WHEN CRIMINOLOGISTS STARTED TO USE NUMBERS

Crime prevention; free will; statistics; policing; Social Physics; the causes of crime; how many Frenchmen evade the draft?

Here is the problem for criminologists of the nineteenth century. They had precision-engineered a shiny new criminal justice system, finely-tuned, carefully calibrated. Their perfectly-rational system was designed for perfectly-rational human beings who had freely to choose between two different courses of action: crime and non-crime. The plan was to ensure ensure that the consequences of the former were just a little less pleasant than the consequences of the latter. Any human being, endowed with reason and free will, would understand straight away that the straight-and-narrow was just a little bit preferable to the primrose path. Voila – a crime-free society!

The only problem was that it didn’t work. Please bash the blue button below:

If criminal justice was a precision-engineered machine, free will was the gremlin inside. Like Santa Claus, the law assumed that everyone chose freely whether to be bad or good. But by the nineteenth century, scientists were starting to get sceptical about that idea. Newton’s Laws had shown – with spectacular success – that Physics was governed by cause and effect. Surely similar laws would soon apply to Psychology, too. In a science devoted to cause and effect, there could be no space left for free will, no matter how much the law depended on it. You simply couldn’t have both.

My newsletter about the problem of crime and free will is here.

To solve this conundrum, scientists needed a new toolkit. One soon became available. Perhaps it looked unpromising. Certainly it looked boring. But it wasn’t and isn’t. In fact, properly used, it can be genuinely exciting. It reveals nature’s truths in a way nothing else can. The name of this new, exciting toolkit was, of course, statistics.

It’s worth remembering that no toolkit is any good on its own. Its owners have to decide what to use it for, and how. Cue all kinds of exciting debates. Some of them resembled a wrestling match with the lights switched off. Scientists grappled with numbers, slipped, tripped, punched themselves in the face, fell, and tried again. There was more bewilderment than applause. In one notorious three-way debate, the first expert argued that the crime rate had increased, the second argued that it had decreased, and the third said it hadn’t changed.[i] Fortunately, standards improved as the toolkit grew more familiar.

Why was statistics new? Why had it taken so long to develop the toolkit? The answer, oddly enough, is bound up with religion. Christians traditionally believed that everything had its own purpose. People, objects, events: all were part of God’s Divine Plan. Aristotle had written about the “final causes” of things. Only much later, during the Enlightenment, did philosophers begin to treat people as “ends in themselves”, rather than vehicles for the Plan.

It was a radical step. Once you subtract purpose from life, the vacuum is filled by chance. Statistics, of course, is precisely the study of chance.

On 29 September 1829, the Metropolitan Police Bill became law. Its time had come. The modern state practically demanded it.[ii] Influenced by criminological theories of the time, Sir Robert Peel had wanted a police force for “the prevention of crime”.[iii] Peel used statistics in a mischievous way, to persuade voters that crime was on the rise. If he wasn’t exactly cooking the books, Peel was certainly warming them a little. But he knew that British citizens felt uneasy. Violent young men were returning from the wars with idle hands to do the devil’s work. The very first stranger-murders hit the very first headlines. A police force suddenly seemed very desirable indeed.

The new force had to start collecting details of “known criminals”. Nothing could have suited the times better. This wasn’t just statistics, this was statistics about the criminal class - a very Victorian idea! The whole approach was highly fashionable.

Lambert-Adolphe-Jacques Quételet had one of those restless minds so typical of his century. He was forever solving some intriguing problem or other. Although he had a doctorate in geometry, he decided to become an astronomer. To that end, he founded a new observatory in Brussels. Shortly thereafter, he quite reasonably decided it would be a good idea to learn some astronomy. Studying in Paris, Quételet met a number of mathematicians. They included Pierre Simon, Marquis de Laplace, who was thinking about a new science of crime and disease. He called it Social Physics. Quételet made Social Physics his own.

The central concept was something we might call a human prototype (Quételet’s phrase was l’homme moyen). To see what Quételet meant, imagine that you and I and everyone else are all copies of a single human being, whom we might as well call Adam. By their nature, copies vary slightly. Some are more accurate than others. Quételet noticed that people differed from each other in just such a way. By comparing them, perhaps we could learn about Adam himself. What does he look like? What will he do tomorrow, or the day after? What is the probability that he’ll commit murder next year?

Adam clearly had a big family. Quételet wanted to discover the rules that governed it. You could call them the “laws of human behaviour”.[iv] Nothing would help but numbers. In 1827, the French government had started publishing statistics of just the sort Quételet needed.[1]

Quételet noticed something that surprised his contemporaries more than it may surprise you. The number of murders in France remained so constant, year after year, that you could predict them. You could even predict how many would be committed in different ways: “with guns, swords, knives, canes, stones,” and so on:[v]

“In every thing which relates to crimes, the same numbers are reproduced so constantly, that it becomes impossible to misapprehend it – even in respect to those crimes which seem perfectly beyond human foresight, such as murders committed in general at the close of quarrels, arising without a motive, and other circumstances to all appearance the most fortuitous or accidental […] We might even predict annually how many individuals will stain their hands with the blood of their fellow-men, how many will be forgers, how many will deal in poison…”[vi]

Approximately the same number of people came to court every year, and approximately the same number were sentenced. Between 100 and 150 were condemned to death, 280 to perpetual hard labour, 1050 to hard labour “for a time”, 1220 to solitary confinement. You could predict the number of suicides by hanging, or women in their sixties getting married to men in their twenties. Even Quételet found such regularities “alarming”.[vii]  They indicated that human beings had no free will after all. We were nothing special if we were subject to the same natural laws as anything else in the universe.

Crime was more predictable even than death. Here is Quételet, writing about human beings in general, and Parisians in particular: “[T]he mortality of the capital proceeded with less regularity than the crimes of the kingdom, and […] each age paid a more uniform and constant tribute to the jail than to the tomb”.[viii]

The crime rate was a barometer for the price of goods. It changed whenever prices changed. It seemed people were driven to crime “in an irresistible manner”.[ix] This was awful news. Remember that the criminal justice system assumed everyone had free will. The causes of crime had once seemed infinite: to disentangle them impossible. But statistics showed there was no problem. The sheer multiplicity of causes meant that they tended to cancel each other out. Crimes like murder and suicide were exactly like the “movements of the tides, and the rotations of the seasons”. Evidently, “the individual felon only carries into effect what is a necessary consequence of preceding circumstances”.[x]

To learn more about the causes of crime - and how we know about them - check out this link.

What made the numbers so predictable? Two things. First, they varied around an average. Second, that variation itself was regular (statisticians say that you could calculate the dispersion). The same regularities that applied to murder and suicide applied also to the height of Native Americans, the chest measurements of Scottish soldiers, and the weight of Parisian baguettes.[xi] Indeed, over the years, scientists have found they apply to most things they want to study, from the weight of sweets in a bag, to the brightness of stars, to the number of victims of crime.

Quételet proved it when he studied the crime of draft evasion. He knew the minimum height of army conscripts. He knew the average height of Frenchmen, and, around it, the spread of the numbers (dispersion again). Armed with these numbers, he examined the data on conscripts’ recorded heights. He found that rather too many were just below the minimum height. There was a surplus of 2,200 short men. Just that number, then, had lied about their height in order to evade conscription.

In those days, it was impossible to analyse large data-sets. With modern computers, though, we can do just that, using techniques Quételet pioneered. Forensic economists are even able to search out “statistical fingerprints” for such difficult-to-detect crimes as fraud, insider trading, and so on.

The success of Social Physics showed that human beings obeyed scientific laws, just like everything else in the universe. This was precisely what the Church had always denied, and criminologists of the time didn’t want to hear. Worse, if crime had actual, identifiable causes, then it seemed no more sensible to punish a person for committing one than to punish a stone for falling when you let go. The very idea is “paradoxical, and indeed incoherent”.[xii] Neither the stone nor the person had any choice. They were compelled to act as they did.

It was a big moment. Under the influence of statistics, Psychology was about to become a physical science.

Here are some of the things Quételet learnt about crime. He was first to show what many people had suspected, that it is most commonly committed by young people.[xiii] Men were four times as criminal as women. Women outnumbered men only in crimes like infanticide and “miscarriage”. In “violation and seduction”, men outnumbered women one hundred to one.[xiv] The poorer people were, the less the difference between the genders.

Young offenders were mostly short. There were more crimes against the person in summer and against property in winter. Cold weather, socialising, and alcohol all lifted the crime rate. Education, too. People who could read and write could commit forgery, fraud, and so on. Poverty had little influence, though richer people committed proportionately more crimes of violence.[xv]

The criminologist, Enrico Ferri, became a devoted fan of statistics. Nothing else could show the links between weirdly different phenomena. For instance, if only you knew the French crime rate in a particular year, statistics could help you figure out what the weather had been. All kinds of factors affected crime: physical; anthropological; social. If we were going to fight crime, Ferri suspected, tinkering with the justice system would be less effective than collecting statistics. It was a scientific opinion, and it belonged to a scientific century, a century of numbers.

All images courtesy of WikiMedia Commons. References provided partly out of academic habit, but partly so that you can chase up anything you find particularly interesting.

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[1] France was well ahead of the game. Germany, for instance, didn’t start until 1882, although the different regions had published fragmentary notes before that.

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[i] Tobias, JJ: Crime & Industrial Society in the Nineteenth Century, Pelican, Middlesex, 1972, p19

[ii] Linnemann, T: “Proof of death – Police power & the economics of seizure, accumulation & trophy”, Theoretical Criminology, 21(1), 2016, pp57-77

[iii] Sir Robert Peel, quoted in Emsley, Clive: Crime & Society in England 1750 - 1900, Routledge, London, 2010, p233

[iv] Mlodinow, Leonard, The Drunkard’s Walk – How randomness rules our lives, Penguin, London, 2008, p158

[v] Mlodinow, Leonard, op cit, p155

[vi] Adolphe Quetelet, quoted in Rennie, Ysabel, The Search for Criminal Man, Lexington Books, DC Heath & Co., USA, 1978, pp35-36

[vii] Quetelet, Adolphe: “Of the development of the propensity to crime” in Eugene McLaughlin, John Muncie & Gordon Hughes, eds., Criminological Perspectives, Second Edition, Sage, London, 2003, p33

[viii] Adolphe Quetelet, quoted in Rennie, Ysabel, op cit, p35

[ix] Quetelet, Adolphe, quoted in Rennie, Ysabel, p34

[x] Henry Thomas Buckle, quoted in Boyle, Thomas: Black Swine in the Sewers of Hampstead, Viking, London, 1989,, p179

[xi] Mldinow, Leonard, op cit, pp155-6

[xii] Berlin, Sir Isaiah(5): “’From hope & fear set free’”, in Henry Hardy & Roger Hausheer (eds), Henry Hardy & Roger Hausheer (eds): The Proper Study of Mankind, Chatto & Windus, London, 1997, p99

[xiii] Quetelet, Adolphe, quoted in Rennie, Ysabel, , pp41-2

[xiv] Ellis, Havelock: The Criminal, 5^th edition, Patterson Smith, Montclair, 1973, p263

[xv] Quetelet, Adolphe, quoted in Rennie, Ysabel,, p36-7