What patterns did Adolphe Quetelet find in early French crime statistics?

Adolphe Quetelet, a pioneer in applying statistics to social phenomena, analyzed the first annual national crime statistics published in France during the early 19th century.12

He discovered a remarkable degree of regularity and constancy in these data, noting that specific figures—such as the total number of people accused of crimes, the number of convictions, the ratio of men to women, and the distribution of offenders by age—remained consistent from year to year.2

From these patterns, Quetelet concluded that there is an inherent order to social behavior, as these acts were reproduced with "astonishing constancy". This led him to argue that criminal behavior is a product of social structure rather than purely individual choice, famously suggesting that society prepares the crime, while the guilty individual serves merely as the instrument through which it is executed. His work laid the foundation for "moral statistics" and sparked significant 19th-century debate regarding the tension between free will and social determinism.21