No abstract

The origins of the Bureau of Justice Statistics and criminal justice statistics in general go back 150 years, but the U.S. President's Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice in 1967, along with subsequent panels and commissions, added urgency and specificity to the work to be done to improve our understanding of the operation of the criminal justice system and of crime. Criminal justice statistics have the potential to be used to shape and evaluate specific policies and programs when the statistics are timely, accurate, and relevant to the decisions being made for policy formulation or evaluation. The full development of effective criminal justice statistics on crime and the administration of the justice system can provide for informed decision making and more insightful resource allocation. In this article, I summarize the historical progressions and evolution of criminal justice statistics in light of the changes affecting the justice environment and propose future work.

The National Information Exchange Model (NIEM) has been widely adopted as a basis for creating standards that foster information exchanges across disparate disciplines in justice, health, human services and other fields. NIEM can be a driver for transforming legacy data into meaningful crossdisciplinary exchanges that can support advanced analysis of impacts of programs and strategies in improving government services of all categories. This presentation will review the basic NIEM principles in terms of how they can enable more meaningful results as administrative data is applied to research on the efficacy of government services across organizations and disciplines.

The objectives of the criminal justice system are ambiguous and often conflicting. Attempts to improve law enforcement, on the one hand, and the administration of justice, on the other, result in an impasse which prohibits optimization of the operation of the system.