ABSTRACT
In the United Kingdom in the nineteenth century, large-scale surveillance of perceived criminal populations necessarily involved a number of innovative governmental technologies. This chapter will concentrate on one of the more signifi cant outcomes: the use of counting to assess the effectiveness of government policy. It will consider the ways that statistical thinking, in the form of the auditing of a large number of transactions, affected policy and governmental statistical practice, in the process providing a case study in the relationship between micro-and macro-level statistical practices. First, I will note two contrasting views of how British government structures worked, describe how they generated statistics of criminals “at large,” and how these fi gures were co-constructed by central government and the reporting bodies. Next, I will show how the resulting fi gures were deployed politically to justify further government action based around the registration of all criminals. Following a description of the activity of this Habitual Criminals Register, I will show the ways that its performance was measured within government and the statistical techniques used to back up the competing explanations for its perceived failure.
