Improving Our Conceptualization and Measurement of Crime

• Date: 01 November 2017
• Published date: 01 November 2017
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/1745-9133.12355
• Author: Charles F. Wellford

EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION

CRIME DATA SETS

Improving Our Conceptualization

and Measurement of Crime

Charles F.Wellford

University of Maryland—College Park

Although the Judiciary Act of 1789 (ch. 20, § 35, 1 Stat. 73, 92–93) created

the position of the attorney general, it would be more than 80 years before the

Department of Justice was established. After the Civil War, a group of Congressmen

led an effort to address Reconstruction by passing legislation creating a Department of

Justice. Once Ulysses Grant was president, the executive branch joined Congress in this

effort. Grant was particularly interested in eliminating the influence of the Ku Klux Klan

and saw a new government agency focusing on justice as the best way to do this (White,

2016).

As a result, when in 1870 Congress passed the Act to Establish the Department of

Justice (ch. 150, 16 Stat. 162 (1870), it assigned to that new agency many more functions

than those that had been associated with the position of attorney general. This new agency

was to handle not only all criminal and civil litigation, but it also was to direct all federal

law enforcement activities. Furthermore, in Section 12 of the Act, the attorney general was

required to

make an annual report to Congress, in January of each year, of the business

of the said Department of Justice, and any other matters appertaining thereto

that he may deem proper, including the statistics of crime under the laws of the

United States, and, in so far as practicable, under the laws of the several states.

The attorney general was also required to produce a report on crime in the United

States. Three years later,Attorney General George Henry Williams informed Congress that

in his opinion, this was an impossible task and requested that this section of the Act be

amended to eliminate the reference to “under the laws of the several states.” Later, Congress

passed, and the president signed, amendments to the Act, in which the attorney general was

Direct correspondence to Charles F. Wellford, University of Maryland–College Park, 2220 LeFrak Hall, College

Park, MD 20742-8235 (e-mail: wellford@umd.edu).

DOI:10.1111/1745-9133.12355 C2017 American Society of Criminology 1021

Criminology & Public Policy rVolume 16 rIssue 4