ABSTRACT
Written history is concerned with change through time; much of the contemporary debate about crime is also concerned with change through time. Any historian writing about crime cannot avoid engagement with contemporary debates and being sucked into the issue as to whether crime is ‘worse’, ‘more prevalent’ or ‘more violent’ than in the past. A quarter of a century ago Geoffrey Pearson drew attention to the way in which generation after generation in Britain looked at what is now termed antisocial behaviour by young people and pronounced that in their immediate present, such behaviour was far worse than in their past. 1 And the problem of the rose-tinted spectacles persists.
