Outline and assess the usefulness of official statistics in measuring crime and deviance

The first 200 words of this essay...

'Outline and assess the usefulness of official statistics in measuring crime and deviance'.

The term deviance cover a wide range of behaviour which digresses from the norms and values of society; but an act doesn't have to break the law for it to be labelled as deviant. Whereas a crime is an act of behaviour or action that break the laws of a society; and covers all activities from trivial to serious. There are many methods for the measuring and collection of data on crime and deviance level within the British Society. The main one is Official Crime Statistics (OCS) - these government statistics that cover a wide range of topics. There are two major soruces of which official statistics are based on; these are crimes recorded by the police (which form the majority of the Statistics) and statistics about those who have been convicted of offences. The basic process for the collection of official statistics is: witness (es) discover(s) a crime, witness reports the crime, the crime is recorded by the police and OCS are collated.

There are several purposes for the use of OCS, these are: to establish the volume of crime over a certain period