Uniform Crime Reports

History of the Efforts to Collect Crime Data

Interest in the collection of crime data in the United States can be traced to developments in Great Britain and Europe. As early as 1778, the Englishman Jeremy Bentham urged that information on prisoners be published to aid legislators considering laws and penalties. He believed that details about criminal behavior would support his theory of crime deterrence and could help gauge the effectiveness of punishments for law violations. Partially in response to Bentham's call, Great Britain published its first official crime data in 1839. By that time, Alexander von Oettinger, working in Germany, had been using statistics to document crime for almost twenty years. A. M. Guerry, working in France, and Adolphe Quételet, in Belgium, were also considering whether numbers and types of known offenses could be used to estimate the amount of crime in their respective nations.

Attempts to measure crime got under way in like fashion in the United States. In 1829, New York State began collecting court statistics, followed by Massachusetts and Maine. In 1834, Massachusetts began gathering data from police officials, followed five years later [Page 1644]by New York. Neither state was interested in all incidents reported to the police, only in those committed by criminals who were ultimately caught and jailed. When the federal government began to collect statistics, it, too, was interested in criminals, not crimes. As part of the 1850 Census, citizens were asked if they were convicts or if any family members were in prison. If the answer to either question was affirmative, the respondent was asked to provide race and nationality data. This continued until the 1880 Census, when criminal statistics from police stations were included for the first time.

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