Crime and punishment have been right at the heart of the British political life for more than 40 years.
At the recent general election, Taking Back Our Streets became one of Labour’s five core “missions” while the Tories dedicated five pages of their manifesto to the same themes. Both parties presented the British public as fearful, vindictive and punitive, and they seem to genuinely believe that that is what people think.
But this image is based on quite flimsy foundations, and there is still a huge amount we don’t know about how people’s attitudes to crime and punishment have changed over time, and whether those attitudes match the real level of crime in society. In order to answer those questions, my research, recently published in the British Journal of Criminology, assembled more than a thousand survey questions from seven different sources and attempted to aggregate that data into four different dimensions of public opinion: crime concern, punitiveness, prioritisation of crime as a social issue, and support for the death penalty.
The story you can tell with this data starts in the 1960s. This was a time of enormous social change, reflected in the ending of capital punishment and the decriminalisation of homosexuality and abortion. But some of these advances seem to have moved ahead of public opinion, with more than 80% of the public opposed to the abolition of the death penalty at the start of the decade. But by 1970, this number had fallen to 61% and my statistical analysis shows that overall support for the death penalty would continue to fall steadily over the next 60 years.
We can also say something about fear of crime. In 1965, 70 per cent of people thought that violent crime was a serious social problem. By 1969, the figure was 78%, but by 1972 it had fallen to 69%. Combining this with hundreds of similar survey questions reveals that concern about crime fluctuated up and down from the mid-1960s through to the mid-1970s, at which point it started to grow dramatically, rising by more than 40% over the next two decades.
In part, this seems to have been driven by rising crime (police records for property crime show a steady increase from 1960 through to the early-1990s). But it’s important to remember that this was also the moment when the post-war Keynesian compact started to break down. In Stuart Hall’s immensely influential interpretation of this period, this was a decade of crisis - a slowing economy, industrial strife, a moral panic about “mugging”, the rise of the National Front - an all-encompassing crisis of legitimacy that saw the state turning away from rule by consent and relying instead on the police to maintain its authority.
Margaret Thatcher’s election in 1979 marked the culmination of many of these tendencies. Fear of crime was still rising, and it was becoming a priority issue for a larger and larger section of the public (more than 12% according to an Ipsos poll from 1988). There is also stronger evidence to link this to real changes in the rate of crime. Frustrated by the inadequacies of police reporting (which often reflect police procedures more than crime itself), the Office for National Statistics launched Britain’s first victimisation survey in 1982. Over the next decade, these surveys would show crime rising relentlessly, reaching a peak in 1993 when an astonishing 40% of people were estimated to have been a victim of crime in the past 12 months.
The 1980s are also the first period for which we can produce decent estimates for how much people wanted to see longer and tougher prison sentences. Unlike support for the death penalty (which was still falling) and contrary to what many scholars have assumed, this form of carceral punitiveness seems to have been extremely volatile during the 1980s. On the one hand, there was clearly a deep well of support for these policies and the under-50s did become significantly more punitive over time. But on the other hand, support for longer prison sentences seems to have been falling for the over-50s, while anti-police protests became regular features on the nightly news.
The real peak of popular law and order politics came in the 1990s: fear of crime and prioritisation were still high and opposition to punitiveness had been erased from the public debate. But by then, crime itself had actually started to fall. In Britain, as in most of the Global North, most types of crime are 90 per cent lower today than they were 30 years ago. And, unsurprisingly, the British public seem to have noticed. Fear of crime was the first area to react, falling by 40% from 2001 to today. After 2010, levels of punitiveness and prioritisation also started to tumble.
But if we now know that the public do respond to changing crime rates, we don’t yet have an explanation for why our politicians seem to be stuck in the 1990s. And until their attitudes change, public policy is likely to remain stuck on “tough” mode.
Dr Matteo Tiratelli is a Lecturer at the Social Research Institute at University College London
