Paper Topic:

criminal justice

Criminal Justice

In the United States of America , various crime data gathering programs have been devised in to minimize the criminal activities . Crime data is used by the government authorities to formulate and evaluate policies , legislations and appropriate programs . Among these various crime data gathering programs , an important source of crime data is the National Criminal Justice Reference Service or NCJRS . It maintains contacts with the various government agencies such as the US Department of Justice , Office of Justice Programs , the Bureau of Justice Statistics , Office of Victims of Crime , and

so on . Important information is also available in the Source Book of Criminal Justice Statistics which provides the quantitative information regarding the criminal activities . Another important program which collects and distributes the crime data is the UCR (Uniform Crime Reports ) program . It obtains information from more than 17 ,000 law enforcement agencies . The crime related information collected by the UCR can be considered as an indicator of the criminal activities . In fact , these data are considered as the crime index which includes eight offenses such as murder , rape , robbery , aggravated assault , burglary , larceny-theft motor vehicle theft , and arson . The UCR data gives information about the pattern and trends in the various offense categories . Recently , new methods of collecting crime data have emerged . For instance , National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS ) is such a new method introduced by FBI . NIBRS obtains information from 4 ,300 law enforcement agencies This program obtains additional information such as relationship between victim and offender , property details , and motivation of offense . NIBRS divides the crime into : group A offenses and group B offenses . The National Crime Victimization Survey is another method of collecting data . This method has showed the actual increase in the incidence of crime when compared to the UCR data . This indicates that many crimes are not reported to the police . Additional data is also obtained through self-report crime surveys . In fact , many academicians have obtained data by using this method . These different programs and methods are used to collect data regarding the pattern of crime incidence and reporting (Crime Data , 2005

However , there are few limitations and potential sources of errors in these programs . An important limitation is the lack of consistency in these different data gathering programs . For instance , inconsistency is found in the data collected by the UCR and the National Crime Victimization Survey . Again in the UCR one can find few inaccuracies The UCR consists of hierarchy rule , which refers to the fact that when many crimes are committed by the offender , only the most serious offences are recorded . Further , formal crime gathering programs such as the UCR cannot obtain the actual information . Moreover , all the offenses are not recorded by these programs as some of them are not reported Scholars have suggested that it is not possible to obtain the accurate crime figure because many crimes are not reported by the police Further , some behaviors are considered as crimes while some other behaviors are not given this label...

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