Attitude Towards Crime and Punishment in England and Wales, 1965-2023

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.