The book includes 23 essays concerning the following topics: (1) zero-tolerance policing; (2) issues surrounding the scope of the statistical commentator and the practitioner in criminal justice; (3) historical trends in violent crime; (4) the vulnerability of official statistics to apparently trivial differences in recording practice; (5, 6) summary of the most recent British national survey of crime victimization and methodological problems with such surveys; (7) why crime rates change; (8) implications of changing the way victimization is enumerated; (9) differences between high- and low-crime areas; (10) identifying crime “hot spots”; (11) how one table in criminal statistics could be recalculated to show the prevalence of convictions; (12) comparing the dimensions of criminal careers; (13) predicting an individual’s probability of conviction; (14) how criminological imagination allows data to be looked at in a particular way; (15, 16) why some statistical analyses should not be taken at face value; (17) the effect of one-off deterrent sentences on reducing rates of a crime; (18) the effect of “net-widening”; (19) critique of using official statistics as evidence of discrimination against women; (20) work of the Crown Prosecution Service; (21) use of the suspended sentence; (22) effects of crowding and prison size on the rate of reconviction; and (23) use of meta-analysis to inform a conclusion about the effectiveness of penal treatments. References, figures, notes, tables, index