Check out the the interesting findings of a new study on crime in the UK from the links below. The study found that knife murders are more likely in poorer areas, whereas (contrary to perception) gun murders are more likely in affluent areas, as are strangling and poisoning.

The report highlights the increase in inequality of the 80's and resultant spike in murders by poor young men and it's effect on the overall murder figures.


http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/4348238.stm
Recession 'boosted murder rates'
The recession of the early 1980s triggered the rising murder rates of the past 25 years, a new report claims.
The Crime and Society Foundation study analysed the social backgrounds of the 13,140 murdered between 1981 and 2000.
Professor Danny Dorling found a link between rising murder rates and the number of young men leaving school at a time of mass unemployment.
Feelings of hopelessness and a lack of opportunity "bred fear, violence and murder," Prof Dorling concluded.
Poverty factor
According to his chapter of the Criminal Obsessions report, the risk of being a murder victim in England, Wales and Scotland rose sharply over the period for poor men of working age.
But it fell for all other groups, including women.
...
..But guns are involved in a larger proportion of murders in well-to-do areas than in poor ones, the study found...
..Director of the Crime and Society Foundation Richard Garside said certain categories of crime, such as murder, tend to grab our attention.

'Imbalance'

"The result is that we overlook crimes and other harmful behaviours that are actually far more damaging to our society.

"To redress this imbalance we need to address our obsession for applying criminal justice solutions to complex social problems and develop a broader perspective on what actions and activities cause the most harm and damage," he said....
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/bsp/hi/p ... report.pdf

Criminal Obsessions:Why harm matters more than crime

....‘CRIME’ EXCLUDES MANY SERIOUS HARMS
Many events and incidents which cause serious harm are either
not part of the criminal law or, if they could be dealt with by it,
are either ignored or handled outside of it. Box (1983) points out
that corporate crime, domestic violence and sexual assault, and
police crimes are all largely marginal to dominant legal, policy,
enforcement, and indeed academic, agendas. Yet all are at the
same time creating widespread harm, not least amongst already
disadvantaged and powerless people.
There is little doubt, then, that the undue attention given to
events which are defined as crimes distracts attention from more
serious harm. But it is not simply that a focus on crime deflects
attention from other more socially pressing harms; in many
respects it positively excludes them. This is certainly the case for
harms caused by corporations or by the state. For example, in the
context of ‘safety crimes’, recorded occupational injury amounts
to over one million workplace injuries per year in Britain;
but restriction to the term ‘crimes’ means making reference
to just 1,000 or so successfully prosecuted health and safety
offences. These are enormous differences and have implications
in terms of what can be done with such data conceptually,
theoretically, and politically (Tombs, 2000). Thus, whilst retaining
a commitment to crime and law, attempts to introduce currently
marginal concerns such as state or corporate offences into the
discipline of criminology (and, indeed, criminal justice) have
raised enormous theoretical and practical tensions.....
Take a man born in 1960. At age 33, in 1993, his cohort suffered
a murder rate of 24 per million; this went up and down slightly
as he aged but was still 24 per million by the time he was 40 in
2000. The murder rates that these, now older, men experience
in Britain are not falling as they age, and, in general, each
successive cohort is starting out with a higher murder rate at
around age 20 to 21 and carrying that forward. However, for one
particular group of men their murder rate is actually generally
increasing as they age – men aged 35 or below in 2000, men born
in 1965 and after. Why should they be different to men born in
1964 or before? Most men born in 1965 left school at the age
of 16 in the summer of 1981 (some may have left at 15 slightly
earlier, only a small minority carried on to take A Levels). The
summer of 1981 was the first summer for over 40 years that
a young man living in a poor area would find work or training
very scarce, and it got worse in the years that followed. When
the recession of the early 1980s hit, mass unemployment was
concentrated on the young, they were simply not recruited. Over
time the harm caused in the summer of 1981 was spread a little
more evenly, life became more difficult for slightly older men,
most of the younger men were, eventually, employed. However,
the seeds that were sown then, that date at which something
changed to lead to the rise in murders in the rest of the 1980s
and 1990s, can still be seen through the pattern of murder by age
and year shown in the figure. Above the cohort of 1965 line in
Table 2 murder rates for men tend to rise as they age...
www.crimeandsociety.org.uk

http://www.crimeandsociety.org.uk/press/13Jun05.html

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For more in this area see ,Reiman, J. (1998) ‘The Rich Get Richer and The Poor Get Prison.’ Ideology, Class and Criminal Justice,
Fifth Edition. Boston: Allyn and Bacon. http://www.paulsjusticepage.com/reiman.htm


A masterpiece. Reiman shows how the U.S. justice system selectively punishes the crimes of the poor while ignoring the crimes of the rich. For example, in 1987, theft and robbery cost Americans $12 billion, but white collar fraud and embezzlement cost $107 billion. Some 19,000 Americans were officially murdered that year, but countless hundreds of thousands were killed by pollution, tobacco, unnecessary surgery, food additives, overprescription of legal drugs, unsafe consumer products, job hazards and other things which are foisted on us by overly profit-driven corporations. Even when the rich get caught for more "traditional" crimes, they get off much more lightly than the poor.