| T. F. Carver, President. | F. Emory Lyon, Member Ex. Committee. | E. A. Fredenhagen, Member Ex. Committee. |
| Wm. F. French, Vice President. | W. G. McClaren, Member Ex. Committee. | Joseph P. Byers, Member Ex. Committee. |
| O. F. Lewis, Secretary, Treasurer and Editor Review. | A. H. Votaw, Member Ex. Committee. | R. B. McCord, Member Ex. Committee. |
| Edward Fielding, Chairman Ex. Committee. |
THE STATISTICS OF CRIME
By Eugene Smith
President Prison Association of New York
[Mr. Smith read a very carefully prepared paper on the above subject at the Omaha meeting of the American Prison Association. The Review would gladly print the address in full but space admits only of certain abstracts, which follow.—Editor]
In the deplorable and chaotic condition of the very sources from which all statistical matter must be drawn, it is hopeless to look for any improvement in our census statistics, unless a radical change can be effected in state administration. The records of the police, the courts, the prisons, can be made of statistical value only by the action of the state itself; and there is apparent but one method by which the state can act to this end.
There should be established in each state a permanent board or bureau of criminal statistics, whether as an independent body or as a department of the office of the attorney general or of the secretary of state. This bureau should be charged with the duty of prescribing the forms in which the records of all criminal courts, police boards and prisons shall be kept and specifying the items regarding which entries shall be made. The law creating the bureau should direct that the forms prescribed by it should be uniform as to all institutions of the same class to which they respectively apply and be binding upon all institutions within the state.
The bureau should issue general instructions governing the collection and verification of the facts to be stated in the record; it should also be its duty, and it should be vested with power, to inspect and supervise the records and to enforce compliance with its requirements. Such a bureau might secure a collection of reliable statistical matter, uniform in quality throughout the state. Indiana is now, it is believed, the only state in the Union where such a bureau exists.
But even this result is not enough. Supposing all the criminal records within each separate state to be made uniform without the state, still they would not be available for comparison or for the purposes of a national census, unless all the states could be brought to adopt the same form and method, so that all criminal records throughout the Union could be kept upon one uniform plan. Here we encounter a serious obstacle. The diversity and conflict of state laws are crying evils of our time, universally recognized and denounced, and yet the most strenuous efforts to bring about harmonious action between the legislatures of separate states have always failed. No single statute, however skilfully drawn, proposed for universal acceptance has ever yet been adopted by all the states of the Union. Still the states must act in unison upon this matter of uniform criminal records or else our statistics of crime must continue to be a national failure and a national reproach.