The Problem of Collecting and Standardizing Statistics of Crime in Forty- Eight Sovereign States

Abstract

Statistics of some sort relating to crime or criminals have been collected by the Bureau of the Census in connection with each decennial census since 1850. In 1880 inquiries were planned to cover not only prison population and commitments but court proceedings and police records as well, though only the prison population data and incomplete results of the police inquiry were ever published. From 1850 to 1890, therefore, the available statistics include little more than the prison population, and even these figures involve considerable variations in definition. For the year 1904 there was taken what might be termed the first of the special censuses of penal institutions, covering not only prison population but commitments and discharges as well, all classified in considerable detail. Similar and comparable figures are available for 1910 and for 1923. These three inquiries covered state and Federal prisons and reformatories, county and municipal jails and workhouses, and juvenile reformatories. The Census Bureau is now engaged in the first of a series of proposed annual censuses of state and Federal prisons and reformatories, schedules for the year 1926 having been received for 96 out of a total of 99 institutions. For use in connection with this annual census, the Bureau issued about a year ago a manual of criminal statistics, which contained, in addition to the necessary instructions for the reports from the prisons and reformatories, a series of suggested outlines for statistics to be compiled by or for other agencies, including police departments, courts, prosecutors, and parole and probation agencies. These brief suggestions, it was hoped, might contribute in some measure to the standardization of records and reports in the field of statistics of crime, or at least form the starting point for more effective methods of standardization. In 1907 the Bureau undertook a more pretentious piece of statistical investigation, collecting criminal-judicial statistics from the records of 1,557 criminal courts, in 249 counties, covering 320,765 cases which appeared on the dockets of these courts during 1906. After the material had been collected and tabulated, and the report not only written but put in type, so many faults and shortcomings appeared that the report was never published. Some of these faults were the result, doubtless, of the way the work was handled in the Bureau, especially of