Every generation will tell their young that it was better in the old days - you know the old days, when you could leave your doors unlocked, sleep with your windows open, and leave your keys in your car. The whole city, My Lord, is alarm'd and uneasy. The citizens are oppressed by rape and violence. My colleague at the Australian Institute of Criminology, Peter Grabosky, published a book entitled Sydney in Ferment and this was on crime in colonial Sydney, and showed it was a lot more dangerous in its early days than it is today. But although most of Australia is comparatively safe, the incidence of crime is much greater than it was 20 years ago.
Criminal activity hurts and outrages people, and it costs the community billions of dollars.
Ideologically polar positions produce their own explanation for increases in crime. Well if we look at it from another perspective, there are probably many more opportunities than ever before for criminal behaviour, and one view is to argue that a lot of crime might be the price we pay for living in a world which offers high material benefits and a very mobile lifestyle. Put that against a context of tremendous social and technological change, and we've got a complex set of ingredients that don't seem to fit any of the standard explanations. We know that we're faced with terminological confusion about what crime is, about how it's measured, how crimes are ranked and about who suffers most, and also who commits crime. Most generalisations on crime as a whole are inaccurate because the term 'crime' denotes too wide a variety of events to be described by a single label.