Assessing offence seriousness through criminal records – the UK experience

In criminal careers research, it is essential to have some assessment of offence seriousness so that escalation over the lifespan can be assessed. While in some jurisdictions, the seriousness of the offences can be directly calculated through published formulae, this is not the case in England and Wales.We describe an approach using correspondence analysis which uses sentencing information to rank and to score individual offence codes, providing an offence hierarchy and a measurable score for each offence. Practical and ethical problems of this approach are described.