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The author is a sociologist on the staff of the Russell Sage Foundation, and an adjunct associate professor in sociology and law at Yale University. He received his B.A. from Pomona College and an M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Washington. He has served as Editor of Social Problems, and as a Fullbright Scholar, during which time he studied Scandinavian prisons. This paper was originally prepared for the 1965 meetings of the American Statistical Association in Philadelphia. All knowledgeable students lament the sad state of crime statistics. The problem is felt to lie in sources of bias that keep these statistics from being true indicators of the crime rate. This paper urges a reformulation of the problem that views the behavior of criminals as only one of the elements they feed into the crime rate. The proposed reformulation requires that we view three elements as inherently a part of the process by which crime rates are produced: the offender, the citizens and the police. The crime rate logically expresses variations in all three of these elements, and it is therefore necessary to gather data on all three before we can make intelligent sense of criminal statistics.
Stanton Wheeler (Fri,) studied this question.