Publisher's Synopsis
Based on over 30 years research of government sentencing policy and work in the criminal justice system, David Fraser's book demonstrates that the State's increased reliance on alternatives to imprisonment has allowed all categories of violent crime to flourish in Britain; that, the homicide rate, for example, doubled between 1964 and the turn of the millennium; that the numbers of life threatening attacks have increased rapidly over the last 40 years, and that justice officials have hidden this development with a blizzard of deceptive statistics whose purpose is to mislead rather than inform the public.