Lamson Library: Law and Government: Criminal Justice

Criminal Justice

Bureau of Justice Statistics
The Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) - the United States' primary source for criminal justice statistics. The mission of the Bureau of Justice Statistics is "to collect, analyze, publish, and disseminate information on crime, criminal offenders, victims of crime, and the operation of justice systems at all levels of government. These data are critical to federal, state, and local policymakers in combating crime and ensuring that justice is both efficient and evenhanded."
Criminal Justice Resources
Campus Shootings, Hate Crimes, Money Laundering, you'll find an exhaustive list of links about every possible crime. This is an extraordinary annotated guide to print and Web-based resources in 70 categories, created and maintained by a librarian at Michigan State University.
Criminal Justice Programs [CriminalJusticePrograms.com]
Criminal Justice Degree Schools has the resources and relationships you need to find the best criminal justice schools and associated criminal justice degrees to launch your criminal justice career.
National Criminal Justice Reference Service (NCJRS)
The National Criminal Justice Reference Service (NCJRS) is a federally sponsored program that shares publications and other information including grants and funding opportunities and upcoming trainings and conferences from the United States Department of Justice's Office of Justice Programs (OJP) agencies and National Institute of Corrections (NIC). NCJRS also maintains a criminal justice library and serves as a resource for law enforcement and other criminal justice agencies.

NCJRS services and resources are available to anyone interested in crime, victim assistance, and public safety including policymakers, practitioners, researchers, educators, community leaders, and the general public. NCJRS hosts one of the largest criminal and juvenile justice libraries and databases in the world, the NCJRS Abstracts Database. The collection, with holdings from the early 1970s to the present, contains more than 210,000 publications, reports, articles, and audiovisual products from the United States and around the world. These resources include including Federal, state, and local government reports, books, research reports, journal articles, and unpublished research.
Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics
Contents

Below is a list of links to the contents of the six Sourcebook sections.

* Section 1 - Characteristics of the criminal justice systems
* Section 2 - Public attitudes toward crime and criminal justice-related topics
* Section 3 - Nature and distribution of known offenses
* Section 4 - Characteristics and distribution of persons arrested
* Section 5 - Judicial processing of defendants
* Section 6 - Persons under correctional supervision
Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program
The Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program has been the starting place for law enforcement executives, students of criminal justice, researchers, members of the media, and the public at large seeking information on crime in the nation. The program was conceived in 1929 by the International Association of Chiefs of Police to meet the need for reliable uniform crime statistics for the nation. In 1930, the FBI was tasked with collecting, publishing, and archiving those statistics.

Today, four annual publications, Crime in the United States, National Incident-Based Reporting System, Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted, and Hate Crime Statistics are produced from data received from over 18,000 city, university/college, county, state, tribal, and federal law enforcement agencies voluntarily participating in the program. The crime data are submitted either through a state UCR Program or directly to the FBI’s UCR Program.

In addition to these reports, information is available on the Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted (LEOKA) Program and the Hate Crime Statistics Program, as well as the traditional Summary Reporting System (SRS) and the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS).