The criminal is still very much of an enigma. I do not know who he is, and I do not know where to look for him.” Leon Radzinowicz, founding director of the Institute of Criminology at the University of Cambridge, was provoking his audience at the Royal Society of Arts in 1964: “For a very long time it was thought that the proportion of crime and criminals remaining unknown was rather small and that, broadly speaking, it continued the same over the course of time. This fallacy has since been challenged and should be challenged even more. Optimistic assumptions have been shattered. An ominous phrase expresses our disillusionment: ‘the dark figure’ of crime. Equally ominous is the fact that it has gained currency in every major language. ‘Dunkelziffer’ say the Germans; ‘le chiffre noir’, ‘il ciffro nero’ are the French and the Italian terms”.
Criminologists were very much aware of the problem of undetected and unreported crime. While Radzinowicz popularized the metaphor of the dark figu...