Comparing Crime Myths And Crime

One problem that has been plaguing societies throughout history is crime. The following essay will provide discussion on the topic “Compare and contrast crime myths and facts”. Even today’s contemporary society is struggling to come to fair terms about effects of crime on society and individuals, fair and effective law enforcement and judiciary systems, educative corrections system and proactive and effective crime prevention. This assignment will focus on comparison and contrast between crime myths and crime facts, as an example using myths about crime and youth gangs and crime and mentally ill.

Starting point for discussion is to examine the definitions of relevant terms. Crime and Justice: A Guide to Criminology defines
We can see from police arrest data for Victoria (Victoria Police 1993) for 1991-1992 year that there were some crimes where youth played a significant role. As we can see from Table 1, these tend to be property crimes, theft and vehicle theft. These findings are reinforced by ABCI (1991) findings which found that youth illegal activities revolved around anti-social behavior and low-level property crime. When it comes to crimes of violence, however, the picture is quite different where 21 per cent of robbery offenders, 11 per cent of minor assaults offenders, 12 per cent of rape offenders, 10 per cent of serious assaults offenders and just 5 per cent of homicide offenders were juvenile. The general conclusion that we can draw from these figures is that violent crime is most likely to involve persons aged 18 and
This has been present at least since the time of the ancient Greeks and across a wide range of cultures. In recent times, this belief has been influenced by the media and television programmes, which, it is estimated, link mental illness to violence between 62-86% of the time. High-profile killings by people with a serious mental illness are given wide coverage in the press, creating an impression that the general pubic is at danger from unsupervised violent mentally ill persons living in the community. Although homicide perpetrated by someone suffering from a serious mental illness is rare compared with the total number of people with mental illness living ordinary lives, such tragedies attract intense media and public scrutiny. Public concern is raised by a construction of mental illness as dangerous in the media portrayals. However, whether it is true that the rate of homicide committed by people with serious mental illness is increasing, either in absolute terms or as a proportion of total homicide in the community, is unclear (Simpson,