4500.0 - Crime and Justice News, Oct 2000  
ARCHIVED ISSUE Released at 11:30 AM (CANBERRA TIME) 20/10/2000   
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Director’s overseas visits


Stuart Ross, the Director of the National Centre for Crime and Justice Statistics (NCCJS), attended the four-day conference on Criminal Justice Research and Evaluation, run by the United States National Institute of Justice (NIJ) in Washington DC. The conference was attended by around 800 participants, and was oriented towards research with a policy development or program evaluation focus. The NCCJS has copies of the conference program and transcripts of the presentations.

Following the NIJ conference, Stuart had meetings with staff at the US Bureau of Justice Statistics, National Institute of Justice, National Criminal Justice Reference Service (all in Washington) and the National Centre for State Courts (in Williamsburg, Virginia). From there he went to Statistics Canada in Ottawa, and the Research, Development and Statistics Directorate of the Home Office in London. One outcome of these visits has been the establishment of publication exchange arrangements with each organisation.

Some of the issues discussed that have a significant bearing on work by the NCCJS and State and Territory criminal justice agencies were:

  • Work in the USA and Canada on establishing or expanding more complex, incident-based crime statistics systems (the National Incident Based Reporting Systems in the USA, and the Incident Based Uniform Crime Reporting Survey in Canada);
  • The UK Review of Crime Statistics Recording and Reporting Practices conducted jointly by Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary, and the Research, Development and Statistics Directorate of the Home Office;
  • Work by the National Centre for State Courts on case-mix approaches to court performance analysis; and
  • The Statistics Canada "extranet" that has been set up to disseminate crime and justice statistics and to communicate with government agencies, advisory groups and other stakeholders.