ABSTRACT
The previous chapter suggested that the judicial statistics may not be a straightforward guide to levels of crime, given the problems of different data collection methods in the pre- and post-1892 statistics. This chapter may give us other reasons to doubt official statistics and to look around for more reliable sources we can use to chart changes in offending. For the moment though, we have seen that statistics presented in the last chapter demonstrated an apparent decline in violence from the late Victorian period to World War I (see Figure 3.11). Drunkenness (simple, aggravated, and drunk and disorderliness) very appropriately had a more staggered decline from the start of World War I. Whereas violence had been in retreat from 1875, drunkenness only fell from the start of the twentieth century, after a significant rise in prosecutions for drunkenness from the 1850s. Nevertheless, the amount of violence and disorder at the start of World War I was only a fraction of what it had been twenty years earlier. This was taken as evidence by penal, medical, and criminological experts that only a small residuum of persistent offenders remained to be reformed or to be controlled by the police.
