What the general public thinks about crime and punishment is a vexed question. In an effort to bring systematic data to bear on this question, I have assembled the largest compilation of aggregated survey data on attitudes to crime and punishment in England and Wales to date. The dataset contains 1,190 question-year pairs, which track popular attitudes across four areas: (i) Crime concern 1965-2023, (ii) Punitiveness 1981-2023, (iii) Support for the death penalty 1962-2023, and (iv) Prioritisation of crime/law-and-order as a social issue 1973-2023.

For example, in 2014, 58% of respondents to the British Election Studies Internet Panel thought that the level of crime was increasing. By 2019, this number had increased to 83%, and by 2023 it had fallen back to 77%. For 16-24 year olds, the numbers are 38%, 69% and 65%.

Harmonised latent trends for each area can be derived from the aggregated survey data using Stimson’s (2018) Dyad Ratio Algorithm for different demographic groups using the R script below.

The project for which this data was collated sought to explore the ways in which changes in economic and social policies resulted in changes in patterns of crime, victimisation and anxieties about crime and how shifts in social values affected national-level experiences and beliefs about crime and appropriate responses to it (such as support for punitive punishments like the death penalty). The researchers explored the long-term consequences of almost two decades (1979-1997) of neo-conservative and neo-liberal social and economic policies for the UK’s criminal justice system and the general experience of crime amongst its citizens. Using the Thatcher and Major governments (1979-1997) as the case study, the research team explored the experiences of crime, victimisation and fear of crime at the national and regional levels, and for key socio-demographic groups, since the 1970s (and where possible earlier than this). In order to complete these analyses repeated cross-sectional surveys of citizens in the UK were collated in such a way that the data could be analysed using techniques associated with time series and age-period-cohort analyses (as well as more conventional techniques). The surveys collated were the British Crime Survey (now called the Crime Survey for England and Wales), the British Social Attitudes Survey and the British Election Study. These survey series are also available from the UK Data Service.

This survey is part of a continuing series designed to monitor trends in a wide range of social attitudes in Great Britain. The British Social Attitudes Survey (BSA) is similar in purpose to the General Social Survey carried out by the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) in the United States. The BSA questionnaire has two parts, one administered by an interviewer and the other completed by the respondent. As in the past, the 1990 interview questionnaire contained a number of "core" questions covering the major topic areas of defense, the economy, labor market participation, and the welfare state. The 1990 self-enumerated questionnaire was devoted to a series of questions on a range of social, economic, political, and moral issues. Topics covered (by section) are: (1) Britain's relations with other countries, (2) the role of government and civil liberties, (3) crime, (4) the countryside, (5) divorce, (6) education, (7) the environment, (8) housing, (9) the child care system, (10) health care, (11) economic issues and policies, (12) government spending, (13) taxation, (14) economic activity, (15) new technology, (16) racial discrimination, (17) sexual behavior, (18) the death penalty, (19) strikes, (20) newspaper readership, (21) smoking, and (22) leisure activities. Beginning in 1985, an international initiative funded by the Nuffield Foundation, the International Social Survey Program (ISSP), also contributed a module to the BSA. The topic of the ISSP module in this collection was the role of government. Additional demographic data gathered included age, gender, education, occupation, household income, marital status, social class, and religious and political affiliations.