NCJ Number
217153
Journal
Alaska Justice Forum Volume: 23 Issue: 3 Dated: Fall 2006 Pages: 1-8
Date Published
2006
Length
8 pages
Annotation
This Alaska Justice Forum newsletter presents three main articles that discuss the history of crime mapping and its use by American police departments, inmate mental health and treatment, and immigration figures for the United States.
Abstract
The article on crime mapping presents a review of the history of crime mapping for investigative purposes and examines the challenges to integrating crime mapping into traditional police work. Scholars have traced the root of crime mapping to 1829 France, where two researchers created maps to show the relationship between violent and property crime and education level. Criminological crime maps were later created by Chicago School sociologists in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Prior to the widespread use of computers, the few police departments that utilized crime mapping did so with primitive techniques such as sticking pins in a wall map. While these maps were useful for identifying clusters of criminal activity, they did not allow more sophisticated criminological analyses. Indeed, crime mapping was not possible for most agencies until desktop computers became widely available in the early 1990s. Even following computerized crime mapping, the implementation in many agencies was not smooth. Many smaller departments abandoned crime mapping after trying it due to technical and human resource problems. The article on inmate mental health and treatment presents summary findings from a Bureau of Justice Statistics report on the number of Federal prisoners with mental health problems. According to this report, 24 percent of Federal inmates and 17 percent of jail inmates have received treatment for a mental disorder since admission to custody. The article on immigration estimates presents the most reliable figures on immigration available. According to these estimates, in 2005 1,122,373 individuals received legal documentation to remain in the United States (including 1,525 in Alaska). Another estimated 10.5 million unauthorized immigrants lived in the United States in January 2005. This is compared to the January 2000 estimate, which put the number of unauthorized immigrants at 8.5 million. Bibliography