The Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) at the University of Michigan has recently added a new data collection to its archive: Capital Punishment in the United States, 1973-1996. The data set, compiled by the US Department of Justice's Bureau of Justice Statistics, presents death row prisoners' felonious criminal history and "basic sociodemographic characteristics...

The FBI this week released their annual report on United States' crime levels (the 1998 report is discussed in the November 5, 1999 Scout Report). Data in the report are compiled from approximately 17,000 law enforcement agencies as part of the FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program. According to this year's report, the Crime Index total, which indicates serious crime volume, decreased 0.2...

The US Bureau of Justice Statistics has recently made available online this report on the number of persons on probation and parole during 2000 and provides comparisons with years 1998 and 1999. The six page, .pdf-formatted report lists the number of parolees and probationers in each state, describes the race and sex makeup of these populations and reports the data as percentages as well as...