It's true.
33% of men and 9% of women have a criminal record. (The figures in the linked article are from a few years back, but they haven't changed much since. I linked to that page because it has a better breakdown and analysis than any that I've seen with more recent numbers.)
I genuinely don't know what to think about this. I am in my 50s and I don't know anyone with a criminal record (or at least, that I know of). But over the years I have been exposed to a variety of worlds that are, shall we say, less salubrious than my upbringing was, so while 33% of men still seems like a lot, finding that out didn't cause me to keel over in astonishment. (Maybe there is some kind of huge divide, between people who are reading this thinking "Only 33% of men? Round here they're all scrotes", and others who are in fact keeling over in astonishment.)
I learned about these numbers a while ago, but the topic popped into my brain when reading the recent thread about the farmer who shot a burglar. It seems to me that when such a big percentage of society consists of people who transgress against the rules (and of course, to get a criminal record you have to get caught, so the percentage of scrotes offenders is probably even higher), them maybe we have to accept at some level that criminality is part of the background noise of life, like road accidents and heart attacks, rather than something committed by a very tiny minority who we can afford to slag off and then ignore. It turns out that a large part of the population has at least some ambivalence about criminality, to the point that they took part in it themselves. Even if they regret it today, they know what it's like to set out to do something sufficiently illegal to get you arrested. It feels like the old joke that if you owe the bank a thousand pounds then you have a problem, but if you owe the bank a billion pounds then the bank has a problem.
For the avoidance of doubt, this is not to justify crime, or to suggest that I would not cheerfully strangle whoever nicked my bag a few months back (they can keep the cash, but replacing all the documents was a task that made me want to cut off my hand). It's just to try and make sense of the idea that a huge percentage of the people in the same supermarket or on the same holiday flight as me have at some point been in trouble with the law for something other than a motoring offence, and what that might tell us about our society. And again, I honestly don't know what to think about it.