Differential Criminal Case Mortality in Selected Jurisdictions

S TATEMENT OF PROBLEM. This paper will attempt to do three things: first, to provide a picture of the mortality rates of criminal cases as they pass through the agencies of the law; second, to provide some tentative estimates of the case load of the major agencies of law enforcement; and third, to present some tentative conclusions on the relative outcome expectations of a limited number of major offenses. Ideally, we might ask for two parallel sets of criminal statistics-one in which the unit of enumeration was the offense and a second in which the unit of tabulation was the offender. The statistics based on the offense would be primarily of administrative nature and would indicate the amount of crime and tell something of the efficiency of the agencies of law enforcement. Such statistics would begin with crimes known to the police and indicate the penalties (if any) resulting from each offense. The second set would take the offender as the unit of tabulation and would provide information on the personal and social characteristics of the persons dealt with at various stages of administrative procedure. Relatively little is known of the numerical relationship between offenses and offenders either for crime as a whole or for particular offenses. Unfortunately no such sets of parallel data exist. There are seven stages in the administration of the criminal law which are, for the major offense group of the Uniform Crime Classification, more or less adequately covered on a national basis. These are: (i) Crimes known to the police; (2) Offenses cleared by arrest; (3) Persons charged by the police; (4) Judicial criminal prosecutions; (5) Criminal convictions; (6) Prison sentences; (7) Prisoners received from the courts by the prisons. These represent successive stages in the prosecution of individual cases although it is well known that not all cases go to the final stage. The problem here is to establish the relationships between the stages, particularly between the first and the last. It will be noticed that the first two stages involve an enumeration of offenses, offenses known and offenses cleared; the last five involve counting of persons. The personal characteristics of the individuals contacted by law enforcement agencies, other than prisons, of the nation as a whole, are substantially unknown; therefore, no effort will be

Criminology · Differential (mechanical device · Political science · Criminal Justice and Corrections Analysis · Engineering · Health and Conflict Studies · Insurance, Mortality, Demography, Risk Management · Psychology

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