Cameron McKay
The impact of military service made it difficult for many veterans to return to everyday life and the demands of family and employers
For many the relationship between war and crime is a simple one. Crime drops during wartime due to the removal of young men, the group most likely to commit crime, and then rises again following demobilisation when hostilities end. It also assumed that post-war societies experience a lasting rise in crime due to the economically and socially disruptive effects of war. In 1926 Thorsten Sellin, arguably the leading pioneer of scientific criminology, published a statistical analysis that suggested that violent crime had risen significantly in Europe since the end of the First World War. Sellin’s analysis then seemed to vindicate the conventional wisdom on crime and war. Yet while the murder rates of France, Germany and Italy saw significant rises, England and Wales broke the trend of established criminological thought and experienced only a brief rise in crime. Although in 1919 there were 123 murders known to the police, in 1921, by which point most men had been demobilised, there were only 90. Apart from the war years, this was the lowest number of murders since 1910.