor complaints or that there had been a shift in family practitioner referral practice or that the counting rules had changed, so do criminal statistics begin rather than end the argument. Borrowing the language of the tabloid press, how can we tell whether a crime wave which incorporates everyone from sex fiends to dole fiddlers reflects an increase in criminal behaviour, improved training for social security inspectors, a shift in policing policy, or a misleading figure whipped up by an interest group to ‘prove’ the failure of the Government’s social and penal policies or the need for more police?

Criminal statistics are, therefore, problematic, and criminal justice professionals need a good working knowledge of their uses and limitations as well as those of alternative data-gathering strategies designed to complement the official approach. For probation officers in particular a grasp of this is especially important, for the members of the public with whom they will in the future be working increasingly closely are inevitably exposed less to the knowledge of the expert than to the headlines of the tabloids. As we proceed, therefore, you will see that I believe the criminal justice professional of the future should not only be able to give a balanced and informed account of crime and criminal justice to a wide range of members of the public but also encourage them to feel that crime is not a social ‘fact’ beyond their control, but a process in which it is desirable that they intervene.

Locating this chapter and the next early in the book is designed to indicate just how fundamental their content is to what follows. Nowhere can we talk confidently about ‘crime’ as behaviour; always our discussion is mediated by statistics which filter what we observe about crime itself. Sometimes I make this explicit, sometimes, for I do not want to bore you with too much repetition, it is unsaid. Always, though, we must tread warily, being aware of the contradiction in which the criminologist is trapped, of speaking about the artefact and calling it reality. In this chapter I shall be demonstrating the extent of the problem, in the next I shall show how attempts have been made to solve it. And for the rest of the book we simply proceed as best we can in a world where almost nothing is quite what it seems. It is a world which is fairly simple to those people who, on discovering my profession, buttonhole me on trains and at parties, and confidently inform me about the increase in crime, its causes and cures. But the more we penetrate the dark interior of the world of crime and criminal justice, the more complicated and mysterious it becomes.