Correlation Between Crime And Crime - 1976 Words

Society is imbued with a deep fixation to understand the prevalence of criminality: who is doing the crime and why? The frequency of crime, however, will never be completely reported or discovered, which is attributable to its somewhat clandestine nature. This phenomenon is underscored by criminologists and sociologists as, the ‘dark figure of crime’; only crime that has been reported can be measured. We are painted with a partial picture of reality, but not reality itself. There are two principal sources of data regarding crime measurement. Crimes recorded by police form the basis of official statistics and alternative measures, such as crime victim surveys and self-report surveys are other methods to measure crime and gain a more†¦show more content†¦2008). The proportion of different crimes represented is the inverse of official statistics. This essay concludes with the proposition that there is no flawless methodology that will idyllically depict the full ex tent of crime. In Australia, there is no single body of criminal law governing the whole nation; each jurisdiction has its own set of criminal laws and major differences can therefore exist, such as the definition of certain offences and their range of seriousness (Chilvers, 1998, Ross, 1999). What is measured depends on how each state defines crime (Skogan, 1977). The Australian and New Zealand Standard Offence Classification (ANZSOC) is a uniform national statistical framework that overcomes differences in legal offence definitions across states and territories to provide national crime statistics (ABS, 2011). Three broad strands within criminology that deal with how to measure crime can be identified as the realist, institutionalist and critical approaches, each reflecting different assumptions that produce different knowledges (Block, Block, 1984). The realist approach endeavours to expose the dark figure of crime to statistical light. This approach understands the role of criminology is to supplement the limitations of official statistics through alternative data recording measures, including, but not limited to victimisation surveys (Block Block, 1984). Yet criminologists that adopt the institutionalist approach argue that