Towards an Irish Recorded Crime Index

Abstract

Recorded crime statistics form an important component of criminal justice and social policy. Of equal importance as the number of crimes however, is measuring the seriousness of these crimes. The Irish Recorded Crime Index (IRCI) is a proposed method of measuring the level of recorded crime in Ireland, taking account of both the number of recorded crimes and the seriousness of these crimes. Using official Irish criminal justice administrative data and developed on a similar conceptual framework to Statistics Canada’s Crime Severity Index (CSI), it combines both information on recorded crime (from the Garda Síochána PULSE system) and prison and courts sentencing data to produce a crime index. After investigation we have used a combination of the probability of imprisonment and the mean sentence length to derive a measure of the “seriousness” of each class of crime. The limitations of this Index as a measure of the overall ‘impact’ of crime on society are also discussed.