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Prepared statement.

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Morial, Hon. Ernest N., Mayor, New Orleans, La.

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Nugent, William, Acting Director, office of criminal justice.

Ordin, Andrea, U.S. attorney for the central district of California.

Parsons, James C., chief of police, New Orleans, La..

Renfrew, Hon. Charles B., U.S. District Court, Northern District of
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Rish, Ray, Community Probation Organization.

Rittneberg, William E., Advocates of Juvenile Justice, New Orleans, La..

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Robinson, Don, fire marshal, Detroit, Mich.

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Rubin, Hon. Alvin B., judge, Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals..

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Sarri, Dr. Rosemary G., School of Social Work, University of Michigan..
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Scarr, Harry A., Administrator, Federal Justice Research Program, Office for Improvements in the Administration of Justice, U.S. Department of Justice..

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Schwartz, Dr. Jeffery A., president, Law Enforcement Training and
Research Association...

Seigel, Ron, Wayne State Coordinating Council.

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Sellin, Thorsten, professor emeritus, University of Pennsylvania..

Serpas, Frank, director, Criminal Justice Cordinating Council, New
Orleans, La..

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Shapiro, Richard, project director, Midwood Kings Highway Development Corporation, Brooklyn, N. Y.

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Smith, Darrow, associate warden, California State Prison at San Quentin president of the California Black Correctional Coalition....

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Smith, Monica Herrera, president, Mexican American Correctional As

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sociation...

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Spaniol, Joseph, Deputy Director, Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts.
Stanley, Rev. John, Member of the Board of Directors, North Central
Seven Community Organization..........

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Stone, Prof. Christopher D., University of Southern California Law
School.

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Treanor, William, executive director, National Youth Work Alliance..

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Turner, Mel, Executive director, Capture, San Mateo, Calif.

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Van De Kamp, John K., Los Angeles County district attorney.

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Van Leer, Rev. Tom, pastor, Mount Calvary AME church

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Vogt, Jeanne R., treasurer of the board of directors, Detroit Transit
Alternative, Inc..

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Washburn, Ben, Detroit-Wayne County Criminal Justice Coordinating
Council..

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Wheeler, Prof. Stanton, Yale Law School-

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White, Wingate M., Louisiana Commission on Law Enforcement and
Administration of Criminal Justice.

Yagerlener, William G., Walter P. Reuther senior centers.

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ADDITIONAL STATEMENTS

American Institute of Architects, President Ehrman B. Mitchell, Jr.
letter to Hon. John Conyers, Jr. dated Apr.1 25, 1979-

Gilford, Rotea J., executive director, Mayor's Criminal Justice Council..
Jones, I. Roy, director, Detroit Transit Alternative.

Rodino, Hon. Peter W. Jr., A Representative in Congress from the State
of New Jersey and chairman of the Committee on the Judiciary.
King, Glen D., executive director, International Association of Chiefs of
Police, Gaithersburg, Md.

Reuther, Walter P. Senior Centers, Inc. LEAA Crime Prevention Project.

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LEAA REAUTHORIZATION

THURSDAY, MARCH 15, 1979

HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES,

SUBCOMMITTEE ON CRIME

OF THE COMMITTEE ON THE JUDICIARY,

Washington, D.C.

The subcommittee met at 9:30 a.m. in room 2237 of the Rayburn House Office Building, the Honorable John Conyers, Jr. (chairman of the subcommittee) presiding.

Present: Representatives Conyers, Edwards, Gudger, Volkmer, and Synar.

Staff present: Hayden Gregory, counsel; Roscoe Stovall, associate counsel.

Mr. CONYERS. The subcommittee will come to order.

Today, we continue our examinations of proposals within the reauthorization and reorganization of LEAA and today's hearing turns around the National Institute for Research and the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

These provisions are in most of the bills before this subcommittee with reference to LEAA and the fundamental question is how much crime occurs in America and how can those reporting statistics be as accurate as possible.

LEAA began a few years ago the national crime survey, which attempted to do more than the FBI crime index, and from the results, it appeared that this study added new dimension to what we know about crime and crime rates.

So we're very pleased to have before us a number of witnesses today from both academia and the bench. And our first witness will be Dr. Thorsten Sellin, who has spent literally years in the subject of our question today.

He is author of a number of texts, was an original participant in an effort to create a National Crime Center and for many years has studied the issues involved in a centralized criminal justice statistical bureau.

We appreciate receiving your statement, Professor Sellin, and without objection, it will be entered into the record and we welcome you before the subcommittee this morning.

[The statement follows:]

COMMENTS ON H.R. 2108 BY THORSTEN SELLIN, PROFESSOR EMERITUS, UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA

I appreciate being invited to comment on H.R. 2108 but in doing so I shall limit myself to a discussion of only some of its provisions. My concern is only with (765)

criminal justice statistics, which according to Sec. 416.3 cover "matters relating to the detection and prevention of crime and the prosecution and treatment of offenders, including juvenile offenders." This is a subject with which I became acquainted nearly half a century ago, when as consultant to and special agent of the Bureau of the Census, I assisted in the coordination of the classifications of offenses then used by that Bureau and by the FBI, the reorganization of the Bureau's annual report on prisoners in state and federal prisons and reformatories for adults, and the initiation of its plan to gather judicial criminal statistics from the States of the Union. Therefore, I shall not discuss statistics of civil justice, which lie outside my field of competency, nor specifically the programs and agencies concerned only with federal criminal justice. My focus will be on the organization and functions of the proposed Bureau of Justice Statistics in the development of uniform comparative statistics based on criminal justice data secured from state and local agencies.

This will be the projected Bureau's chief and most difficult task. Since it cannot compel such agencies to report the data it needs but must rely on its ability to persuade them to co-operate in the venture, being aided in that effort mainly by the financial grants-in-aid it can offer as inducement.

The greatest barrier to the development of national uniform criminal justice statistics is that we are a federation of independent states, each with its own substantive and procedural laws, similar in many respects but in others quite different. This complicates any attempt to arrive at uniformity in the classification of statistical data, when two or more jurisdictions are to be compared. It has proved baffling to all federations of states as it has to the United Nations, whose Economic and Social Council soon after the last world war called for the collection of comparative criminal statistics from member nations. In 1950 an expert committee recommended that, as a starter, the reporting of only three major crimes known to the police be instituted. This modest plan was approved but after ten years of preparation it evaporated, partly because the variety of definitions of these crimes in the legislations of the nations seemed to defy coordination.

We are in the same situation as Switzerland, where each canton had its own laws and institutions until half a century ago, when a national penal code was adopted, making truly national statistics possible for the first time.

Critics remind us that other advanced nations have excellent criminal statistics. The oldest, those of France, date from 1825. We are told that, by comparison, we are a very backward country. This judgment, while essentially true, fails to take into account the difficulties faced by a federation of states, which seeks to develop uniform national statistics of criminal justice. Indeed it is improper to compare any European country, for instance, with the United States. It would be closer to the mark to compare France or England, for instance, with California or any other of our states. Such a comparison would still favor France or England, for although New York, Maine and Massachusetts began to produce some criminal justice statistics as early as the 1830's partly inspired by the French initiative, no American state can even today, with the possible exception of California, match the annual reports of criminal justice statistics published by many foreign countries.

In an address to the International Statistical Institute, meeting in Chicago in 1893, General Francis A. Walker, who was recognized as the leading authority on the statistical work of the United States in the latter half of the 19th century, said: "A strong passion for statistics early developed itself in the life of our people. . . . No government in the world has ever lavished money and labor more generously on statistical inquiry." This passion seems to have been spent on financial, commercial, industrial, labor, population and vital statistics. Its concern for national criminal justice statistics has been tepid, indeed, as though the shadiest side of our communal life should be shunned and hidden. Prior to the 1920's the only national statistics of the kind called for by the present bill were found in the decennial population censuses and were practically limited to the enumeration of inmates in penal institutions on the census date until the census of 1904, which also deal with inmates committed to the institutions during the year. Even so, a truly national coverage of such data was not achieved until the institutional census of 1933.

The statute providing for the census of 1900 limited it to population, mortality, agricultural and manufacturing statistics, but it also directed the Bureau, soon to be made a permanent agency, to produce a later report on statisics relat

ing, among other things, "to crime, including judicial statistics pertaining there to" No such report was issued. Earlier censuses had, in fact, called for som data on convicts, based on court records, but they were so defective they wer given little or no space in the published reports. Even some police statistics little value appeared in the 1880 census reports. It was not until 1927, whe the Children's Bureau began to issue an annual report on Children processed b some juvenile courts that judicial statistics got a tenuous toehold on the nations

scene.

After the first world war interest in the development of criminal justice sta tistics grew, intensified by the famous survey of "Criminal Justice in Cleveland conducted by Roscoe Pound and Felix Frankfurter and directed by Raymon Moley. Published in 1922, it stimulated two great state surveys of similar na ture, "The Missouri Crime Survey" (1926) and "The Illinois Crime Surve (1929). They, as well as the criminality spawned by the prohibition decad played a role in the creation of the National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement, commonly called the Wickersham Commission, which issue its remarkable series of reports in 1931.

One of its recommendations resulted in the passage by Congress of an act which made the Census Bureau a national agency for the collection, analysi and publication of criminal justice statistics. The Bureau had already, without specific authorization, begun to gather statistics on inmates of state and federa prisons and reformatories for adults committed or discharged during the calenda year. The schedules on which these annual reports were based contained a large number of items concerning each inmate, his or her offense and method of dis charge. They were prepared in the institutions, which gave the Bureau excellent cooperation. Yet the reports suffered from inevitable defects from a comparative point of view. Two or three states refused to join the project. More serious was the omission of certain county institutions, such as the county prisons of Pennsyl vania and the houses of correction of Massachusetts. In the former state fifteen county prisons received prisoners with sentences as long, in most cases, as the inmates in the state prisons and in Massachusetts prisoners with sentences under two and a half years served them in the county houses of correction. The result was that commitment rates in these states, published in the census reports, were amazingly low compared with those of other states, giving the unwary student a false impression of the comparative criminality of the states.

In his attempt to comply with the directives of the 1931 statute, the director of the Census Bureau sought help. He appointed an advisory committee, which recommended that the Bureau begin the collection of judicial criminal statistics. Pilot studies had already been made by the Institute of Law of Johns Hopkins University, the most important of which were Leon C. Marshall's “Comparative Judicial Criminal Statistics-Six States" and W. C. Hotchkiss and C. E. Gehlke's “Uniform Classification for Judicial Criminal Statistics," both published in 1931. The summary schedules of the procedural outcome and the disposition of defendants in courts of general trial jurisdiction, devised by these researchers, were recommended by the committee for use by the Bureau and in 1932 sixteen states supplied the Bureau with uniformly compiled data on the criminal business of such courts. The Bureau issued a brief summary report for each cooperating state and assembled them with some comparative tables into an annual publication. In 1937, thirty states participated in the program.

The Census Bureau's activities in the collection and publication of both the institutional and the judicial statistics were terminated in 1946. Afterwards, the Department of Justice would presumably accept responsibility, but it paid no further attention to the judicial statistics. Its Bureau of Prisons tried valiantly, without special appropriations or encouragement, to carry on the collection of the institutional statistics and did so for many years with sporadic publication. With respect to the demise of the judicial statistics, the judgment on the failure of the program passed by the man, who headed it in the Census Bureau, is significant for the lesson it should teach to those who would have to implement the provisions of the present bill. That man was Ronald H. Beattie, lawyer and sociologist and highly competent statistician, who after leaving the Bureau was in charge of the statistical service of the Administrative Office of the United States Courts and later director of the Bureau of Criminal Statistics of the State of California. He has this to say:

“Among criminologists, administrators and others concerned with the problem of crime these new reporting series were acclaimed with enthusiasms [out] little

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