ABSTRACT
Introduction In the introductory chapter I made brief reference to Edwin Sutherland’s helpful, if incomplete, defi - nition of criminology as the study of the making of laws, the breaking of laws and the social response to the breaking of laws. In this chapter we look in a little more detail at the nature of one particular part of criminology: the measurement of crime – how many people are known to have broken the law, how frequently and with what seriousness? David Garland (1994) suggests that for much of its history criminology was dominated by two differing projects: the ‘governmental’ and the ‘Lombrosian’ (a reference to Cesare Lombroso – see Chapter 6). The fi rst of these focused primarily on trends in crime and the activities of criminal justice agencies, and its core concern is with the administration of justice. By contrast, the Lombrosian project focused on the causes of crime or, more particularly, on attempting to distinguish the criminal from the non-criminal . In recent decades, however, these projects have been largely overtaken by a series of broader concerns coalescing around ideas of risk and a calculative, managerialist mentality – concerned with measuring outcomes and managing performance – all of which is set in the context of a much more highly politicised understanding of crime and its control.
