Indicators of criminal involvement: crime rates versus qualitative classification of official records

On the basis of a study of the registered criminality committed before and during treatment by 42 patients in long-term methadone treatment in Copenhagen, Denmark, it is argued that crime rates based on official records (such as the number of sanctioned offenses, or charges, or arrests, per year at risk) distort the picture of drug users' actual criminality unnecessarily. An alternative use of official records is suggested, and the results obtained accordingly are compared to those obtained by computing crime rates.