The purposes of this study are to describe sentencing outcomes in felony courts for selected serious offenses--homicide, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny, and drug trafficking--and to establish a statistical series on sentencing outcomes in felony courts throughout the United States. The jurisdictions consist of cities and counties with an average population of 1.1 million. Among the jurisdictions, the sentencing schemes available varied, with both determinate and indeterminate sentencing practices in operation. The study distinguishes between core informational items such as criminal charges, type of sentence imposed and terms of the prison sentence, and optional items such as characteristics of the offense and the defendant, and how the case was processed.

The purpose of this data collection was to determine the seriousness of criminal events. The principal investigators sought to determine and rate the relative seriousness of murder, rape, and petty theft. Information in the collection includes respondents' opinions on the severity of particular crimes as well as how that severity compared to other crimes.

The purpose of the study was to investigate the criminal career patterns of violent offenders. These data are intended to facilitate the development of models to predict recidivism and violence, and to construct parole supervision programs. Original data were collected on young male offenders in 1964 and 1965 as they entered the California Youth Authority (CYA). At this time, data were collected on criminal history, including current offenses, drug and alcohol use, psychological and personality variables, and sentencing, and demographics such as age, education, work experience, and family structure. The data collection also contains results from a number of standardized psychological instruments: California Psychological Inventory, Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, California Achievement Test Battery, General Aptitude Test Battery, Army General Classification Test, and the Revised Beta Test. After release from the CYA and over the following 20 years, subsequent arrest information was collected on the offenders, including the nature of the offense, disposition, and arrest and parole dates.

This study re-analyzes Isaac Ehrlich's 1960 cross-section data on the relationship between aggregate levels of punishment and crime rates. It provides alternative model specifications and estimations. The study examined the deterrent effects of punishment on seven FBI index crimes: murder, rape, assault, larceny, robbery, burglary, and auto theft. Socio-economic variables include family income, percentage of families earning below half of the median income, unemployment rate for urban males in the age groups 14-24 and 35-39, labor force participation rate, educational level, percentage of young males and non-whites in the population, percentage of population in the SMSA, sex ratio, and place of occurrence. Two sanction variables are also included: 1) the probability of imprisonment, and 2) the average time served in prison when sentenced (severity of punishment). Also included are: per capita police expenditure for 1959 and 1960, and the crime rates for murder, rape, assault, larceny, robbery, burglary, and auto theft.

These data are a product of the National Crime Surveys Redesign Project. The purpose of the data collection was to create several different data files from existing public-use National Crime Surveys files. For each crime, information is gathered on the victim's housing unit and household and the incident itself. A personal history and interview are also included. Several data files contain National Crime Survey and Uniform Crime Report data on the following index crimes: robbery, larceny-theft, burglary, motor vehicle theft, rape, and aggravated assault.

These surveys were part of a series of pretests conducted during the early 1970s to reveal problems associated with doing a nationwide study on victimization. They were done to determine the most effective reference period to use when questioning respondents in order to gain the fullest and most reliable information, to measure the degree to which respondents move incidents occurring outside the reference period into that period when questioned, and to explore the possibility of identifying incidents by a few broad general questions as opposed to a series of more specific probing questions.

This data collection focuses on adult cases of serious crime such as homicide (and related death investigations), rape, robbery, aggravated assault/battery, burglary, and arson. Data are included for Peoria, Illinois, Chicago, Illinois, Kansas City, Missouri, and Oakland, California. The data consist of police, court, and laboratory records from reports submitted by police personnel during investigations of suspected criminal offenses. The primary source of information was police case files. Prosecutor and court files were reviewed for information regarding the disposition of suspects who were arrested and formally charged. Crime laboratory reports include information concerning the evidence submitted and the examiner's worksheets, notes, and final results. There are eight files in this dataset. Each of the four cities has one file for cases with physical evidence and one file for cases in which physical evidence was not collected or examined.

The goals of this data collection were to provide information on robbery-related security measures employed by financial institutions, to identify factors that contribute to robbery, and to study the correlates of case disposition and sentence length of convicted robbers. The collection compares banking institutions that have been robbed with those bank offices that have not been robbed to provide information on factors that contribute to these robberies. The office-based file includes variables designed to measure general office characteristics, staff preparation and training, security measures, characteristics of the area in which the banking institution is located, and the robbery history of each institution. The incident-based file includes variables such as the robber's method of operation and behavior, the employee's reaction, the characteristics of the office at the time of the robbery, and the apprehension of the offender. Also included is information on the status of the investigation, reasons involved in solving the robbery, status of prosecution, ultimate prosecution, and sentence in length.

This data collection provides information on multiple prosecutions for individual offenders. The data are intended for use in the exploration and description of relationships among the various elements of the adjudication process (characteristics of the offender and offense and decisions made by various actors in the prosecution and sentencing of the offenders). The sampled incidents were drawn from two types of offenses: residential burglary and armed robbery. The collection includes only those incidents involving male offenders who were previously unknown to their victims and who were facing adjudication in adult court. The data collection instrument probed five areas for each offender and incident sampled: A. Related Incidents (information to identify all other incidents for which processing overlapped that of the sampled incident), B. Incident Description (information about the criminal incident itself, such as date and location of the incident, date of arrest, victims, weapons, accomplices, witnesses, and evidence), C. Adjudication Process (information such as bond amount, legal representation, adjudication events and outcomes, date of sentencing, and type and length of incarceration), D. Defendant (information about the defendant himself, including date of birth, race/descent, and employment status), and E. Prior Record (information about the defendant's record, such as his age at first arrest and first incarceration, the number of times he was incarcerated, and history of drug and/or alcohol abuse).

The purpose of this project was to estimate long-term trends in violent victimization by gender and various socio-demographic factors. These factors included race and ethnicity, age, type of place (urban, suburban, rural), socio-economic status, marital status (for adults), and family status (for juveniles). The principal investigators also further disaggregated these violent victimization trends by victim-offender relationship to reveal trends in violence committed by strangers, intimate partners, and known/non-intimate offenders. The researchers produced these various trends in violent victimization by pooling and appropriately weighting the National Crime Survey and its successor, the National Crime Victimization Survey for the period 1973 to 2005, resulting in 33 years of data. In total, a series of 135 trends in violent victimization were developed.