How did Adolphe Quetelet use crime statistics to study patterns in offending?

Adolphe Quetelet, a pioneer in applying statistics to social phenomena, revolutionized the study of crime by analyzing early national crime data from France. Rather than focusing on individual motives, he examined collective patterns, discovering an astonishing constancy in the number of crimes, convictions, and the demographic distribution of offenders—such as age and gender—from year to year.12

Quetelet concluded that these regularities indicated an underlying social order, famously asserting that society prepares the crime, while the guilty are merely the instruments of its execution. By applying probability theory and the normal distribution to these data, he developed the concept of a relative propensity to commit crimes among specific groups. His work in "moral statistics" shifted the focus of criminology toward identifying the structural and environmental causes of antisocial acts, sparking significant 19th-century debates regarding the tension between free will and social determinism.213