Criminal Records
One of the few relevant facts which it is impossible to discover from the figures given in the Home Office's annual Criminal Statistics for England and Wales is whether or not we are a more law-abiding nation than we used to be. So many unchartable factors —new offences, the number of police, the willingness of individuals to prosecute and magistrates to convict—have to be taken into account, that the only legitimate inferences that can be drawn are broad comparisons of trends over a fairly short period. Even on this limited basis the figures for 1948, which have just been published, are disquieting enough. It was reasonable to hope that three years after the end of the war we should begin to find a decrease in the number of offenders and offences, particularly among children and young people. That is not the case ; in fact the slight decline compared with the peak war years which was noticeable in 1946 and 1947 has been converted into a sharp rise. This is most remarkable among the youngest group of all—children between the ages of 8 and i4. The number of boys found guilty of indictable offences is up from 19,567 in 1947 to 24,684 in 1948, and of girls from 1,591 to 2,043, both well above the war-time maxima. The figures for all other age-groups of both sexes show a rise over 1947, though not proportionately so great and not in all cases rising above the previous maxima. The offences mainly responsible for the overall increase are various forms of larceny, which are up by to per cent. on 1947, and breaking and entering, which are up by 16 per cent. Both sorts of offence have been rising fairly steadily in the past ten years, but it had been hoped that they would begin to decrease when the disturbed conditions of war and its aftermath, which gave them so much scope, began to disappear. Perhaps even more unpleasantly significant is the fact that crimes involving violence against the person show a much greater increase in the past
year than during any ot the war years. Whatever the reason for all these increases may be, it is plain that the war cannot go on taking the whole blame.
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