Criminology Today

ON THE WORLD WIDE WEB

INTRODUCTION
The study of criminology is a fascinating endeavor. Students of criminology seek to understand the causes of crime, to measure the extent and variety of law-violating behavior within society, to prevent the occurrence of new crimes, to rehabilitate offenders and to assist victims. A valuable resource for the study of criminology is the World Wide Web. The Web is a vast repository of information from a wide variety of sources, including the federal government, universities, state and local governments, research institutions, publishers, and private individuals and companies.

The purpose of this guide is to help you better utilize the resources on the World Wide Web in your study of criminology. This guide is meant to be a companion volume to my textbook, Criminology Today (Frank Schmalleger: Prentice Hall, 1996), and will assist you in finding the latest information of relevance to the text, and in exploring new and fascinating areas within the discipline of criminology.

This guide assumes that you have available to you both the Criminology Today textbook and web browsing software with a direct Internet connection. Internet connections provided via on-line serves such as CompuServe and America-on-Line, and the proprietary web browsers provided by those services should also permit you to visit the sites discussed in this guide – although you may find that not all of the features of every site will be available to you. If possible, it is recommended that you use either Netscape Navigator 3.0 or later, or Microsoft Internet Explorer version 3.0 or later, as your browser. Both browsers are optimized to take advantage of many of the innovative features available through some of the sites discussed in this guide.

This is a step-by-step tutorial. That means that you will be guided to explore particular issues within the field of criminology by accessing specific web sites. Topics covered include: (1) getting started on the web; (2) crime statistics; (3) crime causation; (4) community crime prevention; (5) electronic journals; (6) discussion lists; and (7) selected URLs (Uniform Resource Locators). Instructions for pointing your web browser at a named site will be boldfaced and printed in italics, as in the following example:

Point your browser at: http://www.prenhall.com/~cjtoday

You must type the URL exactly as it appears, and then hit the return (or "enter" key). Sometimes a URL will contain strange or unusual characters, as in the example above – which contains a character known as a "tilde" ("~"). Be sure to type the tilde or any other character specified in the URL. If you wish, you can experiment by typing in the URL in the above example now and hitting the return key. Doing so will take you to one of my home pages – a site that offers support for another one of my textbooks.

GETTING STARTED ON THE WEB
A fantastic place to begin any web-based excursion in the field of criminology is the home page of the Justice Information Center (JIC), a service of the National Criminal Justice Reference Service (NCJRS). NCJRS is one of the most extensive sources of information on crime statistics, crime prevention, and on research and evaluation in the area of crime control. The site also provides links to many other sites with information on victimology, juvenile justice, and international criminology. JIC provides services to an international community of policymakers and professionals, and you can be among them by pointing your browser at its home page.

Log on to the Justice Information Center by pointing your browser at http://www.ncjrs.org and let our explorations begin!

The reason that JIC makes such an excellent starting point for web exploration is because it is essentially a collection of clearinghouses supporting all bureaus of the U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs (OJP), the National Institute of Justice, the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the Bureau of Justice Assistance, the Office for Victims of Crime, and the OJP Program Offices. It also supports the Office of National Drug Control Policy, home of our nation's cabinet level-drug "Drug Czar."

When you arrive at the JIC home page you will find that it is arranged by topical areas, each one of which is "clickable." Arrayed along the bottom of the page, in a separate listing, are these selections:

Main "clickable" topics include the following:

Click on "NCJRS Catalog," select "Catalog Number 26," then "Justice on the Net."

Doing so will permit you to read what the National Institute of Justice says about its growing support of Internet access. A portion of the document is reprinted below:

U.S. Department of Justice

Office of Justice Programs

National Institute of Justice

Justice on the Net

INTRODUCTION TO THE INTERNET, PART 1

Turn on the television or open a newspaper, and you'll find talk of the Internet. The Internet is a massive connection of computers all around the world. It is not owned by anyone, and it can be accessed by millions of people. More and more criminal justice-related information is being made available via the Internet, making it a valuable tool for criminal justice professionals.

How do I access the Internet? There are several ways to gain access to the Internet. Many academic institutions offer their students and staff accounts. Now a growing number of city, county, and State agencies are connected, and some States offer access to all residents. Commercial providers such as America Online, CompuServe, Prodigy, and Delphi offer connections for a fee.

What can I find on the Internet? Many government agencies, professional organizations, and commercial businesses have sites on the Internet that provide a variety of information. Government agencies supply publications in full text, statistical reports, news, and announcements.

You'll also find the text and status of bills before Congress and library catalogs from libraries across the country. On the commercial side, some businesses provide such information as airline ticket prices and stock quotes. The Internet also allows users to exchange electronic mail at a very low cost, making networking with colleagues around the country and around the world faster and cheaper.

The World Wide Web (WWW) and Gopher are two Internet sections that allow you to search by keyword to find sites of interest. When "surfing" the Internet, it is easy to feel overloaded with information, so make notes of useful sites (using your software or paper) to make it easy to return to them later.

What does NCJRS provide on the Internet? NCJRS supplies the full text of recent publications from the Office of Justice Programs agencies and the Office of National Drug Control Policy. In addition, it provides online access to news releases, grant announcements, and links to other useful sites. For example, you'll find calls for proposals for the National Institute of Justice Research and Evaluation Program online, or the text of a Bureau of Justice Statistics report like Weapons Offenses and Offenders (from there you can save the report on your computer or print it out).

ASK NCJRS

If you require technical assistance or have specific questions on criminal and juvenile justice topics, send an e-mail to "askncjrs@aspensys.com".

CRIME STATISTICS ON THE WEB

One area of special interest to readers of Criminology Today is that of crime statistics. Click on the JIC selection entitled "Criminal Justice Statistics" in order to see a selection of statistical information about crime. The page you will see gives you the following choices:

If you prefer to order Bureau of Justice Statistics publications in "hard copy" you can click on "BJS Publications Order Form" and place an order with BJS. Most publications available through BJS are free, and many are available in Adobe® Acrobat format for ready downloading and printing straight from the web. If you do not have Adobe Acrobat software, you can download Acrobat Reader from the Justice Information Center.

Let's explore part of what BJS offers on the web. Select (click on) the first item, "Bureau of Justice Statistics Homepage." The BJS homepage provides a wealth of choices, each containing statistical information on crime and on the justice system. Choices include general information about BJS, "How to Use BJS Services," and selections on "Publications," "Datasets and codebooks," and "Additional criminal justice information." The BJS homepage will contain these selections:

Bureau of Justice Statistics

U.S. Department of Justice

Statistics about --

Crime and victims

Drugs and crime

Criminal Offenders

The justice system

Law Enforcement

Prosecution

Courts and sentencing

Corrections

Expenditure and employment

Criminal record systems

Special topics

Crime and Justice Data from Other Sources

Text links:

What's new at BJS | About BJS | How to use BJS services | Publications

Press releases | Datasets & codebooks | Additional criminal justice information

Click here to search

The choices listed at the bottom of the page relist the selections offered in the body of the page and are intended to support non-graphical browsers. A search facility, at the end of the web page says "Click here to search," and may be used to search the BJS site for specific publications, types of data, or information about special areas of interest. It, too, is underlined to indicate that it is "clickable." In order to begin exploring the kinds of information available through BJS click on the first selection, "Crime and Victims." Reproduced here is a portion of what you will see. When you are at the BJS site you may click on any underlined item in order to move to that referenced document. Note that new updates may be included on the page.

BUREAU OF JUSTICE STATISTICS

Statistics About Crime and Victims

BJS' National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) is the Nation's second largest ongoing household survey. Survey data tell us how many rapes, sexual assaults, robberies, assaults, thefts, household burglaries, and motor vehicle thefts U.S. residents age 12 or older and their households experience each year.

· In 1994, the young, blacks, and males were most vulnerable to violent crime:

· Women age 12 + annually sustained 5 million violent victimizations in 1994. Persons whom the victim knew were responsible for the majority of these victimizations.

· In 1994, women were about twice as likely as men to experience violence committed by a relative.

Additional information about crimes reported to police is available from the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Uniform Crime Reports Program (UCR). The Nation's Two Crime Measures describes the purposes and advantages of the UCR and the NCVS.

Notice that the BJS page on statistics contains a number of underlined choices. One of them is the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Click on Federal Bureau of Investigation now in order to move to the FBI's home page.

The FBI's home page looks something like this (as with previous pages, underlined items are "links" to other material either at the FBI's web site or to other sites on the web):

Federal Bureau of Investigation

Director: Louis J. Freeh

WANTED BY THE FBI FBI OVERVIEW, HISTORY AND EMPLOYMENT OPPORTUNITIES

___________________________________________________________________

The FBI home page contains a number of other headings not shown here. They include: "FBI Investigations," "FBI Congressional Affairs," "FBI Public Affairs," "FBI Law Enforcement Support," and "FBI Uniform Crime Reports." The heading "FBI Uniform Crime Reports" is the last major heading on the page and contains two subheadings. It looks like this:

FBI UNIFORM CRIME REPORTS

Click on "Press Release" in the link entitled

"Preliminary 1995 Statistics - Press Release and Report."

Here's a text-only version of what you will see:

May 5, 1996

Serious crimes reported to the Nation's law enforcement agencies decreased 2 percent in 1995 as compared to 1994, according to preliminary Uniform Crime Reporting Program figures released today by the FBI. It was the fourth consecutive yearly decrease in reported crime.

Serious crime is measured by an Index consisting of violent and property crimes. Violent crime fell 4 percent last year, and property crime dropped 1 percent.

In the violent crime category, murder showed the greatest decline in 1995--8 percent. Decreases for the other violent offenses were 7 percent for robbery, 6 percent for forcible rape, and 3 percent for aggravated assault. Among the property crimes, motor vehicle theft was down 6 percent, and both burglary and arson decreased 5 percent. Larceny-theft was the only offense to show an increase from 1994 to 1995, up 1 percent.

Geographically, decreases in overall Crime Index totals were experienced in all regions: 4 percent in the Northeast, 2 percent in the Midwest, and 1 percent in both the South and West. Violent and property crime also declined in all regions, except the West, where property crime remained at the 1994 level.

When grouped by population size, cities with over a million inhabitants showed the largest decline, 6 percent. A 1-percent increase was experienced in cities with populations from 500,000 to 999,999 and in those with fewer than 25,000 inhabitants.

For the 2-year period, the suburban countries showed a 1-percent decrease in their crime level, while the rural countries reported a 3-percent increase.

_____________________________________________________________________________

For a comparison of the Bureau of Justice Statistics' National Crime Survey with the FBI's Uniform Crime Reports return to the JIC main page and click on the underlined selection "The Nation's Two Crime Measures."

If you have Adobe Acrobat Reader installed on your computer you can click on "Acrobat file" and view a true-image rendition of the original source document. If Adobe Reader is not available to you, you can click on ASCII text file. Once you have done so you will see a file describing "The Nation's Two Crime Measures" displayed on your screen. If you wish, you can save the file by clicking "file" then "save as" on most browsers, and specifying a location on your hard drive to which you wish to save the file. You may also access this document by directly entering its URL into your browser's URL field and hitting return. To do this enter:

http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/pub/bjs/ascii/ntmc.txt

Here's a summarized version of the document you will see:

U.S. Department of Justice

November 1995, NCJ-122795

THE NATION'S TWO CRIME MEASURES

The U.S. Department of Justice administers two statistical programs to measure the magnitude, nature, and impact of crime in the Nation: the Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program and the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS). Each of these programs produces valuable information about aspects of the Nation's crime problem. Because the UCR and NCVS programs are conducted for different purposes, use different methods, and focus on somewhat different aspects of crime, the information they produce together provides a more comprehensive panorama of the Nation's crime problem than either could produce alone.

UNIFORM CRIME REPORTS

Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)

The FBI's UCR program, which began in 1929, collects information on the following crimes reported to law enforcement authorities: homicide, forcible rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny-theft, motor vehicle theft, and arson. Arrests are reported for 21 additional crime categories.

The UCR data are compiled from monthly law enforcement reports or individual crime incident records transmitted directly to the FBI or to centralized state agencies that then report to the FBI. Each report submitted to the UCR Program is examined thoroughly for reasonableness, accuracy, and deviations that may indicate errors. Large variations in crime levels may indicate modified records procedures, incomplete reporting, or changes in a jurisdiction's boundaries. To identify any unusual fluctuations in an agency's crime counts, monthly reports are compared with previous submissions of the agency and with those for similar agencies.

In 1994, law enforcement agencies active in the UCR Program represented approximately 249 million U.S. inhabitants--96 percent of the total population.

The UCR Program provides crime counts for the Nation as a whole, as well as for regions, states, counties, cities, and towns. This permits studies among neighboring jurisdictions and among those with similar populations and other common characteristics.

UCR findings for each calendar year are published in a preliminary release in the spring, followed by a detailed annual report, Crime in the United States, issued in the following calendar year. In addition to crime counts and trends, this report includes data on crimes cleared, persons arrested (age, sex, and race), law enforcement personnel (including the number of sworn officers killed or assaulted), and the characteristics of homicides (including age, sex, and race of victims and offenders, victim-offender relationships, weapons used, and circumstances surrounding the homicides). Other special reports are also available from the UCR Program.

Following a 5-year redesign effort, the UCR Program is currently being converted to the more comprehensive and detailed National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS). NIBRS will provide detailed information about each criminal incident in 22 broad categories of offenses.

NATIONAL CRIME VICTIMIZATION SURVEY

Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS)

The Bureau of Justice Statistics' NCVS, which began in 1973, provides a detailed picture of crime incidents, victims, and trends. After a substantial period of research, in 1993 the survey completed an intensive methodological redesign. The redesign was undertaken to improve the questions used to uncover crime, update the survey methods, and broaden the scope of crimes measured. The redesigned survey collects detailed information on the frequency and nature of the crimes of rape, sexual assault, personal robbery, aggravated and simple assault, household burglary, theft, and motor vehicle theft. It does not measure homicide or commercial crimes (such as burglaries of stores).

U.S. Census Bureau personnel interview all household members at least 12 years old in a nationally representative sample of approximately 49,000 households (about 101,000 persons). Households stay in the sample for 3 years and are interviewed at 6-month intervals. New households rotate into the sample on an ongoing basis.

The NCVS collects information on crimes suffered by individuals and households, whether or not those crimes were reported to law enforcement. It estimates the proportion of each crime type reported to law enforcement, and it summarizes the reasons that victims give for reporting or not reporting.

The survey provides information about victims (age, sex, race, ethnicity, marital status, income, and educational level), offenders (sex, race, approximate age, and victim-offender relationship), and the crimes (time and place of occurrence, use of weapons, nature of injury, and economic consequences). Questions also cover the experiences of victims with the criminal justice system, self-protective measures used by victims, and possible substance abuse by offenders. Supplements are added periodically to the survey to obtain detailed information on topics like school crime.

The first data from the redesigned NCVS were published in a BJS bulletin in June 1995. BJS publication of NCVS data includes Criminal Victimization in the United States, an annual report that covers the broad range of detailed information collected by the NCVS. BJS publishes detailed reports on topics such as crime against women, urban crime, and gun use in crime. The NCVS and UCR data files are archived at the National Archive of Criminal Justice Data at the University of Michigan to enable researchers to perform independent analysis.

COMPARING UCR AND NCVS

Because the NCVS was designed to complement the UCR program, the two programs share many similarities. As much as their different collection methods permit, the two measure the same subset of serious crimes, defined alike. Both programs cover rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, theft, and motor vehicle theft. Rape, robbery, theft, and motor vehicle theft are defined virtually identically by both the UCR and NCVS. (While rape is defined analogously, the UCR Crime Index measures the crime against women only, and the NCVS measures it against both sexes.)

There are also significant differences between the two programs. First, the two programs were created to serve different purposes. The UCR Program's primary objective is to provide a reliable set of criminal justice statistics for law enforcement administration, operation, and management. The NCVS was established to provide previously unavailable information about crime (including crime not reported to police), victims, and offenders.

Second, the two programs measure an overlapping but non-identical set of crimes. The NCVS includes crimes both reported and not reported to law enforcement. The NCVS excludes, but the UCR includes, homicide, arson, commercial crimes, and crimes against children under age 12. The UCR captures crimes reported to law enforcement, but it excludes sexual assaults and simple assaults from the Crime Index.

Third, because of methodology, the NCVS and UCR definitions of some crimes differ. For example, the UCR defines burglary as the unlawful entry or attempted entry of a structure to commit a felony or theft. The NCVS, not wanting to ask victims to ascertain offender motives, defines burglary as the entry or attempted entry of a residence by a person who had no right to be there.

Fourth, for property crimes (burglary, theft and motor vehicle theft), the two programs calculate crime rates using different bases. The UCR rates for these crimes are per-capita (number of crimes per 100,000 persons), whereas the NCVS rates for these crimes are per-household (number of crimes per 1,000 households). Because the number of households may not grow at the same rate each year as the total population, trend data for rates of property crimes measured by the two programs may not be comparable.

In addition, some differences in the data from the two programs may result from sampling variation in the NCVS and from estimating for nonresponse in the UCR. The NCVS estimates are derived from interviewing a sample and are therefore subject to a margin of error. Rigorous statistical methods are used to calculate confidence intervals around all survey estimates. Trend data in NCVS reports are described as genuine only if there is at least a 90% certainty that the measured changes are not the result of sampling variation. The UCR data are based on the actual counts of offenses reported by law enforcement jurisdictions. In some circumstances, UCR data are estimated for nonparticipating jurisdictions or those reporting partial data.

Each program has unique strengths. The UCR provides a measure of the number of crimes reported to law enforcement agencies throughout the country. The UCR's Supplemental Homicide Reports provide the most reliable, timely data on the extent and nature of homicides in the Nation. The NCVS is the primary source of information on the characteristics of criminal victimization and on the number and types of crimes not reported to law enforcement authorities.

By understanding the strengths and limitations of each program, it is possible to use the UCR and NCVS to achieve a greater understanding of crime trends and the nature of crime in the United States. For example, changes in police procedures, shifting attitudes towards crime and police, and other societal changes can affect the extent to which people report and law enforcement agencies record crime. NCVS and UCR data can be used in concert to explore why trends in reported and police-recorded crime may differ.

Apparent discrepancies between statistics from the two programs can usually be accounted for by their definitional and procedural differences or resolved by comparing NCVS sampling variations (confidence intervals) of those crimes said to have been reported to police with UCR statistics.

For most types of crimes measured by both the UCR and NCVS, analysts familiar with the programs can exclude from analysis those aspects of crime not common to both. Resulting long-term trend-lines can be brought into close concordance. The impact of such adjustments is most striking for robbery, burglary, and motor vehicle theft, whose definitions most closely coincide.

With robbery, annual victimization rates based only on NCVS robberies reported to the police are possible. It is also possible to remove from analysis UCR robberies of commercial establishments such as gas stations, convenience stores, and banks. When the resulting NCVS police reported robbery rates are compared to UCR non-commercial robbery rates, the results reveal closely corresponding long-term trends.

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The rest of this document, which contains a listing of sources of information about crime causation which are available on the world wide web -- along with many other criminology-related topics -- is available free from Prentice Hall publishing company when purchasing the textbook Criminology Today. The printed document, called Criminology Today on the World Wide Web, is over 40 pages in length. Be sure to order ISBN number 0-13-744202-5 to receive your text/free web-guide combination.


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