The future of crime and deviance If the face of the criminal in the year 2000 was that of a young male engaged in street crime, by the year 2050 this is likely to have been transformed. By that time population ageing will have reversed our current demographic profile of relatively few older people and many young people. As the distribution of age in the population inverts, so the volume of crimes and acts of deviance typically committed by young people is likely to decline. In fact, it has already been suggested that this is one of the reasons crime in some American cities, including New York, has declined in the past ten years (King & Mauer 2001) So what will the profile of the 21st-century criminal look like? Probably, much more middle class. Crime has not escaped the effects of the transition from a manufacturing to a service economy. It has also been affected by globalisation. Global terrorism, environmental crimes, cyber crime, people-smuggling and identity crime are emerging as the main areas in which law-breaking will occur. The explosion of information technology has been a two-edged sword, offering new possibilities of surveillance and social control, while simultaneously affording new forms of law-breaking, many of which are transnational. Telecommunications fraud, copyright infringement and phishing' are already increasingly prev Highly sophisticated technology makes identification of the perpetrators extremely difficult. Phishing, for example, involves obtaining information about people