Statistics: Violence, Crime and Punishment

This series was begun in 1998 by the United States Bureau of Justice Statistics and was collected as a component of the Annual Survey of Jails (ASJ). The purpose of this data series was to gather data on all adult and juvenile jail facilities and detention centers in Indian reservations, pueblos, rancherias, and other Native American and Alaska Native communities throughout the United States.

Provides the number of firearm transaction applications checked by state points of contact and local agencies, the number of applications denied and the reasons for denial, and estimates of applications and denials conducted by each type of approval system.

This analysis cutting tool was designed to provide rapid customized reports for public inquiries relating to campus crime and fire data.

In 2002, with support from several federal partners, the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) launched the national Criminal Justice Drug Abuse Treatment Studies (CJ-DATS), a multisite research program aimed at improving the treatment of offenders with drug use disorders and integrating criminal justice and public health responses to drug involved offenders. Under CJ-DATS, researchers from 10 academic research centers and NIDA are working together with federal, state, and local criminal justice partners to develop and test integrated approaches to the treatment of offenders with drug use disorders. At present, there are 11 major studies underway in CJ-DATS. These studies are valuable in their ability to address important cross-cutting issues in criminal justice and drug abuse treatment when dealing with the drug involved offender.

These data collections describe in quantitative terms the volume of juvenile cases disposed by courts having jurisdiction over juvenile matters (delinquency, status offense, and dependency cases). Inaugurated in 1926 to furnish an index of the problems brought before the juvenile courts, this series is the oldest continuous source of information on the processing of delinquent and dependent youth by juvenile courts. It is the most detailed information available on youth who come in contact with the juvenile justice system and on the activities of the nation's juvenile courts. Information is provided on state, county, number of delinquency cases, number of status offense cases, number of dependency cases, and total number of cases. The data distinguish cases with and without the filing of a petition.

The BJS Law Enforcement Unit maintains more than a dozen national data collections covering federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies and special topics in law enforcement. Most data series are collected every 2 to 4 years and focus on aggregate or agency-level responses, meaning the information that is collected pertains to units, such as police departments, training academies, and crime labs. The data from law enforcement agencies provide national estimates for personnel, equipment, operations, agency policies, budgets, and job functions across agencies. The Law Enforcement Unit collects data on contacts between the public and police, special units within law enforcement agencies, and trends in police organization.

This resource contains an analysis and findings from the ongoing National Youth Gang Surveys of law enforcement. Numerous charts and descriptions are provided as a resource for understanding gang problems.

PubMed, a service of the National Library of Medicine, includes over 15 million citations for biomedical articles back to the 1950s. These citations are from MEDLINE and additional life science journals. This special version includes Dickinson library's "Get It" links to additional full-text. Coverage: 1950s to present. Some Full-Text.

The mission of the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) is to provide statistical information that will guide actions and policies to improve the health of the American people. As the Nation's principal health statistics agency, NCHS leads the way with accurate, relevant, and timely data.

WHO is the directing and coordinating authority for health within the United Nations system. It is responsible for providing leadership on global health matters, shaping the health research agenda, setting norms and standards, articulating evidence-based policy options, providing technical support to countries and monitoring and assessing health trends.

The Arrestee Drug Abuse Monitoring (ADAM) Program/Drug Use Forecasting (DUF) Series is an expanded and redesigned version of the Drug Use Forecasting (DUF) program, which was upgraded methodologically and expanded to 35 cities in 1998. The redesign was fully implemented beginning in the first quarter of 2000 using new sampling procedures that improved the quality and generalizability of the data. The DUF program began in 1987 and was designed to estimate the prevalence of drug use among persons in the United States who are arrested and booked, and to detect changes in trends in drug use among this population.

These data collections provide annual data on prisoners under a sentence of death and on those whose offense sentences were commuted or vacated during the years indicated. Information is supplied for basic sociodemographic characteristics such as age, sex, race, ethnicity, marital status at time of imprisonment, level of education, and state of incarceration. Criminal history data include prior felony convictions for criminal homicide and legal status at the time of the capital offense. Additional information is available for inmates removed from death row by yearend of the last year indicated and for inmates who were executed. The universe is all inmates on death row since 1972 in the United States. The inmate identification numbers were assigned by the Bureau of the Census and have no purpose outside these data collections.

The Census of Juveniles in Residential Placement (CJRP) was administered for the first time in 1997 by the United States Bureau of the Census for the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP). The CJRP provides a detailed picture of juveniles in custody and asks juvenile residential custody facilities in the United States to describe each youth assigned a bed in the facility on the specified reference date.

The CPFFCL includes all state, county, municipal, and federal crime labs that (1) are solely funded by government or whose parent organization is a government agency and (2) employ at least one full-time natural scientist who examines physical evidence in criminal matters and provides reports and opinion testimony with respect to such physical evidence in courts of law. For example, this includes DNA testing and controlled substance identification for federal, state, and local jurisdictions. Some publicly funded crime labs are part of a multi-lab system. The census attempted to collect information from each lab in the system. Police identification units, although sometimes responsible for fingerprint analysis, and privately operated facilities were not included in the census.

These surveys provide a broad-based, systematic examination of the nature of general civil litigation (e.g., tort, contract, and real property cases) disposed in a sample of the nation's 75 most populous counties. Data collection was carried out by the National Center for State Courts with the assistance of WESTAT. Data collected includes information about the types of civil cases litigated at trial, types of plaintiffs and defendants, trial winners, amount of total damages awarded, amount of punitive damages awarded, and case processing time. In addition, information was collected on general civil cases concluded by bench or jury trial that were subsequently appealed to a state's intermediate appellate court or court of last resort.

The Collaborative Psychiatric Epidemiology Surveys (CPES) were initiated in recognition of the need for contemporary, comprehensive epidemiological data regarding the distributions, correlates and risk factors of mental disorders among the general population with special emphasis on minority groups.

In 2002, with support from several federal partners, the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) launched the national Criminal Justice Drug Abuse Treatment Studies (CJ-DATS), a multisite research program aimed at improving the treatment of offenders with drug use disorders and integrating criminal justice and public health responses to drug involved offenders. Under CJ-DATS, researchers from 10 academic research centers and NIDA are working together with federal, state, and local criminal justice partners to develop and test integrated approaches to the treatment of offenders with drug use disorders. At present, there are 11 major studies underway in CJ-DATS. These studies are valuable in their ability to address important cross-cutting issues in criminal justice and drug abuse treatment when dealing with the drug involved offender.

The purpose of this data collection is to provide an official public record of the business of the federal courts. The data originate from 100 court offices throughout the United States. Information was obtained at two points in the life of a case: filing and termination. The termination data contain information on both filing and terminations, while the pending data contain only filing information. For the appellate and civil data, the unit of analysis is a single case. The unit of analysis for the criminal data is a single defendant.

Data in this collection examine the processing of federal offenders.

Multi-round survey that interviewed students in 4 year colleges and universities, examined key issues in alcohol abuse and other high risk behaviors among college students, including the relationship of state alcohol control measures and college policies to alcohol use and the role of fraternities and sororities, easy access to alcohol, and low alcohol prices. Collected information on students' use of alcohol, tobacco, and illicit drugs, views on campus alcohol policies and student alcohol use, reasons for drinking alcohol and reasons for not drinking or limiting drinking, and personal difficulties caused by drinking problems (e.g., missed classes and trouble with police). Additional topics include overall health status, daily activities, satisfaction with education being received, grade-point average, living arrangements, social life, sexual activity (heterosexual, homosexual, and bisexual), use of condoms during sexual intercourse, rape, and drunk driving.

This survey presents information on three types of general purpose law enforcement agencies: state police, local police, and sheriff's departments. Data from the primary state police agency in each of 49 states (Hawaii does not have a state police agency) are also presented. Variables include size of the populations served by the typical police or sheriff's department, levels of employment and spending, various functions of the department, average salary levels for uniformed officers, and other matters relating to management and personnel.

This collection contains appellate information from the 12 circuit courts of appeals of the United States. The United States Sentencing Commission compiled from the Clerk of the Court of each court of appeals the final opinions and orders, both published and unpublished, in all criminal appeals for the time period surveyed. The Commission also collected habeas corpus decisions (although technically civil matters), because such cases often involve sentencing issues.

This collection contains information on federal criminal cases sentenced under the Sentencing Guidelines and Policy Statements of the Sentencing Reform Act of 1984. The data files include all cases received by the United States Sentencing Commission that had sentencing dates between November 1, 1987, and September 30, 1995, and were assessed as constitutional. Constitutionality compares each case's sentencing date, circuit, district, and judge to provide uniformity in reporting the cases. The cases are categorized either as New Law, with all offenses occurring after the November 1, 1987, guidelines, or as Mixed Law, with at least one count occurring after the guideline effectiveness date and other counts prior to the guidelines.

These data were collected by the National Center for Health Statistics and are of considerable importance to those individuals interested in criminological research. The cause of death codes for the 1968-1978 data are derived from the International Classification of Diseases Adapted for Use in the United States (Eighth Revision) (ICDA-8). The cause of death codes for the 1979-1980 data are derived from the International Classification of Diseases (Ninth Revision) (ICD-9). Due to changes in cause of death definitions incorporated in the ninth revision, the 1968-1978 data and codebooks differ slightly from the 1979-1980 data files.

Preserves and distributes computerized crime and justice data from Federal agencies, state agencies, and investigator initiated research projects.

In 1983, the National Prisoners Statistics program, which compiled data on prisoner admissions and releases, and the Uniform Parole Reports were combined into one reporting system, the National Corrections Reporting Program (NCRP). The NCRP evolved from the need to improve and consolidate data on corrections at the national level. Its objective was to provide a consistent and comprehensive description of prisoners entering and leaving the custody or supervision of state and federal authorities. In addition to the state prisons, the Federal Prison System and the California Youth Authority also began reporting data in 1984.

These data provide the basis for national estimates of nonfatal firearm-related injuries and nonfatal BB/pellet gun-related injuries treated in hospital emergency departments in the United States. Beginning in July 2000, NCIPC, in collaboration with CPSC, expanded NEISS to collect data on all types and causes of injuries treated in a representative sample of hospitals.

The National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) series is a component part of the Uniform Crime Reporting Program (UCR), a nationwide view of crime administered by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), based on the submission of crime information by participating law enforcement agencies.

This data collection effort was undertaken to determine whether accurate and comprehensive pretrial data can be collected at the local level and subsequently aggregated at the state and federal levels. The data contained in this collection provide a picture of felony defendants' movements through the criminal courts. Offenses were recoded into 14 broad categories that conform to the Bureau of Justice Statistics' crime definitions. Other variables include sex, race, age, prior record, relationship to criminal justice system at the time of the offense, pretrial release, detention decisions, court appearances, pretrial rearrest, adjudication, and sentencing. The unit of analysis is the defendant.

The Offender Based Transaction Statistics (OBTS) series was designed by the Bureau of Justice Statistics to collect information tracking adult offenders from the point of entry into the criminal justice system (typically by arrest), through final disposition, regardless of whether the offender is convicted or acquitted. Collected by individual states from existing data, the datasets include all cases that reached disposition during the calendar year. Using the individual adult offender as the unit for analysis, selected information is provided about the offender and his or her arrest, prosecution, and court disposition. Examples of variables included are arrest and level of arrest charge, date of arrest, charge filed by the prosecutor, prosecutor or grand jury disposition, type of counsel, type of trial, court disposition, sentence type, and minimum and maximum sentence length. Dates of disposition of each stage of the process allow for tracking of time spent at each stage.

Periodic nationwide assessments of reported crimes not available elsewhere in the criminal justice system. With the 1977 data, the title was expanded to Uniform Crime Reporting Program Data. Each year, participating law enforcement agencies contribute reports to the FBI either directly or through their state reporting programs. ICPSR archives the UCR data as 5 separate components: (1) summary data, (2) county-level data, (3) incident-level data (National Incident-Based Reporting System [NIBRS]), (4) hate crime data, and (5) various, mostly nonrecurring, data collections.