Ken Pease

Community Service Orders

Community service orders are penal sanctions in which convicted offenders are placed in unpaid positions with nonprofit or governmental agencies. Proponents typically urge the use of community service as an alternative to imprisonment. Community service programs have been established in many countries. The most extensive and most studied experience is British. Following a 1970 recommendation of the Advisory Council on the Penal System, enabling legislation was passed in 1972 and pilot programs were initiated in 1973 in six probation districts. By the late seventies, community service programs were in place throughout the United Kingdom. In 1982, more than 30,000 orders were imposed on 8 percent of offenders sentenced for serious crimes. A major Home Office evaluation of the British system used four different methods to calculate the extent to which those sentenced to community service would otherwise have been imprisoned. By every method, it appeared that no more than half would have been imprisoned. Research in Great Britain and in several other countries confirms this finding. For community service to be justified as an alternative to incarceration but used as a supplement to nonincarcerative sentences is hypocritical. Offenders who would not have been imprisoned in the absence of orders may find themselves later imprisoned for violation of an order. Among the major problems of implementation are disparities in the extent of imposition of orders, in the length of orders, and in the use of sanctions against offenders who do not comply with orders. There have been few efforts to assess the impact of the use of orders on recidivism, and the results are inconclusive.

Predictive Mapping of Crime by ProMap: Accuracy, Units of Analysis, and the Environmental Backcloth

This chapter concerns the forecasting of crime locations using burglary as an example. An overview of research concerned with when and where burglaries occur is provided, with an initial focus on patterns of risk at the individual household level. Of central importance is evidence that as well as being geographically concentrated (at a range of geographic scales), burglary clusters in space and time more than would be expected if patterns of crime were simply the result of some places being more attractive to offenders than others. One theoretical framework regarding offender spatial decision making is discussed and consideration given to how features of the urban environment which affect the accessibility of places (e.g., road networks or social barriers) might shape patterns of offending. A simple mathematical model informed by the research discussed is then presented and tested as to its accuracy in the prediction of burglary locations. The model is tested against chance expectation and popular methods of crime hot-spotting extant and found to outperform both. Consideration of the importance of different units of analysis is a recurrent theme throughout the chapter, whether this concerns the intended policy purpose of crime forecasts made, the spatial resolution of different types of data analyzed, or the attention given to the dimension of time – a unit of analysis often overlooked in this type of work. The chapter concludes with a discussion of means of developing the approach described, combining it with others, and using it, inter alia, to optimize police patrol routes.

Population Inequality: The Case of Repeat Crime Victimization

This paper employs data from the 2000 British Crime Survey for England and Wales to discuss ways of illustrating the degree of inequality in the distribution of crime victimization. In particular, Lorenz curves are presented for major crime categories, i.e. property, personal and vehicle crime, and their components are presented. They are fitted both nationally (Le. to victimized and non-victimized people) and amongst victims. Crime Lorenz curves over victims illustrate repeat victimization. Additional repeat victimization statistics, such as concentration, the percentage of repeat crimes and the percentage of repeat victims, are also shown. Threats and assaults are the most recurring crimes, whereas theft of vehicles shows low rates of repetition within a year.

The Probation Career of Al Truism

The writing of Bill McWilliams on probation history and practice is briefly reviewed. Bill’s plea for a theoretical moral underpinning for practice would, if answered, make the service less vulnerable to the discrediting of its claims that probation is effective in increasing public protection. These claims are ill-founded, and are only sustainable because of political and criminological disinclination to address the evidence or live with its consequences. The search for a moral underpinning might have led Bill to link probation with current concerns to combat social exclusion. This would involve detailed consideration of the distributive justice–retributive justice nexus and its implications for probation practice. It is argued that concern altruistically to give help to all those damaged by the criminal justice process, victims, witnesses, perpetrators and their families alike, would accord with a secularised but morally grounded version of the police court mission.

Police Perceptions of the Long- and Short-Term Spatial Distribution of Residential Burglary

This paper seeks to explore police officer perception of the spatial distribution of residential burglary over different time periods. Using a survey of officers across three English police basic command units (BCUs), it examines the accuracy of their impressions of the locations of crime over the preceding year and the preceding two weeks. It also explores how these perceptions might affect the deployment of resources and police action. The results suggest that whilst officers have a good idea of where burglary occurred over the preceding year, they are less accurate for the recent distribution of risk because short-term hotspots are indeed significantly more unstable than long-term hotspots. The short-term predictive power of both one-year and two-week retrospective perceptions is very limited. Tactical advantages will only be afforded by the swift and routine identification of emerging short-term hotspots.

Crime, labour and the wisdom of Solomon

Abstract The most fundamental fact about crime is that its incidence is largely determined by factors outside the criminal justice process ‐ by the design, use and maintenance of artefacts and of social arrangements, and by the socialisation of people. Labour will make a difference insofar as it acts according to that reality, by changing organisational structure within the Home Office, and by directly and indirectly seeking to influence the real engines of crime. There is a useful parallel in the policy thrust towards environmental sustainability. The greening of policy proceeds (too slowly) through the policy of inducing industry, commerce and citizens to behave differently, by penalising the un‐green, rewarding the green, and most centrally by establishing sustainability as a criterion of good practice about which Government cares. The greening of policy is under way. The remoralisation of policy as suggested here is not. While crime control is ghettoised in the Home Office and entwined with blame allo...

Crime Prevention Within the Probation Service

Preventive strategies have only belatedly been recognised in tackling the crime problem. The authors argue their merits, not as a last resort, but as part of a balanced approach, and suggest that the Probation Service is essential to the development of new initiatives. They admit these are controversial proposals but believe that a preventive perspective would aid the task of helping offenders.

'Nuisance' phone calls to women in England and Wales

Obscene or nuisance phone calls are particularly targeted towards women. Employing data from two sweeps of the British Crime Survey a decade apart (BCS 1982 and BCS 1992), this work attempts to measure the effects of individual socio-economic characteristics and victimization history of women in England and Wales on their likelihood of receiving at least one nuisance call. To make the logit modelling analysis more tangible, risks of nuisance calls are calculated from our models of five hypothetical women, single mother, professional, student, housewife and pensioner, with specific attributes taken from the set of explanatory variables.

Distributive justice and the crime drop.

The present chapter seeks to link two of the central facts concerning victimization by crime in the Western world. The first is that the burden of crime is borne very unequally across areas and within areas across households and individuals (Tseloni et al., 2010). The second is that there has been a very substantial cross-national drop in crime as captured by victimization surveys (van Dijk et al., 2007) (Farrell et al., 2010). The authors seek to establish whether the crime drop has resulted in a more or less equitable distribution of crime across households. Inequality of victimization challenges distributive justice. Harms as well as goods should be distributed equitably. Changes in inequality would suggest whether we should regard the crime drop as unequivocally benign (inequality reducing or neutral) or have reservations about its benefits (inequality increasing). The possible outcomes of the analysis have differing implications for criminal justice in general and policing in particular. There is already evidence that policing concentration at least in England and Wales is not proportionate to the presenting crime problem (Ross & Pease, 2008), and reasons have been suggested for this, the writers’ favoured account being labelled the “winter in Florida, summer in Alaska” paradox (Townsley & Pease, 2002).

Concentration of personal and household crimes in England and Wales

Crime is disproportionally concentrated in few areas. Though long established, there remains uncertainty about the reasons for variation in the concentration of similar crime (repeats) or different crime (multiples). Wholly neglected have been composite crimes when more than one crime types coincide as parts of a single event. The research reported here disentangles area crime concentration into repeats, multiple and composite crimes. The results are based on estimated bivariate zero-inflated Poisson regression models with covariance structure which explicitly account for crime rarity and crime concentration. The implications of the results for criminological theorizing and as a possible basis for more equitable police funding are discussed.