225-T3 - Controversies over Counting Crime Flashcards
Four considerations in the quality of crimes statistics
- coverage
- reliability
- validity
- methodology
What is the crime funnel?
a figure representing the limitations of police-reports crime rate statistics, where the totality of crimes taking place funnel down into a fraction of all incidences of c given crime
theory without facts is…
ideology
facts without theory is…
implicit ideology
statistics without theory is…
numerology
three types of things criminal justice statistics describe
- about crime and criminals
- about criminal justice system (CJS) and its response to crime
- about perceptions of crime and criminal justice
What are some types of raw data found in the criminal justice system? (4)
- police reports and records
- court decisions
- admin records of prisons and penitentiaries
- decisions or parole and probation officials
Canadian Centre to Justice Statistics (CCJS)
Finds raw data of the Canadian Criminal Justice System and publishes them.
* its data on CJS inputs are good
* its data on criminal incidents, arrests, charges, convictions, and dispositions have improved
Difference between criminal records and statistics
- records: concerned with individal cases - used to help practitioners make decisions about these individual cases
- statistics: aggregated, the common patterns of many individual cases - used to plan: planning and evaluation, policy and program development, and theory building and testing
What methodological topics must be considered to change records into usable statistics? (5)
- units of count
- level of aggregation
- definitions
- data elements (what information is collected)
- counting procedure
dark figure of crime
AKA “hidden figure of crime”
* crime that remains unreported, unrecorded, and largely unknown
Methodologies in counting crime and describing crime patterns and trends (3 + 1 less dominant)
- official (police-reported) statistics
- victimization surveys
- self-report studies
*
also includes corrections data information*, but this is not one of the three major methodologies
Give an example of an act that contributes to the dark figure of crime
e.g. if you choose not to report a burglary to the police, that data point does not get recording in police-reported crime statistics
Canadian Uniform Crime Reports (UCR)
incidents of crime that are reported by police systems
Factors on the quality of official/UCR statistics
- corrections data is reliable and valid
- crimes known to the police are always biased (inconsistencies in reporting and recording of crimes to law enforcement)
- UCR is an extensive form of crime stats collection