CRIM 1650 Chapter Notes - Chapter 4: Uniform Crime Reports

• School: York University
• Department: Criminology
• Course: CRIM 1650
• Professor: Dr. James W. Williams

Document Summary

Uniform crime report system (ucr) based on crimes reported to the police. Reliability: one of the standards against which the tools used to measure concepts are judged: consistency of results over time, are methods/techniques used to gather information strong enough. Validity: extent to which a tool or instrument actually measures the concept: do the statistics count what they are supposed to. Crime rate: (rates of incarceration, conviction, recidivism) divide amount of crime by population size and multiple by 100,000. The criminal justice system operates as a funnel. Kaplan"s law of hammer when you give a child a hammer, they discover that everything needs pounding. Crime statistics are seen as: part of gov"t"s control mechanism, way of characterizing the crime problem, means of self-justification, reflection for more fundamental structural inequalities. Theory: set of concepts and their normal definitions or assertions about the relationships between these concepts, assumptions and knowledge claims.