Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics

The Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics is a reference tool that provides comprehensive data on crime and criminal justice issues in the United States. Published by the U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, the Sourcebook includes more than 600 tables in each edition. In addition to the annual print volumes, the Sourcebook is available on the Internet at http://www.albany.edu/sourcebook and on CDROM. Sourcebook Online presents the most current print edition as well as new and updated tables as they are prepared for the next volume.

The Sourcebook has been sponsored by the Bureau of Justice Statistics since 1972 and is produced at the Hindelang Criminal Justice Research Center at the School of Criminal Justice, State University of New York at Albany. The Sourcebook was developed by the late Michael J. Hindelang, a professor at the School of Criminal Justice, to meet the need for accessible criminal justice data. Until the first edition of Sourcebook in 1973, there was no single resource for statistical information covering the broad spectrum of the criminal justice system.

Each Sourcebook edition is compiled from more than 100 different data sources and is designed to meet the criminal justice information needs of a wide audience, including students, researchers, the media, government agencies, criminal justice practitioners, professionals from many social science fields, and the general public. Data selected for inclusion in the Sourcebook are nationwide in scope or of national relevance and, whenever possible, are displayed geographically by region, state, and city. In addition to presenting the most reliable and current data available, one of the Sourcebook's primary objectives is to combine current data with data from earlier years into trend presentations whenever possible.

The Sourcebook is divided into six sections: characteristics of the criminal justice system, public attitudes toward crime and criminal justice, the nature and distribution of known offenses, characteristics and distribution of persons arrested, judicial processing of defendants, and persons under correctional supervision. The first section, characteristics of the criminal justice system, presents information on the administrative aspects of law enforcement, judicial, and correctional systems in the United States. Included are detailed data on criminal justice expenditures at the federal, state, and local levels, and counts of employees in police departments, and judicial and correctional systems. Breakdowns of police agencies and officers, judges and their caseloads, and prisons and prison employees are available in most editions.

Public attitudes toward crime and criminal justice, the second section, presents the results of national public opinion polls on a multitude of issues, including fear of crime, ratings of the police and the judicial system, the death penalty, gun control, and drug use. Surveys of selected populations, such as college students or police officers, are presented when available.

Section three, the nature and distribution of known offenses, presents data from numerous measures of crime and delinquency, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Uniform Crime Reports Program and the Bureau of Justice Statistics National Crime Victimization Survey. These major national data sources, along with self-report studies focusing on selected populations such as high school students, provide a gauge of the type and extent of criminal activity in the United States.

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