Criminology, probation and stuff

I like Google’s new tool, the Book Ngram Viewer with which you can search 5 million books published between 1800 and 2000. Apparently Google have normalized the results by the number of books published in each year so the results shouldn’t be too skewed. I thought I’d run some criminology related searches.

Crime, Criminal, Offender:

We might not be living in such a crime obsessed world as we might think. Interesting to note that offender is less popular than it was.

Prison, Probation:

Interest in the prison appears to have waned with probation staying stable after the formalisation of the Service in the early 20th Century. Interest in the prison population has shot up:

And, my favourite, Risk:

The Risk Society!